I am being told that I must become a “grant writer” for my law enforcement agency within a month or so. There is not enough time to apprentice so they want me to learn everything I need to know in a 2 day workshop!!! Any suggestions?

Suggestions! I’m filled with ‘em. Especially for someone who has transformed, like one of the X-Men, into a grant-writing superhero. Again like the X-Men, I replied via e-mail:

The self-serving but accurate answer to your quandary is “hire us.” Note that we also edit proposals, although about 60 – 70% of the time, when people hire us to edit they’d have been better off just hiring us for the full monty. If that’s not going to happen, I’d say this:

1) Read all of Grant Writing Confidential; I should turn it into an ebook, but I haven’t had time, and making this blog into a cohesive book will probably never be worth it from a pure cost/benefit analysis. Still, I want to anyway—especially after reading “Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors.” What I wrote in “Why You’re Unlikely to see ‘Seliger and Associates Presents Grant Writing Confidential: The Book and Musical’ Anytime Soon” is still accurate, but the possibilities opened up by self-publishing have exploded in the last year.

2) Does your agency have a particular program to which it wants to apply? If so, which one? Assuming the agency does have a specific program in mind, write as much as you can of the proposal draft before you go to the workshop. Take the draft with you and try to discuss it with whoever is teaching it. Then you’ll basically be turning that person into an editor / professor; it’s much easier to discuss writing, or almost any other “making thing” discipline, in the concrete than in the abstract.

Taking an infinite number of workshops is not going to make the blank page any easier. Having something, anything, on the blank page is better than having nothing. Isaac likes to say, “Something can be edited. Write something.”

3) If you have anyone you know who’s a decent writer and can be pressed into service as an editor, warn and beg them in advance that you need their help. Every writer needs an editor.

4) Start writing as soon as you can; leave blanks; get to the end. I’m repeating what I said in number four, but something cannot be edited if it hasn’t been written. I suspect this fundamental fact scuppers as many would-be grant writers as any other.

5) Good luck.

6) GWC readers: you have any other advice for Susan?

Our would-be client presented the idea of hiring us to his board. One board member pointed out that the organization lacked a current strategic plan, the last one having expired at the end of 2010 while the new one not be approved until the end of 2011. Our client asked me:

Do you think trying to write foundation proposals without a strategic plan will be a hinderance?

I responded . . .

I don’t think that lack of a current strategic plan is an impediment to seeking foundation or government grant support. The status of the organization’s planning process can be included or not included in any proposal, at your direction. If the funder requests information about your organization’s strategic planning process, it would be our job as grant writers to address the question.

Or, as John Lennon put it in “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

The best time to prospect and apply for grants is always now, not at the end of an introspective planning process, no matter how well-intentioned—just like the best time to start writing a novel is now, the best time to start exercising is now, and so on. Strategic planning is a fine activity for a nonprofit, provided they have plenty of money and lots of time.

As I’ve been blogging about for the past three years, however, the continuing economic malaise means that most nonprofits have little extra money and are so overwhelmed with increased service demands that staff and board members are too exhausted to contemplate developing a plan for 2016—first the organization has to survive 2011. The very uncertain future of the discretionary federal budget funds (e.g., grant programs), combined with the roller coaster stock market (which impacts foundation endowments), make this a especially bad time to miss grant opportunities.

Obviously, I’m not a big fan of strategic planning. Leaving aside my view and whether strategic planning for nonprofits is efficacious, strategic plans have little to do with grant writing. While some federal RFPs and the occasional foundation guidelines will want some info on an organization’s planning process, funders are usually much more interested in what the organization has done, the need for the proposed service/activity, and plausibility of the project concept than the kind of generalities that are found in most strategic plans. And, as I pointed out in my email above, a good grant writer can fairly easily turn a marginal planning process into an passable one through the magic of proposalese.

Which brings me back to the question of grant prospecting. When talking to clients, I often describe the challenges faced by nonprofits and public agencies seeking grants as being analogous to those Alaskan bears we’ve all seen fishing for salmon.

