grant talk
grant writing talk and news, written and edited by laura lundahl, principal of iden advancement, a group of grant writing consultants.Archive for November, 2008
Grants.gov emerges with Google, RSS and PDF capabilities
It is official: Grants.gov is getting easier to use. Starting August 2008 Grants.gov has made three cool new advancements that bring the site closer to being in the current technology decade.
As the first of the changes, as Local/State Funding Report (July 28, 2008) announces, by opening up to Google searches, Grants.gov, (which is the official internet clearinghouse for all federal grants) has taken a giant step towards easing access to the federal foundation applications, as well as FAQ files, help topics, and updates or changes to grant announcements. Grants.gov has opened their virtual doors, allowing Google to access useful public information that was previously not searchable online.
Secondly, Grants.gov’s has established an RSS feed, which allows for automatic important announcements, critical to applications currently in the works.
Making applications easier all-around, Grants.gov has taken a third step in becoming more user friendly: Accepting applications in PDF formats. Before the beginning of 2009, all 26 federal granting agencies will begin accepting full PDF applications online, in all Adobe versions. This will unify and provide clarity to the Grant.gov application process; a process that has been becoming increasingly more user-friendly as time goes on. These three new developments are perhaps the most significant and beneficial changes Grants.gov has made to the application process in recent years, and should improve the accessibility of the application process for both seasoned grant professionals and newcomers alike.
Government Grants: Who is Your Biggest Advocate
After the “submit” button is clicked on a government grant, the real fun for everyone involved in reviewing your proposal begins. Any government grant will likely be critiqued by more than one foundation representative. Approximately 10 to 50 experts take on the task of screening, reading and discussing just one proposal. This occurs according to an established proposal review manner, based on required granting guidelines.
Further detail about what actually happens in proposal reviews sometimes seems like a mystery. With federal proposals, however, the review and scoring actually happens in a somewhat predicable process. Sometimes called a “peer review process” or a “panel review” process, this is where the actual scores for most government grant are determined. A “high” score and a winning score are two different things, but that is another topic entirely.
According to information available on grant.gov, most US government proposals that fall into a “discretionary” grant category will be scored in this peer review panels. These panels consist of experts in the field and non-federally employed government grants experts. The panelist’s job is to read each proposal the federal agency asks them to, and assign a confidential score to the proposal, based on how well it meets the criteria surrounding the original legislative intent of the funds being administered.
Learning more about this process enables better grant writing- which is why I became grant review panelist. I started in 2001, volunteering to review United Way grant proposals, and now review proposals for several federal agencies. Through this process, I learned the extent to which a panelist can easily understand and identify with a proposal either enables or disables high scores. I learned that if I can’t build a case for why a proposal meets the mandatory grant guidelines, it will never receive a high score in panel reviews. Knowing this changed the way I thought about grant writing. If there were only one sentence of advice I could offer regarding federal grant preparation, it would be the following: Write it so that a stranger to the organization can read it, understand what is being proposed, and fight for your cause against any adversity
It sounds drastic- adversity. But if your proposed work meets the granting guidelines, and the panelists understands and can prove that, your proposal will receive a high score. If anyone can prove the proposal doesn’t meet the required criteria, even a panelist who has fallen in love with an applicant’s causes and mission will not be able to advocate for the proposal receiving a high score. To this end, a grant writer preparing a federal proposal should prepare it specifically for the panel to read, and make it easy for panelists to identify how the proposed work addresses the criteria of the grant. The panel room is where your score is decided, and the only person in that panel room advocating for a proposal are the specific panelists who are assigned to review your work.
While many proposals show great passion for the work they are proposing, federal grant reviewers are often frustrated by the proposals that have not taken the steps needed to accurately link this work to the needed criteria. This literally prevents review panelists from justifying recommending a high score.
Panel discussions are where proposal scores are ultimately decided, and where billions of dollars are up for scoring every year. People who serve as panelists are there to learn about the ways your proposal meets (or does not meet) the required granting guidelines, and prove the strengths of your proposal to other panelists.
Enabling a panel member to see the ways a grant matches the federal criteria required by the grant application guidelines allows a panel members to advocate a proposal in panel discussions. This means it is the best interest of the grant writer to make it as easy as humanly possible for grant reviewers to find the criteria they need to fight for your proposal during panel discussions.
Against the Spray and Pray Method: Relationship Building Part II
A friend recently told me that her company, a private organization with national-reaching influence, suggested an increase in grants leaving the institution by 30 percent in one year. Perhaps this suggestion would be realistic if the suggested increase in grant applications had been strategically planned during the year prior. Such planing might include research into what funders may be applicable to the goals of the organization, hiring of new staff to manage this increase in application, or working with internal employees to increase their ability to communicate funding needs and ideas to grant makers. Of course, none of this had been done, or this wouldn’t make for a very interesting entry.
In order to meet this demand and reduce the amount of time spent customizing proposals, grants are slapped together using the ‘ctrl + c’ and ‘ctrl = v’ functions on a key board, and viola! Finished! A slew of proposals are mashed together and sprayed out to the funding world, and the grant writer crosses his fingers and hopes for a bit. Thus- the “Spray and Pray” method: spray out as many grant applications as possible, and pray that one of them gets approved.
My friend’s organization had just hired their first grants director, had no other grant development staff and assumed that within the first year of the grant director’s tenure that a 30 percent increase would be possible. These types of assumptions are sometimes made by intelligent professionals whose backgrounds are largely the for-profit business world. For-profit strategies for increasing output does not transfer well into the fundraising sector. Soliciting funding for public interests, charitable needs or research projects is not like sales. Unlike the for profit world, income generated will not be at all proportionate to output. To say it another way, the amount of funding brought in per year is not directly proportionate to the amount of proposals sent out.
Many funders who’ve spoken to groups at Puget Sound Grantwriters Association meetings this past year have warned against organization sending out boilerplate or “template” proposals. This is basically an insult to your audience. Grant makers see through a template, boilerplate proposal. Cut and paste jobs stand out as cheap, careless attempts among high quality proposals.
Why spend what can be an incredible amount of time re-writing proposals for each funder when the project you are seeking funding for is the same? Because funder’s interests are not, I repeat, not the same. Take for example, the Microsoft Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation- or the PACCAR Foundation and the Norcliffe Foundation. Both of these examples are of one corporate foundations and one family foundation, linked because the family is responsible for the corporation. Thus, the board members may overlap, and there may be some crossover in the geographic areas the foundations serve. Their interests, however, are completely separate. Grant seekers may assume interests would be similar, application processes would be identical, but this is not the case in either of the above examples.
No, friends, the Spray & Pray method is not the answer. Consider a slightly more strategic approach. Essentially, a more efficient approach is based on relationship building and research- the main tools of proposal planning. These tools are used as the first step in submitting to any funder. When the funder’s specific interests are known and a proposal has been determined to be a natural fit with their interest, the next step should be to start with a clean slate. Create an outline of the funders interests, and write specifically to these interests. For example, phrase each of the funder’s interests as a question which you have to answer. For a funder who states on their website they are interested in “community building through grassroots efforts,” you should have a clear section of your proposal that answers the question, “How dose your organization build community through grassroots efforts?” This doesn’t mean you need to include the text of the question in the narrative of the proposal you actually submit, but the answer should be there, and be easy to find.
This kind of attention to each grant maker’s specific interests takes significant lead and planning time, but it is more effective. It preserves the reputation and integrity of an agency’s name. This strategic method to grant writing literally disables the Spray & Pray method, and increases and organizations productivity, success rate and bottom line.
