February 8th, 2010 · by Jake Seliger · No Comments
When Seliger + Associates moved its intergalactic headquarters to Tucson, we also decided to buy a new phone system under the assumption that prices were relatively low and hiring someone to set up our old system again would prove sufficiently difficult and expensive to justify buying a new one.
Doing so is harder than it looks—just like buying a copy machine, which I explained at the link. Most of us, if we’ve worked in institutions or large business, are used to having a phone magically appear on our desks. But if we’re suddenly in a group of, say, five or ten, someone has to buy the phone system. This time around, that person was me.
There are a few basic strategies that small organizations can use for phones these days: (1) they can use their existing cell/mobile/home phones, (2) they can use Internet lines through outfits like Vonage, Skype, and Google Voice, (3) they can buy a Voice over Internet Protocol (”VoIP”) “box” through companies like Digium, or (4) they can buy a box that works with copper lines through Nortel, Avaya, and the like.
One of the biggest problems is simply understanding the difference among these approaches. Another is understanding the differences between a) the manufacturers of these systems and b) the vendors who actually sell / install them.
We ultimately went with option 4 and purchased an Avaya system that runs through plain old telephone system (POTS) lines. We did so largely because it’s probably the most reliable. In addition, we previously owned an ancient Avaya system and already had the mandatory, very expensive proprietary handsets. Here are the issues with the first three alternatives:
1) It’s tempting for small businesses and nonprofits to use personal phones as their primary business lines as well. Don’t do that if you can avoid it; if you don’t believe me, go read Personal Phone Numbers For Business, Yeah That Was A Mistake… on BigStartups.com. A quote:
[T]hrough the magic of the Internet and networked computer systems, contact information tends to get syndicated to dozens of places when it is first entered. Often it does not get updated when the original source does.
Once you start using personal numbers for business, it’ll be hard to stop. That’s one reason to get an 800 number if you’re facing customers: it will be portable wherever you might move. Our 800 number—800-540-8906, for those of you wondering—has followed Seliger + Associates from northern California to Seattle to Tucson. If you use personal numbers, people will also be able to figure out that you’re primarily using cell phones, and you’ll look unprofessional or amateurish. Also, do you really want to field fevered phone calls from crazed clients at 3:00 A.M.?
2) Consumer VoIP outfits like Vonage, Skype, and Google Voice have problems of their own. Vonage customer service is notoriously terrible. Skype is okay, especially for international calls, but doesn’t transfer calls from receptionist areas to back areas easily, doesn’t have professional voicemail (as far as I know), and has no real customer service when something breaks. Google Voice requires existing phone lines. All of these problems can be overcome, but if the overriding goal is never to have to think about phones, this isn’t the way to go.
3) Outfits like Digium are okay, and its vendors sell boxes that sit somewhere in your office. You plug existing landlines in or set them up boxes with Internet access. These systems are slightly less expensive than the solution we went with, but it was harder to find vendors for this, and we didn’t want to have the same points of failure for Internet access and phones. In other words, even if there is a power outage that takes down Internet service, we still have an option, since phone systems using POTS lines like Avaya will still produce a dial tone at the point where the POTS lines go into the Avaya box.
That left us with copper providers.
Phone systems have a zillion features; look at some of them here, although beware that the link goes to a vendor website. As I said earlier, perhaps the hardest part of dealing with phones involves finding out who sells them: the big manufacturers are Avaya, Nortel, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Mitel. The best way to start getting prices is by searching for “Avaya Vendor,” “Nortel Vendor,” and so on in Google. Then call the manufacturer to find a local vendor. These pages are probably going to be hard to navigate and understand. Once you have a list of resellers, you’ll have to call each one for a quote. Some manufacturers have multiple vendors in your area. You’ll need to know things like:
* How many lines you want.
* How many handsets you need.
* How far you might need your system to expand—will you need four lines, or forty?
* How many voicemail boxes do you need?
* The number of technicians and/or service people the vendor has, along with their location.
* The cost of a 36 month lease, a 60 month lease, and whether it’s a regular lease or a “fair market value” lease.
* The bottom line cost of outright purchasing a system.
* Installation fees.
* The warranty.
* Timing—when can it be installed?
Once you start asking these questions, you’ll be inundated with information and quotes that are hard to compare. You should build a spreadsheet in Excel or another spreadsheet program. Mine has about 30 rows and 12 columns. In addition, almost all of this has to be done by phone: that’s why it will probably take at least a full day of work just to get bids, understand the systems you’re dealing with, and figure out who the vendors in your area are.
