When to Say Goodbye: Terminating a Grant Writing Engagement
The relationship between a grant writer and their client is crucial. Both parties rely on mutual responsiveness and engagement to successfully navigate the challenges of meeting deadlines with well-designed, highly competitive proposals. The only things more important to this relationship are trust, integrity, and respect. However, there are times when the relationship doesn’t work. Most often, when we encounter a problematic client relationship, our contract grows by a clause or two. When we find a pitfall, we try to put in some guardrails to avoid it in the future and move forward. Rarely, we arrive at the difficult decision of terminating the engagement.
Earlier this month, for only the third time in our 14+ years in business, we terminated a client relationship. While that is never the outcome we want to see, we would be remiss if we didn’t debrief this learning experience for you.
Recognizing the Signs of Non-responsiveness
The key issue in this relationship was non-responsiveness. The first step in addressing non-responsiveness is recognizing its signs. These can include missed meetings, delayed or no responses to emails, incomplete information necessary for grant applications, and a general lack of engagement in the process. Such behaviors stall the grant writing process and reduce the likelihood of submitting competitive proposals.
In our recent case, there were red flags throughout the engagement as the client missed several scheduled meetings and frequently disregarded requests to respond to meeting invitations and information requests by specific dates and times. We found ourselves exercising a great deal of patience in the relationship while simultaneously being more and more specific about what was needed from the client at each communication.
A primary concern for us when we encounter non-responsiveness from a client is evaluating the likelihood that the organization can navigate productive funder relationships. If we can’t get timely, effective communication from them, will their program officer? We never want to be in a situation where we are securing funding for projects that are unlikely to be implemented with fidelity.
Communicating Concerns
Before deciding to terminate an engagement, it is crucial to communicate the concerns. A clear and professional conversation or written communication outlining the issues and the need for timely responses and engagement can sometimes resolve the issue. It is important to be specific about the consequences of continued non-responsiveness, including the potential end of the engagement, to underscore the seriousness of the situation.
In our case, we allowed the engagement to extend well beyond the agreed term while progressively attempting to clearly communicate what was needed to get the relationship back on track. We reiterated our expectations multiple times through numerous email communications, text messages, meetings (when these were attended), and by providing extensive sample documentation to support the client in providing what was needed. Unfortunately, none of these strategies helped.
Decision to Terminate
We never take the decision to terminate an engagement lightly and try to approach these situations with the utmost professionalism and tact. Prior to terminating the engagement, we consulted with our legal advisor about communicating the impending termination.
We detailed exactly what we needed to move forward. We listed the dates of our many requests for the supporting documentation needed, spanning a year, and we set clear and specific deadlines for providing the supporting documentation needed to fulfill our scope of work. At the end of the day, we were more generous than our legal advisor suggested but were still unsuccessful in obtaining what we needed to proceed with the engagement.
Ultimately, our decision to move forward with terminating the engagement hinged on our client’s response to our final request for the documentation we needed. Obviously, their response was not to provide the materials. Unfortunately, it was worse than that. It was disingenuous. After more than a dozen requests had been made and lengthy conversations had been had in recorded meetings, the client pivoted to claiming they had already provided the material. They had not. And that ended the relationship.
Remember way back at the beginning of this tale, we said, “The only things more important to this relationship are trust, integrity, and respect.”
According to our legal advisor, we’re more patient and generous with our clients than we necessarily should be. That is never going to change. Our goal is always to grow, develop and sustain our clients. To do that, we meet them where they are and do our level best to bring them along to where they need to be to reach the next level. But we do not budge when it comes to integrity. Funding at the levels we achieve for our clients and our professional reputation absolutely depend on maintaining the highest levels of integrity from everyone involved.
What Happened with the Other Two?
Careful readers may be wondering what happened with the other two clients since we said this was our third termination. We’ll tell you. One did something so egregious and unethical that we could not risk continuing to be associated with the organization– they took a personal check from a donor suffering from cognitive decline when we already had an appropriate ask into their family foundation. The other employed a program director who verbally assaulted one of my employees. When I went to meet with them about the situation, the program director verbally assaulted and physically threatened me in front of their new executive director. The executive director completely understood why we were removing ourselves from the situation until personnel issues could be addressed.
In both of these cases from about a decade ago, the organizations have since undergone changes in leadership. We’ve maintained open lines of communication with both of them and at this point, we would be willing to work with them again. Their common need was professionalism in leadership that had to happen before we could effectively work with them. The same holds true for our more recent case.
Moving Forward
As with any learning experience, we’re taking time to reflect and adding a new clause or two to our contract. We’re updating our screening process for new clients to include more rigorous checks on their grant readiness and capability. Where required and necessary supporting documentation is lacking, we’ll be including specific timeframes for producing documents in order for the engagement to move forward.
While we always regret seeing a relationship fall apart, we value the opportunity to learn and grow from it. We always try to practice what we preach and do more, better.