Imagine you’re a bear standing by an icy Alaskan stream, and you’re pretty hungry after sleeping for six months. You could jump into the stream, try to bite the first salmon* that swims by and 20 more in a row, catching a few and missing most. Or you could first study the kind of salmon that might be found in the river, do a cost-benefit analysis of trying to catch sockeye versus pink salmon, decide that you only want sockeye, wait to look for somewhere the sockeye might to be likely to appear, mosey down to the river, and then bite a sockeye when you finally spot one. It might take awhile to get ready to go down to river and even longer until a sockeye swims by. But the planned sockeye has the potential to be the perfect lunch, provided you can catch it.

Bear # 1 will probably be full of salmon and lounging in the sun sending Tweets long before bear # 2 spots her first sockeye—and longer still until she actually catches one.

Let’s imagine two organizations, one called “Overworked and Chaotic Human Services” (OCHS) and the other “Well-Planned Human Services” (WPHS) in the context of our bears.

OCHS constantly looks for grant opportunities to fund its current services and any other services it could plausibly provide. Like bear # 1, OCHS closely monitors federal, state, local and foundation funding “streams” and tries to bite lots of “grant salmon.” Most of the time it comes up with water, but it manages to secure the occasional grant salmon, adjusting its programming to whatever grant salmon it catches. Although OCHS is pretty much willing to eat any grant salmon, the organization also closely monitors emerging trends and anticipates which grant salmon will swim by and when. It just doesn’t stop fishing while contemplating future grant salmon runs.

WPHS is tightly focused on delivering certain services and has a comprehensive overlapping five-year strategic planning process to ensure that the organization knows what it wants to do. Like bear # 2, it takes a long time for WPHS to actually get to the funding streams because it’s absorbed in delivering particular services and planning its organizational future. When it does take a dip into funding streams looking for sockeye, it may find out that the sockeye run was yesterday and there won’t be another one until next year. If this happens, it could become a very thin bear.

The prospective client, who declined to hire us during his organization’s strategic planing process, is like bear # 2. Over the years, we’ve worked for both kinds of bear clients and presently have one that is a bear # 2. Most nonprofits take the “let’s bite any salmon” approach. I think this produces better results. When I was a young grant writer during the Carter administration and writing proposals for a single nonprofit or public agency as an employee, I learned to dive into all funding streams at all times, giving my employer the best chance to get grant salmon.

In a future post, I will provide some tips on how to prospect for grant salmon. But, like most aspects of grant writing, one can only learn this by doing. Taking a two- or three- or five-day training course on grant prospecting, which lots of training outfits offer, will not teach you how to find and catch grant salmon. You have to be hungry and be willing to get your feet wet, or hire someone like us to dive in and bite the passing grant salmon for you. Just don’t be bear # 2, sitting by the funding stream and navel gazing, while the salmon grants swim by.

* Years ago, we wrote several funded proposals for an Alaskan Native organization to support the transition of their failing salmon canning business enterprise into a smoked salmon business. I had the opportunity to visit the cannery and learned quite a bit about salmon fishing, albeit by Alaskan Natives, not bears.

This is not surprising, as nonprofits are always slow to adopt new technology, due to budget constraints, lack of imagination, and/or overall fuddy-duddyness. Although we used email and had a website in 1993, our nonprofit clients didn’t routinely use email until about 2005. After what seemed like an eternity of using faxes and FedEx, most of our document exchanges now involve scanners. As my 25-year-old son used to say when he was around five and had a little trouble with multi-syllable words, Hallaloollah! I’m guessing it will take the nonprofit world years to fully incorporate social media in service delivery. Even though most of our youth services clients don’t know it, virtually all of their teenage and young adults clients have smart phones, no matter how low-income they may be.** Social media permeates American youth culture.

Last week I let readers know that Seliger + Associates entered the Twitterverse (follow us at @SeligerGrants), and we’ll probably setup a Facebook page soon (I can already hear Jake groaning). All of this has got me thinking about how human service providers could use social media effectively.