If you’ve read this, however, you at least have a place to start and know a few of the questions you’ll want to ask. Perhaps the best thing you can do is ask a lot of questions of your local vendors and preface those questions with, “I’ve never done this before, so explain the choices in terms a novice can understand.” (You can also ask questions in the comments section of this post.) Like car dealers, some vendors will try to upsell you, or tell you that you need more of a system than you think you do. By the same token, as with car dealers, patience and fortitude might be the difference of thousands of dollars. Like a car, you will live with your small business phone system for years, so take the time to get it right.
February 3rd, 2010 · by Jake Seliger · No Comments
Two days ago, Isaac told me his keyboard was broken. Yesterday, I stopped by the office to take a look and try cleaning it. This, gentle reader, is what I found; more sensitive individuals may wish to avert their eyes:
That’s three years of proposal-writing detritus beneath the keys, as well as a warning about the hazards of Diet Coke and Trader Joe’s trail mix. Hundreds of proposals have probably been written over the course of this keyboard’s life.
Consider yourself warned, and educated too: if you have a keyboard that isn’t functioning properly, you can pop the keys off using a butter knife. Submerge them in soapy water, agitate, rinse the keys, and leave them to dry overnight. Clean the board itself with a q-tip or paper towel, taking care not to get inside the key wells themselves. Don’t submerge the board, which might harm its electronics. Then reattach the keys.
In Isaac’s case, the keyboard works. This is doubly good because he likes the Apple wireless keyboard depicted, but Apple no longer sells this model. Now the company offers chiclet keyboards, so finding the older white ones isn’t easy.
(I, on the other hand, preferred the One True Keyboard, or the IBM Model M, until I tried the Kinesis Advantage. People who spend a lot of time typing are apt to have strong opinions about their keyboards.)
January 31st, 2010 · by Isaac Seliger · No Comments
President Obama highlighted his proposed partial “freeze” on discretionary federal spending during his State of the Union address last week, which set off a flurry of predictable wrangling among Democratic and Republican members of Congress (for a pretty good summary of what’s going on, see Democrats, Republicans Spar Over Cutting Deficit). While talk of budget freezes may make most grant applicants start to get the sniffles, there is little to worry about at the moment.
So far, President Obama is talking about freezing some domestic spending programs in FY ‘11, which doesn’t start until October 1. He also seems to love spending for things like education, stimulating jobs, green energy, etc. The proposed FY ‘11 budget, which debuted February 1, shows increases in a number of discretionary programs along with freezes in others. But remember that appropriations for most domestic discretionary programs in the current FY ‘10 budget are wildly higher than in the FY ‘09 budget. At the moment, there are unprecedented amounts of money available for all kinds of initiatives. As I wrote last September in “Graffiti, Windmills, CAP Agencies, and an Answer to the Question As to Whether This is 1975 or 1965,” “This really is the best of times for grant applicants, so let’s all party like its 1965.” Or, to paraphrase Max in Where the Wild Things Are,* “Let the wild grant writing rumpus continue.”
Despite the happy talk above, however, there is one not-so-minor thing to worry about—the dreaded “R” word. No, not the recession “R” word, which, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is actually good for grant writing. I’m talking about “rescission”. Rescission should strike fear into your hearts, as shown in the following Congressional definition:
“Rescission–The cancellation of budget authority previously provided by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may propose to Congress that funds be rescinded. If both Houses have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within 45 days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.”
Since the Democrats control both houses of Congress, and assuming that President Obama is good at herding cats, he could propose rescission of any authorized spending program anytime he wants to. As with so many aspects of grant writing, I actually experienced a budget rescission when I was a Community Organizer Intern in 1972 in North Minneapolis, as noted in my first post, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal.” When I started work, one of my first tasks was to explain to low-income homeowner applicants for home rehabilitation loans that they could not get their money because the funds had been rescinded by President Nixon. At that time, there was nothing Congress could do about a rescission, which led to the 1974 law that requires Congress to go along with a presidential rescission. Given the hysteria that is building over the huge budget deficits, compounded by the upcoming election, a successful rescission is quite possible, and much more worrisome that supposed spending freezes.
This means that if your organization—nonprofit, public agency or eligible business—is thinking about applying for a grant, stop thinking and start writing.
* I have fond memories of reading “Where the Wild Things Are” to Jake and my other kids when they were two or three. It’s one of the best children’s books ever.
