By Janine Vanderburg, JVA Consulting

I have often said that someone with one year of grantwriting experience at JVA Consulting will know more and write more successful proposals than most people with 10 years of experience.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success suggests a reason why our grantwriters are outliers. Natural talent + 10,000 hours of practice = elite status.

Our grantwriting team members at JVA write every single day. Collectively, at JVA, we’ve been writing grant proposals—hundreds and hundreds each year, for 27 years. Which means we’ve had experiences and processed enough information over time that we know how to approach a grant proposal to increase the likelihood of success.

What are some of those things you’ll know as a JVA grantwriter?

• How to position even apparently boring requests like pieces of equipment so that they have sizzle
• How to analyze what a funder is really looking for when application guidelines look pretty general and fuzzy
• How to salvage a grant proposal when a partner drops out at the last minute
• How to shave two pages off a 20-page narrative in an hour
• And lots more

By any measure, JVA’s grantwriting team is world class. Here are just a few examples of our team members’ success in 2014:

• Meghan’s $1 million crime prevention and neighborhood revitalization grant, benefitting Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood.
• Collin’s multiple successful grant proposals funding a physical expansion of Clínica Tepeyac’s main clinic, increasing its ability to serve low-income patients by 25%.
• Laura’s $6.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor for a group of public and private partners to put the long-term unemployed back to work.
• Lisa’s $7.6 million grant to expand high-quality, affordable housing units for people with disabilities across the state.

On April 16, you’ll have an opportunity to learn what we know about what it takes to write these successful proposals, specifically focusing on federal grants. We can’t promise you 10,000 hours of practice, but we can promise that you will learn from someone who has logged in twice that many hours in her journey to becoming one of the best grantwriters around.