In my post last week, I briefly mentioned the troubling emerging problem of big city “flash mobs.” I’m not referring to the original “Thriller” flash mobs that suddenly did zombie dancing, but to the Philadelphia and Milwaukee youth mobs that have recently rampaged. It seems that the mobs formed and de-formed by using Twitter, Facebooking and texting to coordinate their activities, confounding police and potential victims alike (see this video depicting the Milwaukee situation).

There was also a report that a potential flash mob was defused in the Oakland BART subway system last week when the cell phone system was disabled in underground stations. While this raises First Amendment issues that are beyond the scope of this post (for a free proposal phrase, substitute “proposal” for “post”), it shows that public sector administrators and police are getting hip to social media. If a BART bureaucrat can figure this out, as can the State Department, why can’t nonprofit executive directors? For example, we recently completed a federal job training proposal for a large nonprofit in South Central LA. While the executive director told me that virtually all of her very low-income youth clients had smart phones, she wanted to stick with traditional outreach strategies and removed all of my first draft references to utilizing social media.

To illustrate this, here’s a free project concept for an enterprising nonprofit in any city that has experienced the flash mob phenomenon or might. Let’s call this Project YEAH (Youth Electronic Action Helpers), proposed by Youth Engagement Services (YES), a fictional United Way agency. Project YEAH could work this way:

• The basic concept is that all community youth are not angry and disaffected. Lots of good kids can be mobilized through social media to produce peer pressure to prevent violent, flash mob behavior. The target population includes middle and high school age youth, as well as out-of-school, unemployed youth and young adults—say, age 14 – 22—of whatever ethnic population predominates in the target area.
• YES forms a Project Advisory Committee (PAC), including representatives of other services providers, law enforcement, the local Workforce Investment Board (WIB), elected officials, the chamber of commerce, employers, faith-based organizations, etc. The PAC meets virtually, using on-line meeting software and members communicate with one another through a secure web portal, texting, and private tweets. No travel, no donuts, and no wasted time should = better organizational participation. Public access is assured by publicizing the on-line meetings and allowing anyone with a web connection to watch.
• A Social Media Consultant (a tech-savvy local nerd) is hired to set up the project social media sites and develop training protocols for staff and the target population, who are engaged through the outreach effort (see below).
• Several Peer Helpers are recruited as outreach and engagement staff. PHs are 18 – 25 or so and are former gang members, star athletes, American Idol contestants, junior preachers, or have some other affiliation or background that provides them with natural connections and street cred with the target population. PHs are trained in community organizing techniques and skills, along with use of social media, using on-line training to the maximum feasible extent. Smart phones, iPads, Internet service, and similar gear are provided. The PHs mostly connect with each other through virtual methods, rather than gathering at the YES office. Once again, no donut eating. Time and activity logs are keep through a secure database, developed by the Social Media Consultant.
• PHs conduct outreach and education, primarily using social media, rather than the traditional mailings, presentations, street-based outreach, etc. The outreach is based on the ever popular “train-the-trainers” model, updated for the social media world. The trained PHs recruit a cadre of Youth Ambassadors (YAs), who are paid a monthly stipend and are trained by the PHs in community organizing techniques and, to the extent necessary, the use of social media. The YAs use the project-developed social media tools to engage the target population, encouraging them to avoid flash mob/violent anti-social behavior while accessing supportive services (e.g., pre-employment skills training, after school enrichment, GED preparation, job searches, emergency food and clothing, etc.) from YES and PAC members. In effect, each YA will develop a YEAH Follower Cadre, using the Twitter model. Should info begin to circulate on social media channels about potential flash mobs, the YEAH Follower Cadres will react by using social media to discourage participation. In some cases, YEAH Follower Cadres, wearing brightly colored Project YEAH t-shirts and hats will physically meet at potential flash mobs sites, forming a human peer pressure blockade before violence develops. This could include well understood nonviolent protest techniques (e.g., going limp and lying down, etc.). PHs will video the blockades, immediately uploading to YouTube to build awareness and peer pressure.
• All activities, services, follow-up and client satisfaction feedback will be tracked with user-input databases developed by the Social Media Consultant.