CW is an amorphous blob of assumed correctness that ping pongs through the media, popular culture, academia and everything else in America, even though aspects of it may be proven wrong. Two examples from recent newspaper articles will demonstrate how hopelessly wrong CW can be:
1) Foster Care and Orphanages: The CW about foster care is that the system, although flawed, is a much better alternative than orphanages, which conjure up Dickensian images of underfed orphans cowering in dark rooms. Although a quick Google search confirms that no one seems to really know how may kids are in foster care in America, a good guess is about 600,000. Richard. B. McKenzie, a UC-Irvine professor who grew up in an orphanage in the 1950’s, tackles the foster care/orphanage CW in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Best Thing About Orphanages.” Professor McKenzie cites a 2009 Duke University study of 3,000 orphaned children in Africa and Asia and states:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that children raised in orphanages by nonfamily members were no worse in their health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth than those cared for in their communities by relatives. More important, the orphanage-reared children performed better than their counterparts cared for by community strangers, which is commonly the case in foster-care programs.
Professor McKenzie surveyed 2,500 alumni of American orphanages and found they generally did much better than their peers in the general population across a range of educational attainment, income, happiness and related indicators. In other words, orphanages, which have largely disappeared from America and been replaced by foster care, actually did a reasonably good job given the circumstances in nurturing orphans. Having written dozens of proposals addressing the needs of foster youth over the years, I know that outcomes are not good for kids in the system. In 17 years of being in business, however, no one has ever approached us to write a proposal for an orphanage.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is one of the largest private funders for child service programs. A search of their website for “orphanages” produces two hits, both in Romania, while a search for “foster care” produces 230 hits! I have a pretty good idea of how the CW thinkers at the Casey Foundation would react to a proposal to set up a new orphanage in Owatonna*: shock and horror! But they’d probably happily fund yet another “innovative” program to provide wrap around supportive services for foster kids.
2) Endangered Salmon: While living in Seattle for 15 years, I became accustomed to waking up pretty much every morning to another newspaper story about endangered salmon. Several years ago, there was even an attempt to OK killing sea lions because they were eating too many salmon, although I don’t believe a whisker on a single sea lion was actually ever harmed. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this piece in the January 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal: Fish Boom Makes Splash in Oregon. Despite the CW about the end of salmon runs on the West Coast, this year there are so many steelhead and their cousins that in some creeks, “you could literally walk across on the backs of Coho,” according to Grant McOmie, outdoors correspondent for a television news team in Portland. As the article states:
In 2007, one state office warned, “Populations of anadromous [or oceangoing] fish have declined dramatically all over the Pacific Northwest. Many populations of Chinook, Coho, chum and steelhead are at a tiny fraction of their historic levels.” The year before that, a naturalist in Seattle wrote: “It is hard to find the silver lining in a situation as dire as the collapse of wild salmon off the Oregon and California coasts.”
It turns out that the CW about salmon in Oregon is kind of fishy. This looks like a good opportunity for an enterprising homeless services provider in Portland to use the service delivery model I developed satirically in Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development. I’ll give you the acronym at no charge: Project FISH (Feed the Indigent/Salmon for Homeless). The grant writer for this proposal could make tidy use the old aphorism, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”
It is almost never a good idea to go against your understanding of the presumed CW of the reviewers in writing a grant proposal. Not only do you have to stay inside in the box, as Jake wrote, you actually have to stay in a corner of the box. A case in point:
We’ve written lots of funded proposals for anti-tobacco/anti-smoking proposals over the years, particularly in California, which at one time had tons of money for such initiatives. About ten years ago, we were hired to write three proposals to prevent youth smoking in California by three different agencies for the same state RFP. While two of the clients were fairly typical youth service organizations, one was different. This nonprofit was interested in only working with white kids, which they deemed “Euro-Americans.” We almost never get good data sources from our clients, but this client provided peer-reviewed studies confirming that, with the exception of Native American youth, white teenagers in California were much more at risk for smoking than African American, Asian or Latino kids.
I told the client, however, that he would be going against CW about smoking and ethnicity and he would likely not be funded—especially if we wrote the proposal using the term “Euro-American” with a focus on white teenagers. He insisted, and we wrote it the way he wanted, using his terrific citations in one of the best needs assessments we’ve ever written. Not only was the proposal not funded, but it was also completely trashed in written reviewer comments our client later gave me. The reviewers were outraged that the agency would focus on white kids, instead of youth of color, and claimed a lack of data, despite the citations we included. In other words, their CW was so strong, they did not recognize the statistics provided right under their noses. The punch line is that the other two proposals we wrote for this competition focused on African American and Latino youth, respectively, used more or less the same service delivery approach as the first proposal and had entirely specious data that we cobbled together.
