Let's Research Empowering Language in Grant Writing
Someday I am going to get my PhD and study the intersection of philanthropy and anthropology, and when I do, I already know what I want to study.
The research question is: Do grant proposals written in empowering language score higher and win more funding than proposals written in deficit-based language?
Here's the thing. I tell grant writers to use empowering language in their proposals. I have taught it for years. I believe it. And in all that time, I'm basing the idea on my experience as a grant reviewer and discussions with foundation program officers. But I haven't found a research study to prove it.
Not because the research is buried somewhere and I have not looked hard enough. Because the closest anything has come is testing donor appeals, which offers interesting and comparable insights. However, a donor deciding on a small gift in ten seconds is not a reviewer assigning points against a rubric.
Here is why that question matters, what the research has shown so far, and my hypothesis.
Table of Contents
What we actually know
The cash was identical. The sentence attached to it was not. That turned out to be the whole experiment.
Catherine Thomas, who was a psychology PhD student at Stanford, studied a version of my question. Working in Nairobi before her doctorate, she noticed that some organizations described the community they served as a charity case while others described it as a strong, connected community that happened to need support. She wanted to know whether the language used made any measurable difference.
Here is the study if you want to read it yourself, but I'll give you the synopsis.
Before running the experiment, her team catalogued the mission statements of the thirty largest cash transfer programs in Africa. Ninety-seven percent of them used poverty, vulnerability, hardship, and their clients' low status to describe their mission. In other words, it made people sound helpless. Deficit framing is the default setting in the field, and it starts in the mission statement.
In her first study, 565 people living in low-income settlements in Nairobi received a cash gift worth two days' wages. The cash came with no strings attached. What differed was a single message about why they were receiving it: one framed around reducing poverty and meeting basic needs, one around becoming more financially independent, one around supporting the people they care about and helping their community grow.
Thomas has since replicated the pattern. In a 2025 study with women in rural Niger, an intervention built around relational agency, meaning social harmony, respect, and collective advancement, significantly improved women's economic outcomes over twelve months. A comparable intervention built around personal ambition and self-initiative shifted some personal measures but did not move economic outcomes.
They found that language that positions people inside a community with agency produces better outcomes than language that positions them as individuals in deficit. That much is settled enough for me. Deficit language does measurable harm to the people it describes.
What the money evidence says, honestly
The other half of the question is the one grant writers actually lose sleep over. If I stop writing about desperation, do I lose the funding? Here the evidence gets messier, and I would rather give you the real picture than a tidy one.
Thomas's team ran a second study with 1,367 prospective donors in the United States using the same three framings. The wording made no difference to how much people were willing to give. If anything, the community empowerment message drew slightly more donors than the personal empowerment one. That is the finding most often quoted in articles about asset framing, including some I have probably quoted myself.
But DonorsChoose, working with the Gates Foundation, ran a much larger real-world version. Across two experiments, one to 511,000 donors and a second sending fifteen email variations to 1.2 million donors, they compared asset-framed, deficit-framed, and neutral-framed appeals. No clear winner emerged. Their conclusion was that asset-framed appeals can be at least as effective as deficit-framed appeals when matched to the right content and audience.
So in individual donor fundraising, deficit framing sometimes produces a small edge in dollars, and sometimes it does not. It is not the reliable money machine the profession treats it as. It is also not the zero-cost swap that a lot of asset framing advocacy implies.
The study I would run
So here is the study I want to run. If a funder wanted to settle this, it would not even be expensive.
Somewhere out there is a funder with a spare research budget and a curiosity problem. I am easy to find.
Take one real, previously submitted proposal for a real program. Produce two versions that are identical in every respect except the community insight statement, which is written in conventional deficit framing in one version and in empowering framing in the other, using people-first language, self-identification, and active voice. Recruit experienced grant reviewers, ideally people who review for foundations or government programs, and randomly assign each of them one version. Have them score it against a standard rubric with the criteria and point values they would normally use. Then compare the scores.
Add a second arm and it gets more interesting: have reviewers score a full slate of proposals so the target is not obvious, and collect their written comments alongside the numbers. The comments may matter more than the scores. If empowering language changes what a reviewer writes about an organization's credibility even when the points come out the same, that is worth knowing.
Then run it again with community foundation review committees, which behave differently from federal panels, and with program officers making first-cut decisions before a formal review even starts.
If you are a funder who supports research on philanthropic practice, or an academic who wants a dissertation student with two decades of field experience and a very specific question, my inbox is open. I am not joking.
My hypothesis
I think empowering language wins. Not marginally, either. My expectation is that proposals written in empowering language score meaningfully higher against a rubric, and that the organizations submitting them win more awards and larger ones.
Here is my reasoning. A reviewer scoring against a rubric is looking for evidence that an organization understands the community it serves and has a credible plan for working with it. Deficit framing signals distance. It describes people from the outside, as a category of problem, which is what you write when you do not know them well. Empowering language, done well, requires you to know something specific and true about the people involved, and that knowledge shows up on the page whether or not the reviewer can name what they are responding to.
I could be wrong. That is the point of running the study.
What I do in the meantime
Until that study exists, here is where the evidence leaves us. Deficit language harms the people we describe. Deficit language can sometimes help in individual fundraising, or it could result in the same amount raised. But there is no research on deficit versus empowerment language in grant review. That is not a coin flip. That is a professional habit built on assumption, with a known cost falling on the people on the page.
I will add one thing that is not evidence, and I will not pretend otherwise. I review proposals. What I notice is that the ones leaning hardest on desperation tend to be thin everywhere else. The crisis framing is usually doing work that the logic model, the budget, and the evidence base should be doing. When I score those, they lose points because the case for the plan was never made. That is my pattern recognition, but it is the only thing anyone can offer here right now, which is rather the point.
