About Gelvora · 47 Charcoal Hill Rd, Westport
A proposal your boardcan read without wincing,at a price you know up front.
Gelvora is a small grant writing studio in Westport, Connecticut. We write for nonprofits that have a great program, a tired staff and a deadline that arrived before the coffee did.
The story
We got tired of watching good programs lose on bad paragraphs.
Gelvora started the way a lot of studios do: with a friend’s food pantry, a funder’s portal and a Sunday night. The program was extraordinary. The application read like a tax form that had given up. We rewrote it, rebuilt the budget so every line pointed back to the story, and sent it in with an hour to spare.
That’s still the whole job. We interview the person who runs the program, learn what the funder actually asks, and write the thing in a voice that sounds like you, minus the run-on sentences. Then we put one fee on paper before we type a word.
We work out of Charcoal Hill Road in Westport, and we take on a small number of proposals at a time, because a proposal written in a hurry reads like one.
What we believe
Four house rules, pencilled in the margin.
- i.
fixed fees only
An hourly clock rewards slow drafts and long meetings. A fixed fee rewards finishing. You see the number in writing, and it doesn’t drift.
- ii.
the budget is part of the story
We build the budget narrative alongside the prose, so the figure on line three is explained by the sentence in paragraph four.
- iii.
read the guidelines twice
Once for the rules, once for the hints. Funders tell you what they want; most applicants are too busy to listen.
- iv.
you keep the parts
Every engagement ends with a tidy boilerplate file of your mission, history and outcomes, so the next application starts at page two.
The short list of nopes
Things we politely decline.
- Promising you’ll win. Nobody honest can.
- Charging a percentage of the award. Ethically murky, and it makes everyone twitchy.
- Ghost-writing for a team with a full grants department. We’ll say so on the call.
- Padding a budget so it looks bigger. Program officers can smell it from across the portal.
- Chasing a funder that was never going to fund you. We’ll tell you before you pay.
Inside the studio
A proposal week, desk-side.
Mon–Fri 10am–5pm at the studio, with evenings by appointment for boards that meet after dinner.
Next
Twenty minutes, no invoice, an honest answer.
Tell us about the program and the deadline. We’ll say whether we’re the right studio, and if we are, quote one fixed fee in writing.