I think a project concept like the above would be great interest to large community foundations and national foundations, particularly those associated with technology companies. Go try it. A version of this social media-based youth engagement model will make much more compelling reading to a funder than the traditional approaches out clients typically want us to use.

EDIT: The New York Times reports: “Phone Messages Improve [Health] Care, Study Finds.”

* I know one emergency medicine resident who observed that her patients routinely had nicer phones than she did.

** If I’m wrong and you know of a nonprofit that is using social media in its programming, post a comment, as I (and readers) would love to know about it.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don’t want to be a richer [organization]
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different [organization]
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time

Not to compete with Jake’s bimonthly links posts, but a few recent stories should scare the bejesus out of most nonprofit executive directors:

• The New York Times, July 29, 2011, Debt Crisis? Bankruptcy Fears? See Jefferson County, AL. Everyone involved in human services should care about Jefferson County, AL. Jefferson County is an urban county centered on Birmingham, the largest city in the state. Since we recently completed an assignment for a Birmingham client, I know the city is about 3/4 African American and about 1/4 of residents live below the federal poverty level (FPL). When the county goes bankrupt, folks in the city are going to have a much harder time accessing a whole slew of services, from family court to disability services to job training. The lines will be longer at the TANF and WIB offices, and the staffers in even worse moods as they face furloughs and layoffs. But that’s not the real problem: nonprofits who provide a wide array of wraparound supportive services (free proposal phrase here) are going to lose their county contracts when the need for services is growing.
• National Public Radio (NPR), July 26, 2011, Wealth Gap Widens. As reported by NPR, “The gap between rich and poor has widened. Wealth is more and more concentrated among a select few, and those few are mostly white. The median wealth of white households is now 20 times that of black households, and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to the Pew Research Center.” The net worth of most Americans is falling, while the gap between white and minority citizens is turning into a gulf (see Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation for more on this subject). Unemployment is rising and government services are being cut–-a perfect storm for nonprofits.
• The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2011, Slow Growth Stirs Fears of Recession. The official growth in GDP was 1.3% for the second quarter of 2011 and .4% for the first quarter: “The economic recovery is grinding to a halt, raising the risk that the U.S. could fall back into recession and tightening the screws on Washington to resolve a debt-ceiling debate that threatens to inflict further damage on a fragile economy.” In most of the communities where Seliger + Associates works, nobody is worried about a new recession since the last one never ended.

I get calls every week from organizations across America that face cutbacks in traditional funding streams. Public sector bankruptcies, like the hapless Jefferson County noted above, will exacerbate the crisis. As I’ve blogged about before, the only real choices nonprofits have are to shrink in size, seek more donations, go after additional foundation and government grants, and/or re-think their mission and programming.

Two current clients illustrate two wildly different approaches to confronting the changing realities for nonprofits. Both clients provide after school services for low-income African American youth in two almost adjacent fairly large cities in Northern California. In homage to Client # 9, Elliot Spitzer, I’ll refer to them as Client # 1 and # 2.

Client # 1 offers a fairly standard mix of after school enrichment, mentoring and fitness programs, and has been funded mostly through federal grants and donations from local large businesses. This organization has gotten interested in childhood obesity, as popularized by First Lady Micelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign. Client # 1 has decided to seek funds for childhood obesity prevention, as well as specialized mentoring. Both are laudable and fundable project concepts but do not address critical issues facing their target population, since the parents/caregivers of the kids are unemployed, underemployed and/or underwater in their mortgages. They’re having trouble affording food of any kind for their kids, making the relative merits of arugula versus french fries unimportant. The youth probably don’t have time for mentors anyway, because they’re working to help support the family. In other words, Client # 1 is seeking funds for services that meet interesting but peripheral needs of their target population, instead of basic needs.

Client # 2 runs more or less the same programs as Client # 1 but is larger and has been operating longer. This organization has been primarily funded through county contracts, modest user fees, and lots of small donations. While trying to maintain its core services, Client # 2 has decided to seek funds for two new programs. The first will provide emergency food and meal services for the families of targeted youth. The second will help the 5,000 or so youth and young adult offenders about to be released into their county as a result of a recent Supreme Court decision that will return tens of thousands of state prison inmates to the streets in a few months. Regardless of the merits of the Supreme Court decision, the arrival of thousands of ex-offenders, all of whom need housing, jobs and everything else, at once is going to overwhelm the existing supportive services system for ex-offenders like a tsunami.

