This page is a curated selection of our most important
resources and advice for grant and nonprofit
consultants, contractors, freelancers, and strategists.
If you’re a successful grant professional and
you’re chronically undercharging,
feel like you’re holding your business together with duct tape,
want to move beyond providing “standard” grant services,
and you want to actually enjoy your work again,
start with these next three things.
We use and teach a proprietary framework (Scope + Complexity + Access) for setting pricing for services. Within our professional cohort (The Grant Practice), we guide other consultants through our framework and show them how to apply it across pricing models (i.e. hourly, flat fee, and retainer).
We also support experienced professionals with creating (defining/scoping) service packages based solely on the work you both like and want to do that are easy to sell.
Below are some of our favorite video trainings and quick reads to help you assess your current pricing, learn about pricing and service alternatives, and wrap your mind around what scope actually means for you and your work (and why it matters so much more than you might think).
Client acquisition gets easier when your marketing does three jobs: it attracts right-fit clients, it makes your offer feel easy to say yes to, and it teaches prospects what “good” looks like so you’re not competing on price.
What does this look like in practice, though? It means your content and website should lead with a
specific outcome + a clear process + the boundaries that protect delivery (deliverables, timeline, and what’s excluded), so prospects can self-select before a call and you stop doing unpaid “education” to justify your rate. It also means you know what nonprofits are looking for and how to make the discovery call turn into an easy yes.
Posts to Read
Service delivery is where the promises you made in your marketing and scope of work either hold up or collapse. In 2026, clients don’t just need a good writer; they need a clear workflow that reduces rework, missing inputs, and last-minute chaos. That means a minimal tech stack you can actually run, a Standard Grant Narrative system that keeps organizational language consistent from proposal to proposal, and an onboarding process that collects the right information before drafting starts so you’re not guessing (or rebuilding the same docs) mid-project.
Posts to Read
For the last 11 years, I’ve been a full-time grant strategist and consultant at my own grant practice, Krista Kurlinkus LLC. Our team offers highly-specialized grant services and packages (not standard/traditional/all-encompassing “grant writing services”).
I’m also an accredited facilitator, educator, and the creator of
Grant Writing Made Easy®. GWME started in 2015 and has provided
CFRE and GPA-approved, accessible programs and resources to
tens of thousands nonprofit and grant professionals and counting.
I have a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing, which means
I think carefully about how language, systems,
and strategy work together, and I apply that same
rigor to how a consulting practice should be built.
Here’s what I believe:
Doing “good work” and making “good money”
are not mutually exclusive.
Referring to yourself and/or your services as freelancer/freelancing, contractor/contracting, or even simply “Grant Writer” does not accurately reflect the high-level service we provide as grant professionals.
I truly believe this distinction matters and directly correlates to the level of income you’re able to generate as a grant professional and nonprofit consultant.
Grant consulting is a professional practice.
And it should be structured like one.
Structuring a practice means:
Clear service offerings with defined scope.
Pricing that reflects the value of the work.
A tech and automation-forward delivery system that protects your time and your client relationship simultaneously.
And it means a strategic, principled approach to AI.
I’ve been providing frameworks, tools, coaching, and strategic business development to other consultants since 2021 inside The Grant Practice, a professional cohort of highly-skilled grant professionals. Learn more.
Many grant writers have a business that
technically “works”, but aren’t earning what
they deserve and lack structure to feel sustainable.
We show consultants how to use our proprietary
AI-supported business operating system*
and strategic pricing and service models
to finally stop undercharging and reduce chaos.
* Yes we built a custom AI-supported operating system
for our own grant consulting practice.
You can download it and use it, too!
Click here to learn more.
The Grant Practice is a strategic business development program and professional cohort for grant consultants.
You get the structure, tech systems, templates, resources, accountability, and peer support needed to grow your business in a sustainable way.
Our tools, on-demand trainings, template archive, and regular live sessions can be curated and applied to support your exact business goals and needs.
Maybe you need to work on your service design and pricing structure.
Maybe you need new (or first-ever) contracts and formalized client delivery processes.
Or maybe it’s your marketing, or mindset around what’s genuinely possible, or learning how to automate your entire business with AI.
And, of course, maybe it’s all of the above.
Whatever it is, we’re here for it.
“If you haven’t launched your business yet, you will learn EVERYTHING you need to launch, market, manage, and scale a wildly successful grant writing business.
If you already have a grant writing business, trust me, you will pick up so much new information from the trainings and other members of [The Grant Practice] that you will greatly improve/augment the functioning and scale of your existing business.
It is without a doubt the best investment you can make (and the best investment I have made in years), hands down.”
