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.

Materials and other direct costs, such as travel and overhead for support services, will be reimbursed on an actual cost basis, according to the cost proposal in the scope of work letter of agreement.

Individualized activities that are not part of a larger project may be contracted on an hourly fee.  (Example: last minute editing and preparation of materials for a training session that is not included in any other project contract).

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.

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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.