Fee Schedule
Bright Star Grant Consultants, Inc. is committed to
providing their clients with individualized, excellent quality work
completed prior to the agreed upon timelines.
The fee for service can be an hourly service and
provides your project with the combined professional skills of both
Principals. They will both work together with your team to produce
innovative approaches to achieving the goals set forth in the scope of
services agreement.
Project fees are negotiable and dependent upon the
letter of agreement detailing tasks and timeline. We expect to work with you
to achieve a fair and balanced project fee that will achieve your goals and
provide for excellent products, services and deliverables. Both Principals
will be involved for the one project fee.
Retainer fees may be appropriate for some kinds of
projects, such as coaching, networking, consortium building, conference
development, or on-going site monitoring. A clearly stated letter of
agreement with documented benchmarks of achievement will be included in the
letter of agreement.
Note: It is not legal nor professional for grant
consultants to be paid based upon a percentage of the grant, have their fee
included in the grant budget, or to be paid on contingent of grant funding.
Professional Links:
Grant Writer Ethics
How We Work
In addition to the skills that we bring to the technical
aspects of grant development, we enjoy project driven work that requires
visualization and coordination of multiple ideas and tasks. We thrive in
environments that encourage creative problem solving, individuality within
collaborative teams, responsibility, flexibility, and positive action. For
us, challenging work is best approached in an environment of ethics,
openness, and respect for an effective and meaningful solution.
Why are Retainers a Good Long Term Strategy?
The consistency of retainer agreements give you the
advantage of working proactively rather reactively. We can help implement
your long term funding strategies so your work is sustainable. Long term
funding strategies rely on an understanding of grant timelines and cycles.
Timelines in regard to grant seeking are different from
those of retail or contract marketing. Timelines for federal grants in
particular are rather long term. A typical federal timeline can look like
this:
Requests for proposals for XYZ grant are due on June 2
every year. An appropriation is finally approved, but three weeks later than
scheduled. Because of the delay, competitors have only four weeks to get a
copy of the RFP, convene all the necessary information, and turn it in. A
typical federal RFP is 100 pages long and has extensive requirements that
must be exactly noted and satisfied. The proposal you write can also reach
100 pages. The application includes many requirements that must be collected
from a number of people who are invariably very busy. Everything about the
proposal must be perfect, including meeting deadlines, or your proposal and
all the hard work it represents will be rejected without further
consideration. If the proposal is incomplete, it will be a year before you
can try again. It will take months to know how you are faired, sometimes up
to six months. If you did get the award, there will be another delay as the
contracts are drawn and approved. Then the money must be released, meaning
more time yet.
It is commonly understood that major proposals that
require many people and departments to coordinate need a year for
development. Because many grant programs are cyclical, you can research
which grants are a good fit, study the pervious winner's proposals, prepare
internally, and then be ready to pounce when an RFP is announced. What do
you get for your deliberate preparation? Time to ask program officers
questions and build a relationship, which some say improves your chances of
success by 70%. You can attend the technical assistance conference (often
only available to those who have requested their RFP before a special
deadline) where everything that cannot be read between the lines is
revealed. Staying ahead of the deadline also gives you more assurance that
you will complete the proposal without panic and mistakes. This is important
because, with relationship building, you might be able to get a proposal
review done by the program officer before the deadline with enough time to
make adjustments. This is an obvious advantage over the competition.
Foundation and corporation grants have different
timelines. Some offer deadlines 5 times a year, others are quarterly,
yearly, and so on. We can use this to our advantage.
A retainer fee agreement allows us to research the best
and most strategic grant opportunities and then structure a monthly schedule
of application once we are well positioned. Larger grants can be
interspersed with smaller grants so that applications are always in the
works. There may not be immediate results due to the nature of grant
timelines, but the investment can have a cumulative and powerful effect.
Also, there is a threshold where the application process becomes more
streamlined and efficient to prepare.
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