Can you clarify what you mean by "successful full-time professional grantwriter"?
Are you getting a higher-than average hit-rate of successful grants awarded? If so, what is that percentage (ie, what percentage of grant applications you write are awarded successfully?)
Or, by successful do you mean that you just do this full-time because you have many clients you work for?
Yes, higher than average success -ate (it can be a choice, really, as to your modus operandi - I choose to be more careful and targeted with what I apply to, but others choose to work at higher volume and accept a higher failure rate - I respect either choice we can all be a bit different), and yes I now have more clients demanding my work than I have time for. I increasingly focus my time on larger grants instead of small ones, but I still love doing tiny projects for a local community sometimes (kind of like pro bono) as this profession tends to be for the love of helping the community, at least in my case. I'm about mid-career at this stage.
I won't disclose my percentage rate but it's extremely high. Sometimes government grant programs close down 2 days after you submit a massive application to them, that happened to me last year. So is that a fail? Not sure. How much you are granted is another thing though, about 50% of my grants don't get awarded the full amount applied for, it's extremely common.
I find this very fascinating. Just out of curiosity, how often to come across organizations that you would turn down if it was your decision to give them a grant? For whatever reason: wastefulness, greediness, or just plain pointless.
Actually the main reason is risk. I have a client right now with plenty of money to pay me that really wants me to do grants for them but they're not a quality client and I believe they will be turned down by most grantmakers and that's not how I work. They have some PR and governance issues.
There are also some clients (or grantmakers) that simply turn me off. Not common, but it happens. E.g. a certain kind of religious foundation only granting to those who contribute to their world view (with all respect to religion in general though), or a corporate foundation whose name I just don't feel like applying to (sorry McDonald's, you just leave a bad taste in my mouth).
It feels weird being part of mining companies (and philanthropists) paying funds to do good when what their source of money did was not good, but you weigh up the whole world and realise it's better sometimes to just help community projects happen, you've got to have balance somewhere.
Usually every grant project makes me tear up at least once, out of empathy to those I'm helping. That's what it's all about.
I respect your will to not disclose your success rate, but I'd like to point out that "extremely high" means exactly nothing to me.
A 30% success rate could be extremely high when applying for grants, or maybe for all I know an 80% success rate is what you get if you just make it up as you go along and you need to score above 95% to qualify for "extremely high". No way to tell one or the other from where I'm sitting.
If you don't know what the background success rate is, then why do you need to know what this commenter's success rate is? All you need to know is that it's significantly higher.
Are you getting a higher-than average hit-rate of successful grants awarded? If so, what is that percentage (ie, what percentage of grant applications you write are awarded successfully?)
Or, by successful do you mean that you just do this full-time because you have many clients you work for?