Grant Writing Confidential

Faithful readers will recall my post on the perils of last minute changes to proposal concepts in Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing). But, as Paul Harvey likes to say, now it is time for The Rest of the Story. . .

Just after I’d written “Stay the Course,” our public-sector client who was the subject of this sad tale of woe called to breathlessly say that HUD had funded the proposal for $3 million! Despite the unnecessary drama resulting from last minute changes that caused the proposal to be submitted at about 11:59 PM on the due date, the outcome was great, illustrating the difference between process and outcome objectives that I covered in The Goal of Writing Objectives is to Achieve Positive Outcomes (Say What?).

In addition to the good news, what’s particularly interesting about this story is that our client didn’t even know that HUD had received the proposal until about two weeks before the funding notification. It seems that she did not receive the sequence of emails from grants.gov confirming receipt of the proposal. She called and sent emails to grants.gov and HUD, which generated responses along the lines of, “we can’t find any record of it.”* This went on for about two months. Adding to the festivities, it turned out that there were problems with other applicants that day at grants.gov, so HUD re-opened the competition for a short period of time to allow these applicants to re-submit. Our client called the HUD Program Officer to discuss the re-submission process, at which point she was quickly told, “You don’t have to, we have your proposal and it’s already scored.” Two weeks later, she got a call from her congressman letting her know she’s been funded.

I’m not sure what the moral to this story is other than proposal writing is stressful enough without amping it up by making last minute proposal changes. And, of course, the story reveals the chaotic nature of the grant review process, as well as their general uninterest most bureaucrats show toward the programs they run and their “customers” (grant applicants). Presumably, if anyone at grants.gov or HUD actually cared, they could have done research to reassure our client that the proposal was received, instead of providing the slow psychological torture of bureaucratic indifference.** I could have helped our client solve this problem in short order, if she’d only called me, because a quick phone call to her congressman’s field deputy who is the HUD liaison would have lit a sufficient fire under their rear ends to raise even the most slack-jawed HUD staffer from their stupor long enough to get to the bottom of this exercise in absurdity. Just like the Boss said, it’s hard to be a saint in the city, and it’s hard not to be a cynic in grant writing.

As Paul Harvey also likes to say, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

* Faithful readers will remember how fantastically unhelpful bureaucrats can be.

** For an exquisite study in psychological torture, read Ian Fleming’s most unusual James Bond story, “Quantum of Solace”, which is not to be confused with the movie that just opened that merely shares the title.