Put yourself in the position of a funder. Would you fund Client # 1, which has a strong track record and wants to operate innovative services that nibble at the edges of problems, or Client # 2, which has an equally strong track record and is trying to address basic and emerging challenges?

As always, we’re doing our best to help both Client # 1 and # 2 meet their funding objectives. Two similar clients are taking action to increase their funding streams in different ways, as they adjust to the changing economic environment of their communities. As Bowie put it, they’re both turning “to face the strain.” Make sure your organization understands that doing what you’ve been doing forever probably will not work. Be creative, be aggressive and go get some grants. As Coach Taylor said on the now-concluded show Friday Night Lights, Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose!

You should immediately be able to say, “Jane Doe. Or “John Doe.” Whoever. Can you instantly think of that person’s name—the person who gets the praise if the proposal is submitted on time and technically correct or the blame if it isn’t?

If you can’t, you’ve got a problem—and it’s a problem endemic to a lot of industries. This topic is topical because there’s a fascinating article in Fortune Magazine called “Inside Apple,” which describes the notoriously secretive and productive company. Here’s the relevant bit:

At Apple there’s never confusion “as to who is responsible for what.” In Apple’s parlance, a DRI’s name (directly responsible individual) always appear on the agenda for a meeting, so that everyone knows who’s the right contact for a project

Oh, and it’s not just Apple, or just nonprofits, with this problem. In one discussion thread about “Inside Apple,” poster “JacobAldridge” says “This is a project I run with almost all of my clients – shifting an organic, but dysfunctional, business arrangement into one where everyone knows their responsibility, and the right person does the right jobs at the right time (and for the right cost point).” In the nonprofit world, doing something like this for organizations as a whole is way beyond our scope, but it is our standard practice to designate specific responsibilities when we’re hired for a grant writing assignment.

We insist on a single contact person and a single set of revisions per draft. If we didn’t, we’d have madness—the kind of madness you might remember from worthless group projects in high school or highly dysfunctional organizations. We’d have critical documents or drafts fall through the cracks of miscommunication or evaded responsibility. We’d suffer “confusion ‘as to who is responsible for what,’ ” which we virtually never experience.

Many nonprofits intentionally avoid assigning direct responsibility for proposals and other tasks to a single person. This is a mistake, much like splitting up the writing of a proposal. Don’t do it, and if your organization does, it’s time to start thinking like Steve Jobs or Seliger + Associates—and about how to adopt the DRI model.

It sounds counterintuitive, so let me explain using a recent “we love you!” e-mail from a client as an example:

Your assistance was truly invaluable; we could not have accomplished all of this without your excellent work. We really appreciated the Documents Memo, the specific deadline dates, the direction, advice and guidance and when you left decisions up to us, that was clear.

Please use us as a reference any time and any comments I’ve written here. Whether we get the funding or not, you provided us the opportunity to present the best package possible and best opportunity for funding.

We get attaboys like this regularly, and we like reading them because we take pride in our work.* Clients are often surprised when we do what we say and say what we do, which tells us something about a lot of the other would-be grant writers out there. And we treat all of our clients more or less the same way, which means that we produce complete and technically accurate proposals and minimize the amount of work our clients have to do. This means that we tell clients exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when we need every piece of an individual proposal, which makes many of them love us.

But some clients hate us because we tell them exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when we need every piece of an individual proposal. This thoroughness and lack of ambiguity actually makes them unhappy if they don’t really want to submit the application or want someone to blame if the application is rejected for reasons outside anyone’s control (which we’ve discussed previously here and in “True Tales of a Department of Education Grant Reviewer“).

A certain number of clients hire us, as far as we can tell, because they want to be able to tell others that they’re Doing Something—not because they want to turn in a proposal. This doesn’t bother us, but a large enough minority behave in this way that we’ve noticed the behavior.