They were funded.
Now, about that discount. We’re willing to provide a 20% discount off our standard fee for a foundation appeal to the first qualified client who wants to fund an orphanage, salmon to feed the homeless or some other anti-CW project concept that we find intriguing. This means we’ll conduct basic research to identify a prospect list, complete detailed research to narrow down the list, write a foundation letter proposal (about five single spaced pages) and prepare 10 finished foundation proposals to the best identified sources for $5,600, a $1,400 discount from our standard fee of $7,000 for this type of assignment! If we get anyone to take us up on this offer, I’ll post updates on the outcome.**
* We were recently hired by a client in Owatonna, a small town about 40 miles south of Minneapolis. I have fond memories of Owatonna, since I used to go there frequently with my dad in the late 1950s to get live turkeys from a farm for our family kosher meat market. It was fun for a six-year-old to try to catch a turkey that was bigger than himself—with a poultry hook. Owatonna is also mentioned in one of Jake’s favorite childhood movies, Hot Shots. At the start of this hilarious parody, Charlie Sheen is Topper Harley, a troubled fighter pilot trying to recover his mojo in an Indian village, when a character speaks a series of faux Indian words that are actually town names in Minnesota, including Owatonna. The sequel, Hot Shots! Part Deux, is also lots of fun.
** The client must be a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Seliger + Associates will, at its sole discretion, determine if the client is qualified and the project concept is appropriate for this offer.
* One person wrote us an e-mail we responded to, and in a follow-up he said:
Thanks for the info, and I look forward to reading the blog post. I’ve learned more about grants and grant writing from reading your blog than I did earning my B.S. in Emergency Admin. and Planning.
Now that’s a compliment! Depressingly enough, the last section is probably true.
* Along the same lines as above, but from a Tweet: “Not to send business elsewhere, but I highly recommend this #grant newsletter: http://blog.seliger.com/ #foundations.”
Even if you could surmount union opposition, the federal government has an ever-increasing thicket of red tape that makes such a thing impractical. It takes months to get hired for a job with the federal government. It takes months to ramp up a new program. By the time you’d gotten your NWPA through Congress over strenuous union objections, appointed someone to head it, set up the funding and hiring procedures, and actually hired people, it would be 2011. Maybe 2012. Perhaps you could waive all the civil service and associated procedure surrounding federal hiring, but I don’t see how.
* Terrorists hurt America most by making it close its borders. In other words, the United States is doing more harm through its reaction to terrorism than the terrorism itself has done, in part because terrorism is highly visible, reported, and immediately obvious while the effects of making border crossing more difficult are diffuse and too seldom discussed.
* “[Prostitution] involves a good or service (or whatever you want to call it) — sex — which, when undertaken for free by consenting adults is legal but which becomes illegal when money changes hands. Can you think of other goods and services that share this trait?”
* Remember: If you apply for a grant program, you might actually win and then have to run said program. This comes up by way of “In Race for U.S. School Grants Is a Fear of Winning:” “One major concern is that should Illinois succeed in the national competition for Race to the Top money, it might not have the ability to finance the long-term costs of any new programs once the federal money has been spent.”
* Prisons or colleges? California “chooses” prisons because of structural issues relating to prison guards’ unions, politics, and laws, all of which interact with one another to produce a nasty outcome. See how at the link.
The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.
Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going to serve 300 participants per year, not 30 or 3,000. If the RFP says, “run a three-year program,” propose a three-year program, not a five-year program. I could go on indefinitely in this vein, but I shouldn’t have to. The point is simple: do exactly what the RFP says you should do. As a grant writing rat in an RFP Skinner Box, you get the treat (money) by pressing the bar (following RFP directions), not by running in circles trying to get out of the box.
Clients sometimes direct us not to do what the RFP says, even when we advise them that it is best to follow the RFP. Ignoring the RFP instructions almost guarantees they won’t be funded; Isaac has already written about one example in True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales:
Writing a YouthBuild proposal is very much a “cookbook” exercise in that the DOL pretty much tells applicants what they want applicants to do, and successful proposals have to regurgitate this stuff within the absurdly short page limit and the obtuse data required by the funder. In other words, if you want a YouthBuild grant, you should, as Rupee says, just Do the Damn Thing.
