Grant Writing Confidential

Attention grant writing consultants of the world: if you can’t even write your own website text, you’re not going to be very believable as a writer of any kind.

I point out this obvious fact because various people have copied our website over the years. Alert reader and grant writer Shirley Nelson of Grant Strategies pointed us to a recent example in the form of “Community Spec, Inc.,” which I’m not going to dignify with a link. Until very recently, their front page said:

CSI staff have over 15 years experience in successfully writing grants for clients in over 28 states across America. We differ from other grant writers in that we use a turn-key approach. Our clients only have to give us general direction and sign the completed grant applications. We do all the rest, including the program design, needs assessment, narrative, budget and final submission package.

Does that sound familiar? If you’ve ever been to the Seliger + Associates homepage, it should:

…We have been in business since 1993 and have had over 500 clients in 42 states.

Seliger + Associates has written over $200,000,000 in funded grant applications. We differ from other grant writers in that we use a turn-key approach. Our clients only have to give us general direction and sign the completed grant applications.

We do all the rest, including the program design, needs assessment, narrative, budget and final submission package.

In response, Isaac called Ryan Reeves, who was listed as the contact person for Community Spec. At first Isaac left a message with a secretary, and within an hour the offending Community Spec website disappeared. At the time of this writing, however, parts of the site are still available through Google’s cached version. Going to their site merely brings one to a page that says “Service unavailable. Please check back later…”

A day later, Ryan called back to claim that a) his site had been up for five years and b) he hired a web designer, who wrote the text for the site. The latter claim is particularly interesting, since when we hire web designers, we give them the text, not vice-versa. There are two unflattering possibilities in Ryan’s claim: he either plagiarized the text and then lied about it or is too incompetent to write his own text. The most hilarious part of the call came when he said that he wanted to “work with us” on the issue. Doing so is really quite easy: don’t plagiarize our material.

I can’t imagined that Community Spec is long for this world.

In any event, if the copied website weren’t enough to tip off potential clients or workers, the e-mail Ryan Reeves sent to Shirley ought to be another clue. He’s trying to hire contractors based on the websites of other grant writers, apparently trying to position himself as a broker. If that’s the best way he can find employees, he’s doing something wrong. Other consultants aren’t looking to be hired as contractors for third-parties; they’re looking for clients of their own, and unsolicited junk isn’t much appreciated. As Shirley wrote in an e-mail, “I am also annoyed by competitors that spam my e-mail box looking for grant writers. The most notorious was Resource Associates.”

Resource Associates

“Notorious” is right. Note to Ryan: following in Resource Associates’ footsteps is probably unwise. Like Shirley, we’ve run into them. At the moment, Resource Associates’ website has a fantastically annoying and creepy animated man promising to hook you up with the “top grant writers in the world.” Years ago I got one of the same e-mails surely did and foolishly responded to it, getting as far as their contract before realizing what was up.

The Resources Associates contract says that one can’t solicit “customers or providers” for ten years after working with them. Their promotional material claims that they have over 100 grant writers. 100 grant writers? Their staffing page lists 11 people. Where are the other 89 coming from? Every freelancer who ever signed a contract? The 100 number doesn’t pass the smell test, much like Ryan’s outfit. Once, a woman from Resource Associates called Isaac to pitch the idea of working for Resource Associates and claimed she had 300 grant writers on staff, causing Isaac to laugh, call her a liar, and end the call. Isaac doubts there are 300 qualified grants in America, let alone working for Resource Associates. If she misrepresents the number of people on her staff, what else might she be lying about?

Perhaps most hilarious of all were Resource Associates’ payment offerings to contract grant writers, which included $1,000 for under 20 pages of narrative and $2,000 for more than 20 pages of narrative. If you can find a competent consultant willing to complete and submit an entire federal proposal for just $2,000, you’ve found the person worth their proverbial weight in gold.

No wonder Resource Associates ceaselessly chums the waters for grant writers: given their payscale, there are only a couple of possibilities: 1) they find people who are incompetent and don’t realize what they’re getting into; 2) they somehow find people who are competent to prepare complex applications for low amounts of money, which means that said people are likely to swiftly leave when they realize their worth; 3) Resource Associates swiftly promote said people to higher levels of pay and responsibility, meaning they probably wouldn’t spam our inboxes so much and would list more than 11 people as employees; or 4) they can’t find competent people, meaning they must constantly search for them, since they haven’t read Why Can’t I Find a Grant Writer? How to Identify and Seize that Illusive Beast.

If you’re a grant writer, stay away from Resource Associates. If you’re Ryan Reeves of Community Spec, don’t copy our stuff, and if you do, don’t blame it on your web developer. If you put it on the Internet, you’re responsible for it. If you’re reading this, remember that there are plenty of questionable and shady characters in grant writing, and you don’t want to associate with them.