Let's Research Empowering Language in Grant Writing
In a low-income settlement outside Nairobi, 565 people each received a cash gift worth about two days' wages. No strings attached. They could spend it however they wanted.
The only thing that differed was one sentence about why they were receiving it. Some heard the money was meant to reduce poverty and meet basic needs. Some heard it was meant to help them become more financially independent. Some heard it was meant to support the people they care about and help their community grow.
That single sentence changed how confident people felt about reaching their own goals. It changed what they expected their lives to look like in two years. It changed how judged they felt for accepting help at all.
Same money. Same people. One sentence.
The researcher behind that experiment was Catherine Thomas, then a psychology PhD student at Stanford. Working in Nairobi before her doctorate, she had 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 that difference did anything measurable. It did.
Here is the study if you want to read it yourself.
Table of Contents
Deficit framing is the default, and it starts in the mission statement
The cash was identical. The sentence attached to it was not. That turned out to be the whole experiment.
Before Thomas ran that experiment, her team did something worth pausing on. They 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, almost all of them made people sound helpless.
That is the part I want every grant writer to sit with. We tend to watch our language in the community insight statement and nowhere else. But deficit framing usually arrives long before that section. It is baked into the organization's own mission statement, the line that is supposed to explain who you are and why you exist. And it is the favorite tool of the opening hook, the startling fact meant to grab a reviewer's attention in the first sentence.
Both come from the same instinct: that pain sells better than dignity. Check those two places first.
Thomas has since replicated her findings. 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.
Two countries, two study designs, one consistent finding. Language that positions people inside a community with agency produces better outcomes than language that positions them as individuals in deficit. Deficit language does measurable harm to the people it describes.
What we know about the money
That covers the people we write about. 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?
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.
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.
But notice what all of that research has in common. Every one of those studies tested an individual donor opening a fundraising appeal.
The study I would run
Not one of them tested a grant reviewer. As far as I can find, nobody has.
Somewhere out there is a funder with a spare research budget and a curiosity problem. I am easy to find.
That matters, because those are not the same task. A donor deciding on a small gift is making a fast, emotional call. A grant reviewer works through a structured application against a rubric, often over days, frequently on a committee, assigning points to specific criteria. There is no reason to assume findings from one transfer cleanly to the other.
I know what the answer is from the field. Every program officer I have talked with and every reviewer training I have been through points the same direction. What we do not have is a study.
So here is the one I would run. If a funder wanted to settle this, it would not even be expensive.
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.
Someday I am going to get my PhD and study the intersection of philanthropy and anthropology. This is the question I want to answer. If you are a funder who supports research on philanthropic practice, or an academic looking for 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 have seen this pattern from the reviewer's chair for years. The proposals leaning hardest on desperation tend to be thin everywhere else. The crisis framing is 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.
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.
Does empowering language actually help a proposal get funded?
Program officers and reviewer training consistently point that direction, and that is the basis most of us in the field are working from. What does not exist yet is a controlled study testing how empowering versus deficit language affects proposal scoring. The research we do have covers individual fundraising appeals, not grant review.
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.
Five hundred and sixty-five people, the same cash, and one sentence that changed what they believed about themselves. If a single sentence can do that, the sentences we write about the communities we serve are worth every minute we spend on them.
If you want to build this kind of practitioner-level nuance into every section of your proposals, this is exactly the work we do inside the Certificate in Grant Writing.
Not ready for that yet? Join the Spark the Fire newsletter and get practitioner-level grant writing like this every week.
Cheering you on,
Allison