– Pamela, Grant Writing Consultant
How much should I charge as a grant consultant?
It depends on your experience, your service model, and your market, but most consultants are undercharging. The Pricing Playbook walks through the full framework, including flat fee, hourly, and retainer models. If you’re offering AI-powered deliverables or building client systems, you should also be charging for that capability.
What pricing model is best for grant consulting?
Flat-fee or retainer models almost always outperform hourly billing for experienced consultants. Hourly rewards slowness; flat-fee rewards expertise. The Pricing Playbook covers how to design packages that protect your time and still feel fair to clients.
Are percentage-of-award fees allowed in grant consulting?
In most professional contexts, percentage-based fees are considered unethical and are explicitly prohibited by major professional associations. There’s a full post on why, and what to do instead.
What should be in a grant consulting scope of work?
At minimum: a description of deliverables, what’s excluded, the number of revision rounds included, your document requirements from the client, and a change order clause. If AI is part of your workflow, your SOW should address how it’s used and what the client can expect as a result. The contract post covers the full list.
How do I prevent scope creep with grant consulting clients?
Scope creep is almost always a contracting problem, not a client problem. The fix is a clear SOW, a change order process, and a brief scope review in your kickoff call. The post on scope creep walks through the exact approach.
Should I be using AI in my grant consulting practice?
Yes, but with a governance framework. The consultants who will lead this field over the next decade are the ones building principled AI systems now, not the ones waiting to see what happens. The question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether you’re designing your AI use intentionally.
We don’t just talk about grant writing. We do it every day, working with a full roster of nonprofit clients. Our courses are taught by Ph.D.-level writing experts with 11 years of full-time grant consulting experience. We’re educators and practitioners, which means we know how to teach complex ideas clearly and make them usable in real life.
We believe in and actively fight for racial, ethnic, economic, gender, LGBTQ+, and disability equity. Our instructional content and guest experts reflect this focus. Our pricing is on a sliding scale that is meant to counter capitalist, sexist, and racist structures that our country is built upon. If that makes you uncomfortable or you think it’s wrong, this is not the community for you.
We started using AI in our consultancy in late 2022 and began teaching it in May 2023. In late 2024, we began developing the AI Grants Hub™, an advanced AI-powered workspace for grant writers. We refined the Hub for over 18 months and officially launched it in September 2025. Our approach to AI is grounded in accessibility, ethics, and results. The Hub will help you write faster, smarter, and more strategically. Our course co-leader and grant strategist, Dr. Stephanie Weaver, is a certified Notion Administrator, so you know the tech is top-notch.
We don’t do passive learning. You’ll take action, get feedback, and actually build momentum. Live trainings and community discussions keep you accountable and connected.
When you join The Grant Practice, you get access to the same templates, workflows, and strategies we use to run and grow our own consulting practice. Plus, through Grant Writing Made Easier, you’ll strengthen your proposal writing, storytelling, and strategy skills. You’re supported on both the business and craft sides of grant writing.
You’ll hear from professionals in finance, law, marketing, business mindset, and more. You get a full picture of what it takes to run a thriving consulting business, not just one perspective.
Ultimately, I think everything you do as a business owner should have some element of pleasure. If not, why are you doing it? From the content to the design, to the personalities you’ll encounter, this experience will be a pleasurable one. Guaranteed.
Multiple price points. Multiple learning formats. Captions, transcripts, and written guides. We don’t just talk about access, we build it into everything we do.
Most grant consultants are still figuring out how to use ChatGPT more effectively. We’re years past that consideration.
My team has been developing, testing, and refining AI systems specifically for grant writing and consulting for the past 4 years—systems that account for the compliance requirements, funder relationships, organizational nuance, and rhetorical standards that make grant writing different from any other kind of professional writing.
We are leading the development of AI governance frameworks for grant consultants: clear protocols for where AI belongs in the workflow, where it doesn’t, how to disclose its use appropriately, and how to train client teams to use it responsibly. This work is grounded in our background in rhetoric and writing, which means it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about maintaining the credibility, accuracy, and persuasive quality that get grants funded.
Inside The Grant Practice, we teach consultants how to build their own AI-powered systems for their business operations and for client delivery. Not generic AI prompting tips. Actual system design: how to build a client hub, how to create AI agents that work with your clients’ data, how to integrate AI into your workflow without losing quality control, and how to position your AI capabilities as a competitive advantage in the market.
Grant consultants who build these systems now will be running practices that are simply not comparable to those who don’t. The gap is widening fast.
And you’ve started to wonder whether or not there’s a cleaner, more professional (and yes, more modern) way to run this business.
There is.
You’re in the right place.