The clients for the four funded proposals listened to us, and we were able to craft compelling, technically correct proposals that warmed the stone-like hearts of the DOL reviewers. In contrast, our True Believer client had a vision of how she could use a YouthBuild grant to attack a whole slew of problems faced by at-risk youth in her rural community. Almost none of what she wanted to do, however, had anything to do with YouthBuild, and she fought us throughout the proposal development process. We did our best to make the proposal fundable to no avail. Despite her passion and commitment, no YouthBuild funds are available today to help the young folks she cares so much about.
A more recent example involved a Department of Education program in which the exact student cohorts to be served are mandated in RFP, as well as the underlying legislation and regulations. It doesn’t get any more specific than this. For reasons that were not made clear to us, our client insisted on removing one of the specified student cohorts from the draft proposal, even though we told him that he could save the postage, as the proposal will likely be deemed technically incorrect, which it is, and be thrown out before it is scored. This particular RFP also includes specific fill-in-the-blanks objectives, which were to be replicated word for word in the proposal. In the first draft, our client modified the wording of the objectives.
While some RFPs provide significant latitude in program design, many do not and are essentially cookbooks. If you have a cookbook RFP, follow the cookbook. For example, YouthBuild demands that participants being trained in the construction trades have on-site training experiences in the construction/rehabilitation of low-income housing, so you shouldn’t propose a retail mall as a training site, no matter how good an idea that might be to the Executive Director or Board. On a similar subject, remember that every question in the RFP applies to you, no matter how dumb it may seem, how repetitive it may be, or how little you think it should apply. I explain how this works in RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions.
Part of not thinking outside the box includes telling the funding agency what they want to hear. One such example is the infamous “sustainability” sections that many federal RFPs include, which we wrote about in detail here. These sections require applicants to state how they will sustain the project after federal funding ends. As Isaac said in the post:
For the vast majority of nonprofits applicants [...] grants and donations [are the only viable financial resources available]. If we know this simple truth, how come foundation and federal program officers seem clueless? If the agency had the couple hundred thousand dollars sitting around to fund a given program, it wouldn’t need the grant and wouldn’t apply.
Furthermore, the major cost for most human service providers are staff salaries and other operating costs. So it’s improbable that you’ll just need a bunch of money to get off the ground; although startup costs are real, they’re still dwarfed by staffing and ongoing operations costs in most cases. There might be a hypothetical dream project out there, somewhere, that just needs that DHHS grant to get started and then can run indefinitely off of revenue, but we’ve never seen it.
If you don’t like an RFP’s inane restrictions, remember the golden rule, as articulated in Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Very occasionally, you have to invent a box for yourself because the funder hasn’t given it to you. Foundations will do this by not putting a maximum cap on requests and/or by having maddeningly opaque guidelines. In such cases, you should look at how much they’ve previously offered in funding; if they’ve historically made grants in the $10,000 – $50,000 range, asking for $400,000 is unlikely to work (for more on this topic, see my post “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For?“).
Most of the time, however, you’ll be given a box, and if you step outside it, you’re not going to be praised like a precocious high school student. You’re going to be treated like a cat who’s decided to show its creativity by ignoring the litter box. The RFP is your litter box. Ignore it at your peril.
December 27th, 2009 · by Isaac Seliger · No Comments
Faithful readers will note that we regularly discuss RFPs, NOFAs, FOAs, SGAs and other government acronyms denoting that grant funds are available. Jake in particular likes to fulminate about especially dumb RRPs, as he does in Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP and Adventures in The Broadband Initiatives Program. Despite marinating in a stew of RFPs, Seliger + Associates never responds to RFPs/RFQs (the latter being “Requests for Qualifications”) for grant writing services, and there are two basic reasons for our unabashedly stiff-necked position.
The first reason is the most important: I know from over 15 years of working for various California cities, mostly in management capacities, that RFQs/RFPs for professional services are easily wired, “wired” meaning that one firm is going to get the contract regardless of who submits a response. Now, I am not talking about Sopranos-style wiring in which the public official can expect a visit from Paulie Walnuts if the wiring job isn’t done right. Instead, the public official is usually just more comfortable with a certain consultant or has a personal relationship. A city might also want a local consultant but need bids from qualified out-of-towners to provide cover. So a favored firm is identified before the competition takes place. Many public agencies have a requirement to run a bid process before selecting a consultant, and the public official in change of the RFP/RFQ process structures the document to produce the desired outcome. This is usually done by putting requirements into the document that favor the fair-haired bidder.