Then there are the clients who hate us, most often for things outside of our control. They don’t like that yes, in fact, they do need every single item listed in the documents memo if they want to be funded; they don’t like that we must have comments on the first draft within, say, a week, otherwise there’s not going to be any time to write the second draft; they don’t like that we’re honest and direct; and so forth. We don’t make the deadlines; we only have to conform to them.

Our work is similar across clients: we read the RFP, deliver the documents memo (or “doc memo”), write the drafts of the proposal, prepare the budget, and assemble the final submission package. What’s interesting to us is the wide array of reactions we get from our clients. One of our challenges is to maintain our equilibrium regardless of our clients’ reactions. This is probably a problem universal to consultants.

Some are like the client quoted above; a small but real number of others aren’t. But we see our job as maximizing our clients’ probability of getting funded, and we do this by turning in complete and technically accurate proposals without missing a deadline. How our clients treat and feel about us varies widely for reasons largely outside our control.

On another note, grant writers are not miracle workers, although we sometimes resemble them, and we are not True Believers; hence Isaac’s post, “Does Seliger + Associates ‘Care’ About Our Clients? Neither are other consultants. We sometimes look like we are, but that most often happens when clients do as much as they can to help themselves too.

I just wanted to thank you again for this semester. Although I enjoyed the material of the course, what I will keep with me for the rest of my life is what the course made me think about. Like I said, I am always one to (over…)-analyze and question things but doing a lot of the “why” exercises really helped me organize my thoughts in all areas of my life.

Such messages give me hope during the inevitable experiences with apathetic or indifferent students, and the positive e-mails from students and clients are often pretty similar. Here’s a recent example from a client: “Your comments are good, helpful, and easy to understand.”

Medical residencies are disseminated through a Grants.gov-like mechanism called the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), which is about as user-friendly as a double-edged sword with no hilt. This means he should’ve taken extra care by double checking every step of the application process and leaving himself at least a 48-hour window between the deadline and submission, which is a two-step, unintuitive process.

This being Grant Writing Confidential, you can probably already guess that he didn’t do that. Instead he waited until five minutes before the deadline. Over a couple months, I kept encouraging him to set a goal and create objectives, along with a timeline. That’s because I’ve seen Seliger + Associates prepare innumerable proposals and know what happens as a deadline approaches: panic. And panic isn’t conducive to clear thinking or good decision making.

Anyone who’s applied to a college knows that you need a large number of persnickety documents in the exact order and quantity the college demands. Those of you who’ve prepared a grant proposal should be thinking, “That sounds just like a proposal!” It’s also just like a medical residency. If you fail to do precisely what you’re supposed to, you’ll simply be out of luck. The main difference with grant applications is that a) they’re even more persnickety than colleges and b) a lot of agencies prepare them over and over again.

The weaker agencies panic each time and use the “hope and pray” method, which entails a lot of chaos. Smart agencies develop systems to prevent mistakes and ensure applications are submitted on time. They don’t procrastinate. They double check everything, then have a second person check too; it’s easy to miss a sentence or a document or a requirement. They learn from mistakes so they don’t make them again.

When you hire Seliger + Associates, part of what you get is a built-in anti-procrastination device. You’re not just buying our expertise, but the processes we’ve developed. If you, like most of my students, wait until the last minute to write your proposal (or paper), you’re more likely to miss critical parts of the RFP or nuances that might be essential to being funded. You’re going to miss a document that could get your application rejected. You’re going to be overwhelmed when you don’t need to, like my friend the soon-to-be doctor.

There’s nothing stopping you from doing all this on your own, of course, just as there’s nothing stopping my students from writing their papers early. It’s just that most people don’t make lists, don’t get someone knowledgable to back check their work, and don’t prepare in advance. As the big day inevitably approaches, they grow steadily more crazed. They’re more likely to make mistakes, and if they make a bad one, they’ll sink their million dollar grant ship.

