One of the most common things I hear from nonprofit leaders sounds something like this:
“We’re really good at the work. We’re just not very good at talking about it.”
And honestly? That’s usually true.
Over the years, I’ve noticed something interesting. The organizations doing the most difficult, emotionally demanding, community-centered work are often the ones that struggle the most when it comes time to explain what they do in a grant proposal, presentation, or funding conversation.
Not because the work lacks value. Not because the outcomes aren’t meaningful. But because the work has become so normal to them that they stop recognizing how extraordinary it actually is.
When you live inside the work every day, your perspective changes. The things that would stop an outsider in their tracks become part of your routine. The crisis response. The after-hours phone calls. The impossible situations your staff navigate before lunch. The quiet moments of compassion that never make it into reports or statistics.
You stop seeing those moments because you’re too busy surviving them.
That’s understandable. But it creates a real challenge when it’s time to communicate your impact to someone outside your organization. Because funders are outsiders. They don’t see what you see every day. They don’t sit in your staff meetings. They don’t hear the conversations happening in hallways after difficult client interactions. They don’t watch your team solve problems in real time with limited resources and sheer determination. All they see is what you manage to put on paper.
And that’s where many strong organizations struggle.
Not because they lack passion or competence, but because they assume too much context. They forget that the person reading the proposal may have no idea how difficult this work really is. They use internal language that makes sense to them but means very little to an outside reviewer. They summarize enormous efforts in a sentence or two because, to them, it’s “just part of the job.”
I see this all the time.
An organization will casually mention that they provide transportation assistance without realizing they are coordinating rides across multiple rural counties where public transportation barely exists. Another will briefly reference case management without explaining that their staff are effectively acting as navigators through fragmented healthcare, housing, legal, and recovery systems simultaneously. To the organization, those things are ordinary. To an outsider, they’re evidence of an incredibly sophisticated operation.
But if you don’t explain it, the reviewer never sees it.
This is especially true in organizations responding to crises. The faster the pace of the work, the harder it often becomes to step back and articulate it clearly. People operating in survival mode tend to communicate in shorthand. They focus on immediate needs, immediate outcomes, immediate fires. That urgency shapes the way organizations talk about themselves.
The irony is that many nonprofit leaders are deeply effective communicators when they aren’t trying to “sound professional.” Sit them down over coffee and ask why they do this work, and suddenly the story comes alive. They’ll tear up, tell you about a family they helped, a turning point they witnessed, or a moment that reminded them why the work matters. When they sit down to write a grant, they put down jargon or try to sound like the government verbiage they just read in the RFP.
That’s the heart, the emotion, is the version funders need to hear. Not the sterilized version. Not the version stripped down into generic nonprofit language that could apply to almost anyone. The real version.
The challenge, of course, is balancing authenticity with professionalism. A grant proposal still needs structure, data, and measurable outcomes. You can’t submit pure emotion and hope for the best. But organizations often overcorrect in the opposite direction. In an attempt to sound formal, they unintentionally drain the life out of their own story. And when that happens, they undersell themselves.
I think part of the problem is that many nonprofit leaders don’t fully appreciate the level of expertise their work requires. When you’ve been doing something for years, you forget that not everyone knows how to do it. You forget how much knowledge, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and persistence are required just to keep things functioning day after day. You stop recognizing your own complexity because you’re immersed in it.
That’s one of the reasons outside perspective matters so much in grant writing. Sometimes organizations need someone else to look at what they’re doing and say, “Do you realize how significant this actually is?”
Because often, they don’t. They’ve normalized extraordinary work. And to be fair, they almost have to. If you fully absorbed the weight of every situation, every crisis, every story, you probably couldn’t keep doing the work long-term. Some degree of normalization is survival.
But when it comes time to communicate impact, that normalization becomes a liability. The organizations that secure funding most effectively aren’t always the ones doing the best work. Often, they’re the ones that have learned how to translate that work clearly for people outside their walls.
That translation matters. Because funders cannot support what they do not fully understand. And some of the strongest programs in this country are still learning how to explain just how extraordinary they really are.