For example, we recently received a RFQ from a city. I looked quickly at the document and saw that 25% of the available point total was for “knowledge of the local community,” while 25% was for “grant writing experience.” This is obviously wired for a local grant writer, as we would have received zero points under the local knowledge category. Another favored approach is to require the successful bidder to meet regularly with agency staff in person, making it impossible for a non-local bidder to compete. There are other similar techniques, including having a ringer on the selection committee. We receive up to a dozen RFP/RFQ notices per year. I assume this is because we are such a well-qualified and well-known firm that we would provide exceptional cover for a wired bidding process, if we were dumb enough to respond. Not being stupid or naive, we always send more or less the following response: We will not respond to this RFP, but would be happy to provide a fee quote if your process fails to turn up a qualified consultant. Over the years, exactly one public agency eventually hired us after running a RFP/RFQ process. Years ago, when we first started, we would sometimes submit real bids but never got the job, and about 12 years ago stopped wasting our time by responding.
The second reason is also significant: having been in business for almost 17 years, we simply don’t have to respond to RFPs/RFQs for grant writing services. We think we’re the best grant writing outfit there is. We are like Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s response to a reporter’s question concerning who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: ““You’re looking at him!”* For better or worse, we’re as good as it gets with respect to** grant writing. Responding to RFPs/RFQs wastes our time with no reliable prospect of reward. Like lawyers and escorts, grant writers are all about billable hours. Unlike architects, engineers, accountants and similar personal services consultants, who have tons of competition and must respond to RFPs/RFQs, we provide a unique service with few qualified competitors. Don’t believe me? Try a Google search for grant writers and see what you get.
Despite the above, we’ve worked for hundreds of public agencies, including cities, counties, housing authorities, redevelopment agencies, and state governments. We can do so without responding to RFPs/RFQs because some public agencies have minimum contract amounts before bidding kicks in, which means they don’t have to go through the process. Additionally, all public agency purchasing rules have an exception for what is known in the trade as a “sole source contract.” This is because public agencies occasionally face unexpected emergencies and can’t wait for a bid process or will eventually have a unique need—say, grant writing—for which there are so few qualified bidders that there is no point in running a competition.
As long as the public official is willing to place herself on the line, nothing prevents her from hiring us under a sole source contract. When I was a public official and wanted to hire a favored consultant, I simply explained what I wanted to do to the City Manager and City Attorney, wrote the argument in a City Council staff report, if needed, and signed the contract. This is a lot less work than orchestrating a phony RFP/RFQ process. Since I know the sole source approach is always available, and our services and fees are cleverly hidden in plain sight on our website, I assume that any public official who wants to go through an RFP/RFQ process is probably trying to wire it and, thus, is not worth our time to respond.
* In the terrific film version of The Right Stuff, Dennis Quaid delivers this line as “Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you’re lookin’ at ‘im”, with a boyish charm I could never achieve even when I was a charming boy.
** Free Grant Writing Tip: when responding to disjointed RFPs and searching for phases to connect disparate thoughts, alternate between “With respect to . . .” and “Regarding . . .” See, it was worth reading this post for this transition tip alone.
December 16th, 2009 · by Jake Seliger · No Comments
The “Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program” program solicitation says that it’s part of the “Institutional Integration (I3)” program, which immediately made me think of the i3 programs that Isaac wrote about here. I sent him an e-mail saying, “the i3 RFPs are starting to be released!”
“Not so fast, young Skywalker,” he replied (young Skywalker is how the Emperor and Darth Vader refer to Luke in Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi): the Department of Education must be running out of acronyms, because I3 is different from i3. The first stands for “Innovation through Institutional Integration,” while the second stands for “Investing in Innovation Fund.” The only difference between the two acronyms is the capitalization of the letter “i.” Maybe someone is taking lessons from Steve Jobs.
I can’t be the only person who is going to be confused, given the similarity. Since millions of potential acronyms exist out there, how does the Department of Education come up with two nearly identical acronyms for programs that already sound similar? If they must recycle an acronym, they should pick ECOMCOM (Emergency Communications Control), the central mystery in the pretty good 1964 film, Seven Days in May.
