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Our liberal arts college has had a grants office staffed by two part-time people for the past decade plus. As you would guess, they assisted with proposal writing, budget preparation and proposal submission for external proposals from any department on campus. For budgetary reasons this office was recently eliminated. There has been discussion that external consultants would be hired to assist with larger proposals (but we would be on our own for smaller ones). Does anyone have experience (positive or negative) with using external consultants in this way?
We had a terrible experience with McAllister and Quinn on two different NSF proposals. We ended up getting the second one, but it was in spite of them not due to any assistance they gave. We had a university contract with them, which we have since let expire.
Maybe other people have had a different experience though.
We also had a trial contract with McAlister and Quinn. I am not convinced it helped us beyond the help we would have gotten from sending the proposal to a colleague for review. This was 3 years ago so I don't really remember the details. I do remember it being quite expensive.