Services
Grant Writing Consultant Services
We help our clients win millions of dollars in grant funding each year by identifying grant opportunities, crafting compelling applications, and designing grant-worthy programs. Our goal is to empower our clients to get the grant funding they need to get their programs running and self-sustaining—and we have nearly 50 years of experience supporting clients through the grant-seeking process.
Because we’re also evaluators, we’re able to help clients articulate their theory of change, develop program strategy and SMART objectives, and create a realistic implementation plan—all of which contribute to a successful grant application. Our continuum of services guides you through every step of your program so that you can move seamlessly from grant award to achieving your organization’s or program’s vision.
Our Grant Writing and Grant Consulting Services
We offer a range of services—from serving as an external grant reviewer to full-scale grant writing, with a range of technical assistance offerings in between, including:
- Grant-specific needs assessment activities to help you identify and substantiate your grant priorities through data-gathering activities, including interviews and focus groups, surveys, and secondary data collection and analysis
- Best practice literature reviews to help inform your program planning and development process and to summarize evidence-informed approaches
- Grant reviewers to help strengthen client-written grant proposals
- Program evaluation plans that leverage our considerable program evaluation skill-set and tools to give you a competitive edge in the grant-seeking process, including logic model development, theory of change approaches, and rigorous impact evaluation designs
- Full grant application package development with “soup-to-nuts” grant writing support, including proposal narratives, budgets and budget narratives, and supplementary materials
- Grants training programs to empower your team to develop winning grants on its own, including beginning and advanced grant-writing and interactive workshops and webinars on grant-related topics
Educational Grant Consulting
Education projects are our specialty, and to date we have carried out diverse P-12 education grant consulting projects with hundreds of clients. Our grant writing projects in education have ranged from early learning to higher education and beyond, and we boast a national reputation for our work in magnet schools, arts education, full-service community schools, and GEAR UP. We are called upon to consult on the design of community-based, school-based, and systemwide educational interventions, bringing depth and breadth of experience with special populations, such as opportunity youth and children living in poverty.
Federal Grant Consulting
Our federal grant consultants have raised more than $1 billion in competitive funding from government grants, most often for programs and services to K-12 school districts and the partner organizations that serve them. When the U.S. Department of Education (US Ed) releases a new federal notice inviting grant applications, we get excited. Our grant consultants speak the language of federal grants and enjoy demystifying them for our clients. Our expertise in acting as evaluators on many federal grants means that we know how to set you up for success when taking on the great challenge—and potential great reward!—of a federal grant.
Win Grants With Experts
Our grant consultants can help you design innovative programs and secure funding to bring these to life. Start a conversation with us today to learn more.
Our Approach to Grant Consulting
Consultation
We embark on every engagement with conversations with your key stakeholders to understand your needs and requirements.
Planning & project management
Planning is a highly-collaborative process where we aim to gain deep understanding and context on the “why” behind your grant application and program. We build out a timeline to reach your application deadline, create custom budgeting and support tools, and run an extensive data gathering process.
Grant strategy
We leverage a research-backed approach and nearly 50 years of experience with successful programs and grants to guide the proposal strategy and develop a program that will both win the grant award and achieve the outcomes you’re striving for.
Proposal preparation
Our consultants write your grant from start to finish. We build in ample time for multiple rounds of review and compliance and quality checks and deliver “camera-ready” files for your team to officially submit (we can help with that too).
Evaluation
We also offer the opportunity to continue working with us in an evaluation capacity. Our evaluators are steeped in grant evaluation needs, including evaluation design, measurement, psychometrics, data management systems, and program implementation and fidelity.
Why Partner With Metis Associates
Demonstrated track record
Our work has supported over $1 billion in successful competitive grant applications from major government funders with a success rate of over 70% on our federal grant work alone. We’ve helped our clients secure funding for programs from preschool to workforce training through 32 different US Department of Education programs and a range of other federal funders, including USDOL, USDA, USDOJ, and USHHS.
Education experts
Our consultant team includes evaluators, statisticians, and former educators and education administrators. With deep knowledge of public schools, our consultants work with all educational stakeholders, including teachers, administrators, parents, and students.
Competitive pricing
We use cutting-edge tools to save time and cost—and allows us to devote more time to the conceptual, technical, and substantive tasks required to produce a highly competitive proposal.
Our Grant Writing Consultants
Marilyn Zlotnik
As Metis president, Marilyn has over three decades of experience as a program development specialist and grant writer, directing program development and proposal writing activities at Metis for the past 30 years. Marilyn is a charter member of the Grant Professionals Association and one of a dozen grant writers selected nationwide to support the development of the first credentialing exam for grant professionals, the Grant Professional Certification™. She has designed and conducted a wide range of grant writing training for social sector clients and individuals from graduate courses to single workshops.
Donna Wilkens
With over 20 years of grant writing experience specializing in large federal grants, Donna has served as the lead grant writer for funded grants in the areas of early childhood education, afterschool programming, K-12 education, school climate and community safety, magnet schools, youth development, and full-service community schools. Donna received her Grant Professional Certification (GPC) in 2022.
Our Grant Writing Case Studies
Over three funding cycles, Metis helped this charter management organization secure over $110 million in federal Charter School Program (CSP) funds to replicate or expand schools across multiple states.
Case Study: Expanding A Portfolio of High Quality Charter Schools
Metis partnered with Center For Family Services, winning over $30 million to help a coalition of cross-sector partners transform one of the most challenged cities in the U.S. into a place of opportunity and promise.
Frequently Asked Questions: Grant Writing
Yes! At Metis, we’ve integrated AI into several parts of the grant development process in ways we believe have greatly improved our efficiency without compromising quality: synthesizing research for a proposal literature review, developing a detailed proposal narrative outline, condensing and polishing the narrative, and reviewing a draft proposal against the RFP rubric or requirements.
Before you hire a grant consultant, you need to have your funds lined up to pay for that work independent of the grant award you hope to win. Writing on a contingency basis (waiting until the grant is funded to pay your grant consultant) is against the Grant Professionals Association code of ethics and is also precluded by many funding agencies.
Private grant applications are shorter and easier to write than government grants, and have fewer evaluation and reporting requirements, but they’re extremely competitive and often come with smaller awards. Government grant applications tend to be longer and more complicated to write, with more rigorous reporting and evaluation requirements, but they’re less competitive than private grants, and the awards tend to be larger.
Before you pursue a grant, you need to understand exactly what the funder is expecting in terms of evaluation and determine if you have the internal capacity to fulfill the requirement of if you need to hire an external evaluator. When evaluation is built in from the start and properly resourced, it becomes one of the most valuable outcomes of the grant — for learning what works, making the case for sustainability, and building credibility for the next competition.