Perhaps the Department of Education is using Unix-style case-sensitive acronyms, in which you have to pay attention to whether you’re getting a capital-I cubed or a lower-case-i cubed. As the Wikipedia entry on filenames says, “In most file systems in Unix-like systems… upper-case and lower-case are considered different, so that files MyName and myname would be valid names for different files concurrently in the same directory.” When you’re thinking Department of Education, think Unix, with all the user friendliness that entails. Consider this a public service announcement that clarifies the difference.
December 13th, 2009 · by Isaac Seliger · No Comments
Faithful readers will know that I’m very fond of what used to be called “B movies,” so it should be no surprise that I also love movie trailers. The otherwise forgettable 1998 remake of Godzilla featured one of the best theatrical trailers I’ve ever seen: old guys are fishing off a East River pier in Manhattan, one hooks something big, his pole bends, the camera moves to the water where a huge wake is forming, and Godzilla’s head emerges. Fade to black with this in gigantic type across the screen: “SIZE DOES MATTER.” The theater audience went wild. Too bad the actual movie was awful, but I still remember the trailer!
I’ve seen you say before that a good way to get into grant writing is to volunteer to write grants for small local non-profits. Do these kind of non profits have a realistic chance of getting funded or is this more of an exercise in going through the motions and learning the process? Would some of these big health care reform/stimulus bills be a more likely source of grants for these kinds of organizations, or would it be easier to try and apply for a more established grant (be it federal or otherwise)?
Michael is wondering if it is worth volunteering to write proposals for a small nonprofit in hopes of becoming a paid grant writer. Since only small nonprofits are likely to take him up on his offer, he probably doesn’t have any choice. But his question suggests the larger issue of whether the size of the applicant organization, and by extension the age and experience of the applicant, matters in applying for grants. While, like most questions regarding grant writing, quantum effects cloud the answer, in most cases size doesn’t matter, and it often helps if the applicant for a grant program is new and/or has no track record, as long as the applicant meets basic eligibility criteria. How is this possible?
Let’s take a real world example of a tiny faith-based nonprofit organization in Watts that came to us about 10 years ago for help in writing a LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) proposal to provide services for students at Jordan High School, which more or less is the definition of a high-risk high school. What made this interesting is that DCSF was re-bidding a contract it had had for years with an extremely well-known and very large nonprofit in Watts that has been scooping up city, county, federal and foundation grants since the Watts Rebellion in 1965 (those readers who know South Central will know which agency I’m writing about).
Our prospective client, a minister, asked if I thought he could compete for this grant against the local heavyweight champ of nonprofits. I told him that he was man of faith, and if he had faith in his organization, so did we, and we could write a competitive application that would put him in the ring, a nonprofit Rocky against a nonprofit Apollo Creed. Like Rocky, our client won the grant. While we wrote a great proposal (shameless plug here), the most likely reason it was funded was that the incumbent large organization probably thought they had the grant in the bag and threw together a lame proposal. Also, DCFS may have been tired of funding the same organization. Over the years, grantees that get repeated grants often end up becoming lazy, don’t file reports on time and/or start fighting with the funding source. In other words, they act like a typical teenager. This opens up opportunities for new and frisky applicants to successfully compete for grants. The punch line is that once this small nonprofit got their DCFS grant, they used our grant writing skills to develop into a large, multi-program agency with lots of grant funds.
The same principle that size doesn’t usually matter in applying for grants is also true regarding small public agencies. Two examples will demonstrate this. I’ve already mentioned one before in Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later, which involved us writing a funded $250,000 Department of Education Goals 2000 proposal for a tiny school district with just over 100 students in rural Oklahoma. We were able to make the client competitive against giant applicants like Chicago Public Schools by emphasizing the oddity of their situation: the District wanted to implement bilingual education because of an avalanche of immigrant workers arriving in the community for jobs at an about to open industrial-sized hog farm.
This year, we wrote a funded $1,500,000 HUD Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) program grant for a small, rural city in California that caters to thousands of seasonal tourists. We usually write LBPHC proposals for much larger cities like Boston, but HUD apparently bought our argument that this city, although small in comparison to most LBPHC grantees, has a big lead problem and could implement a believable abatement program. We amped up the proposal by tying the lead problem to the current foreclosure mess (it never hurts to play up any related media-inspired hysteria you can find in a proposal). It also helped that our client had never before had a direct HUD grant, since all of their previous HUD awards were passed through the California Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Small Cities Program. I think HUD is always looking to fund new applicants for LBPHC and other long-in-the tooth grant programs and was pleasantly startled to get a credible proposal from an unlikely applicant.
