Why I Rarely Write Funding Bids for Commission
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This week, someone asked if I would write and submit funding applications on their behalf and take a percentage of any grant awarded. It's a reasonable-sounding arrangement on the face of it. No win, no fee. No risk to the charity. But I said no, and I've said no enough times now that I thought it was worth explaining why — because the reasons go deeper than simple professional preference.
A grant application is the last thing you write, not the first
Here is what the commission model tends to obscure: a good funding application is not a creative writing exercise. It is the visible tip of a much larger iceberg, and the iceberg has to exist before anyone puts fingers to keyboard.
Before a bid is worth writing, an organisation needs to be able to articulate clearly what it does, why it does it, who benefits, and what changes as a result. It needs financial records that are accurate, up to date, and tell a coherent story. It needs governance structures that a funder can look at and trust. It needs evidence — not aspirations dressed up as evidence, but actual evidence — that it can deliver what it promises and account for what it receives. Most funders will check. The good ones definitely will.
If those foundations aren't in place, the most beautifully written application in the sector will struggle to succeed. And if somehow it does succeed, the organisation will then have to deliver on promises it wasn't actually ready to make. That rarely ends well for anyone, least of all the people the charity exists to serve.
Working for a percentage of whatever lands gives me a financial incentive to skip this conversation, or to have it very quickly and move on. That's not a position I want to be in.
Commission changes whose side I'm on
External consultants exist, or should exist, to help organisations make better decisions. Commission structures complicate that. If I stand to earn money only when a grant is secured, I have a built-in bias toward encouraging applications, even when the honest advice would be something quite different.
Good advice sometimes sounds like: you're not ready for this. Or: this funder isn't right for you. Or, occasionally: your organisation needs to sort out its governance before it goes anywhere near a grant application. These are not comfortable conversations, but they are often the most useful ones. A commission arrangement makes them harder to have — not because consultants are dishonest, but because financial incentives have a way of quietly shaping what we choose to notice.
Funders notice too
Many grant-makers are explicitly uncomfortable with percentage-based bid writing, and some will ask directly whether a professional has been paid in this way. The concern isn't arbitrary. Funding relationships work best when the organisation making the application genuinely owns and understands it — when the words on the page reflect real thinking, real relationships, and real capacity, not a polished external performance. A funder who discovers that a bid was written by someone on a cut of the award has every reason to wonder what else about the application wasn't quite what it appeared.
There is also a subtler pressure that commission arrangements can create. When the goal is to win, rather than to be honest, the temptation grows to overstate need, to promise outcomes that are ambitious to the point of fantasy, or to apply for funding that doesn't quite fit the mission because it's available and the pot is large. None of this serves charities well in the long run.
Chasing money is a different activity from pursuing a mission
One of the most corrosive patterns in the charity sector is purpose drift: the slow, often unintentional process by which organisations reshape themselves around what funders will pay for, rather than what beneficiaries actually need. Strong charities ask first what they are there to achieve, and then look for funding that supports that purpose. The other kind starts with what's available and works backwards. Commission-based fundraising, at its worst, adds professional velocity to the second approach.
What I'd rather do instead
The work I find most useful — and most honest — is helping organisations build the foundations that make them genuinely fundable: clarity of purpose, a compelling case for support, sound governance, real relationships with donors and funders, and a funding strategy that serves the mission rather than substituting for it. That work takes time, and it doesn't always lead immediately to a successful grant application. Sometimes it leads to the conclusion that a particular application shouldn't be made yet.
But that conclusion, delivered early, is worth infinitely more than a beautifully crafted bid built on shaky ground.
Fundraising isn't a lottery, and grant writers aren't bounty hunters. The organisations that fund sustainably over time tend to be the ones that treated funding as a consequence of doing good work — not as the point of it.
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