One more note on where this shows up. Most grant writers watch their language in the community insight statement and nowhere else. Deficit framing usually arrives earlier than that. It is often baked into the organization's own mission statement, and it is a favorite tool for the opening hook, the startling fact meant to grab attention in the first sentence. Both come from the same instinct: that pain sells better than dignity. Check those two places first.
How to write a community insight statement with empowering language
A needs statement describes what you see wrong. A community insight statement describes what you actually see. The difference is whether you looked long enough to know.
The community insight statement is not a softer name for the needs statement. The traditional needs statement was built around one question: how much is wrong with this population? The name assumes the subject is a deficit to be documented. The community insight statement keeps the real data and the real scope of the problem, but builds the section around what you understand about the community, including the context, the barriers, and the agency already present.
Three tools do most of the work.
People-first language
People-first language means making personhood the most important characteristic of every person you describe, and putting descriptive identities like income or housing status second.
I was reading a student's grant proposal once where the stated goal of the project was to reduce cavities and poor dental hygiene. Think for a second about what image that phrase puts in your head. For most readers it is not a neutral one. Implicit bias, the automatic assumptions we make about a social group without meaning to, fills in the rest, often tied to assumptions about the person's economic status. That is not what you want your reviewer thinking about.
There is also a practical cost to leaning on disturbing imagery. When something reads as too bleak, a lot of readers quietly shut the feeling off and look away rather than lean in. I asked my student to rewrite the goal in the positive instead of the negative. She landed on improving and maintaining good oral hygiene and increasing access to dental care. Same project. Completely different effect on the reader.
Economy. Rather than writing that a person or group is poor, at-risk, or disadvantaged, all of which imply a permanent state, write that a person is experiencing material poverty, or better yet, that your project is increasing financial stability.
Housing. Avoid terms that are crass, inaccurate, or that reinforce stigma. Skip "the homeless" or "transient" in favor of "a person experiencing homelessness" or "houselessness." At the same time, do not shy away from language around mental or physical health when it is directly relevant to the program you are proposing. The goal is accuracy without stereotyping, not avoidance.
Self-identification
The rule is simple: use the language preferred by the group or person you are describing. If you do not know, ask.
Race and ethnicity. Learn the most specific terminology, or the term preferred by the group or person concerned, rather than defaulting to a broad category. Remember to name the race or color of white people too, rather than treating whiteness as the unnamed default. Combine continent and national identity where appropriate, such as African American or Afro-Cuban, and capitalize these terms.
Indigeneity and ancestry. Use language that centers the experiences of families most affected by colonization across generations. Whenever possible, use a specific name, such as Cherokee, rather than a general term. Capitalize the proper names of tribes, nationalities, and peoples.
Age. List specific age numbers rather than vague categories that carry negative connotations. Ask when you can. One person may prefer "senior," another "older adult." At the same time, avoid language that overextends the limitations tied to a young person's developmental stage or an older person's health.
Disability. Ask for preferred terminology whenever possible. Avoid language that villainizes or sentimentalizes people with disabilities, and avoid phrasing that quietly equates thinness or able-bodiedness with health. Do not assume someone is not living with a disability. Some disabilities are invisible.
Active voice
Active voice means putting the actor of the sentence in the role of performing the action. "The ball is being chased by the dog" is passive. "The dog chases the ball" is active.
This matters for two reasons. Active verbs convey action, and action reads as competent, confident, and qualified, which is exactly the impression you want your organization to leave with a reviewer. Active voice also does quiet work against implicit bias: it keeps the people in your proposal doing things rather than having things done to them. If you want a running head start, my list of action verbs is built for exactly this.
Frequently asked questions
What is a community insight statement?
It is the section of a grant proposal that establishes the scope of a need using real data, built around understanding the community's context and strengths rather than only its deficits. It replaces the traditional needs statement, which was built to justify itself through desperation.
Is there research showing deficit language hurts grant funding?
No, and it is worth being precise about that. The research on donor response comes from individual fundraising appeals, not grant review, and its results are mixed. No controlled study has tested how empowering versus deficit language affects proposal scoring by grant reviewers. Claims that deficit language costs you grant funding are extrapolations from donor email experiments, not findings.
Doesn't donor psychology support urgency and need-based appeals?
Less than the profession assumes. The Stanford donor study found no difference in giving across framings. A much larger DonorsChoose experiment found deficit framing sometimes produced more total dollars while asset framing produced better engagement and conversion, with neutral framing winning outright in several tests. There is no consistent deficit advantage to protect.
How do I write a community insight statement without losing the case for funding?
Keep the real data. Keep the scope of the problem. What changes is the frame around it: describe the community's circumstances and context rather than defining people by their deficits, and use people-first language, self-identification, and active voice throughout.
Can I still use statistics in a community insight statement?
Yes. Empowering language is not about removing evidence; it is about how you frame the people behind the evidence. A statistic about food insecurity in a region is still relevant. Describing the people affected by it as helpless or hopeless is the part that needs to change.
What is people-first language in grant writing?
It is language that puts personhood ahead of any single descriptive identity, such as writing "a person experiencing material poverty" instead of "a poor person." It keeps the reader focused on the person rather than a label.
What is the best grant writing certification program?
The Spark the Fire Certificate in Grant Writing is built for exactly this kind of practitioner-level nuance, the details that separate a technically complete proposal from one that actually reads as fundable. If you are looking for a grant writing certification that goes past the basics, that is where I would point you.
I still plan to run that study one day. Until someone does, we have replicated evidence of harm on one side, an untested assumption on the other, and a choice to make about which one we are willing to act on.
Cheering you on,
Allison.