As long as your organization meets basic eligibility for a given grant competition and avoids the “silly factor” that Jake wrote about last week in So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?, get busy and write. As with many things in life, it doesn’t much matter how big the applicant is, as long as the grant writer knows how to use his skills to craft a compelling argument. With luck, the funder will see the application as an opportunity to fund someone new, while using grant funds to meet a real local need.
One question clients often ask is how much money they should apply for in a given grant request. Our standard answer: ask for the maximum because zeroes are cheap.
As with many aspects of grant writing, there is no right answer to this question. It’s impossible to know. But all other things being equal, you might as well ask for the maximum amount available, since you do the same amount of work in preparing the proposal regardless of the dollar amount requested, and there doesn’t seem to be any relationship between the size of a grant request and the probability of being funded.
Let’s say you’re applying to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP) Mentoring Initiative for Foster Care Youth program. The maximum you can seek is $500,000. In the vast majority of cases, you’re better off applying for $500,000, instead of, say, $50,000, because you’re unlikely to be harmed by asking for the max. If OJJDP likes your organization and application but thinks you’re requesting for too much, they might knock your award down some, but they’re unlikely to reject you outright.
Once again: zeros are cheap, and it takes just as much effort to write a proposal for $50,000 as it does for $500,000.
The big exception to this is the “silly” factor. Does your organization have an annual budget of $200,000? If so, proposing a $5 million/year budget is going to make the reviewer roll her eyes and perhaps share your folly with her colleagues. You don’t want to elicit the laughter, as Dr. Evil does in Austin Powers when he asks for too little (or much) money:
In the “1969″ section of the video, he asks for $100 billions dollars, and everyone thinks it’s hilarious because of how absurd the request is. You don’t want to create the same effect in grant reviewers.
Foundations are trickier than most government grants because foundations usually don’t have maximum caps on requests. But you can almost always find their range of awards, and if the Peoria Foundation usually makes awards between $10,000 and $75,000, you probably don’t want to ask for $300,000. If you conduct detailed research on each foundation, you’ll find a list of their recent awards (this is what we do as part of our foundation work). You might ask the Peoria Foundation for $50,000 toward a project, but don’t seek an order-of-magnitude difference from their usual neighborhood of funding. And if you’re seeking foundation funding, make sure you read Isaac’s post, “PSST! Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret? ? Do you Promise Not to Tell? Here’s How to Write Foundation Proposals.”
Sometimes federal agencies specify a minimum grant request. For example, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 2009 (warning: .pdf link) had almost $2 billion available, with a minimum request of $5 million. So to apply for NSP 2 funds, the applicant had to be reasonably large to be believable in spending $5 million. By the way, NSP 2 was intended to address the ongoing foreclosure crisis and the applications were due July 17, as discussed in this post. Apparently, HUD doesn’t know about the foreclosure crisis, since the award announcement has still not been made. But, as Isaac observed of the original version of the program, NSP 1, which was an entitlement rather than a competitive program, HUD’s track record at quickly responding to this crisis isn’t exactly stellar.
Our clients will also ask if they should apply to programs with very large amounts of money or very small amounts available. There’s (usually) no particular advantage in going one way or another. Large amounts often mean that many more agencies will apply, increasing the competitiveness. But unless you have some kind of inside knowledge about who the competition will be, it doesn’t make much sense to assume that a big pot of money will necessarily be more viable. It can be, but won’t always be. The Basic Center Program, which is brought to you by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), has $13,377,274 available this year. Aside from this being a strange number—what’s wrong with rounding to $13,377,000? Am I really going to miss the extra $274?—it has 91 awards. Organizations that apply for the Basic Center Program are probably doing so just to find some federal money, and if a few thousand organizations apply, it might become very competitive.
Finally, it can also be worth applying for competitions that have relatively small amounts available. For example, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) often runs highly specific competitions with relatively small amounts of money and numbers of grants, such as the currently open Offender Reentry Program (ORP). This year, there is $13 million available and 33 awards. So, why would an organization bother applying for a ORP grant? First, they might actually be interested in serving former prisoners. But, additionally, they probably know that if they get a SAMHSA grant, their organization’s credibility with other funders goes through the roof. Over the years, we have successfully written funded SAMHSA proposals in which only 10 or 12 awards were made and watched as our clients use the SAMSHA grant to leverage other substance abuse treatment grants and contracts.
Thus, it often pays to apply for fairly obscure grants with small amounts money on the line. But when you do, remember that zeroes are still cheap.