In the case of my friend, his medical residency application was in jeopardy because of delays and self-imposed indecision. Innumerable nonprofits suffer the same malady every year. Don’t be one of them: design systems that ensure you get your work done methodically and in advance. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone who will. Don’t be like my friend the medical resident and dither unless you want to harm your own chances of success for no reason at all.

And the friend did get into a great residency, which confirms the old adage that sometimes “luck beats skill.”

This also applies to people who contact us. We only work for organizations that have a some plausible charitable or other fundable purpose in mind and whose representatives who don’t seem to be charlatans or scammers. One way we can identify potential charlatans or scammers is when they fail the laugh test. Like this person, who says she is located in the US and works for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Tanzania:

We are seeking funding from USAID, Gates, and others and I would like to know the success you have had with these NGOs. Have you ever won grants over $10 million? How much collectively have you ever been able to obtain from USAID, Gates and Rockefeller?

We are currently seeking a grant from the MasterCard Foundation for $100 million. They suggest that eh completed application if 50-75 pages long.

Now, it’s possible that this person is simply running a scam, but I’m going to make the questionable assumption that he or she isn’t for the purposes of this post. He or she is missing the fact that virtually no foundations make grants of $100 million, especially on their own. It just doesn’t happen, or, if it does, it’s national news.

The language of the e-mail is wrong too: I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real client ask if we’ve “won” grants. Written grants, yes, but not won. You win the World Series; you’re awarded a grant.

In short, the kinds of questions this person asks fail the laugh test. She doesn’t know how things work. Lots of people in a variety of fields deal with problems like this; the sex advice columnist Dan Savage wrote a whole column called “‘F’ Is for Fake” on the subject of the BS letters he gets and how he knows they’re BS. He doesn’t use the laugh test, but he might as well.

We have a similar BS detector because we have to. For example, in the almost 18 years we’ve been in business, exactly one person who called on a weekend has ever hired us. So when someone calls on a weekend, we assume they’re a flake. And when someone talks about foundation grants of $100 million, we assume the same.

During the almost-forgotten recession of the early 1990s, I was toiling in the local government fields as the Community Development Director for the City of San Ramon. To paraphrase Mister Roberts, San Ramon was located somewhere between Tedium and Apathy in Contra Costa County. The recession cut city revenues drastically, and because I was not particularly loved by the City Manager or City Council, one day the ax just fell (“Tangled Up in Blue,” B Dylan). I joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

This happened in late 1992, and I had a few months of severance pay to more or less keep the wolves at the door and not in the house. By March, the idea of Seliger + Associates had formed; through some initial connections, incredibly hard work, and luck we began to get clients. The early 1990s was, of course, long before the Internet and email. To get clients, we bombed nonprofits in LA with cheesy direct mail flyers, and once or twice a week I flew down to meet with any nonprofit executive director who called. I spent a lot of time in churches, living rooms, drug treatment centers, half-way houses, and the like, mostly in South Central and East LA, pitching our services for very modest fees.

Our first clients more or less fell into two categories. The first were fairly large United Way-type agencies that seemed amused at the concept of an itinerant grant writer parachuting in every week from the wilds of Northern California. The second category were tiny start-ups, like Mrs. Smith, trying to get grants to help people around them who were being devastated by the recession. As I’ve blogged about many times in the last two years, tough times are good times for grant writers because lots of grant funds are available and lots of organizations need to replace falling donations.

Tough times are also good times for new and nimble organizations that address local challenges. Like Mrs. Smith, such newly minted nonprofits, provided they have taken the time to get their 501(c)(3) letter, can compete successfully against their larger, more bureaucratic brethren. This is because small, new nonprofits are not paralyzed by hand-wringing over drops in donations and lowered United Way grants while simultaneously trying to avoid staff lay-offs. About a year ago, Jake wrote about this phenomenon in “When It Comes To Applying for Grants, Size Doesn’t Matter (Usually).” Such nonprofit start-ups (perhaps “upstarts” is a better characterization) helped us start our business.

In the early years, we wrote tons of funded proposals for such organizations—often LA City or County grants—enabling them to take contracts from ossified nonprofits that had been around since the Watts rebellion. It helped that I was then willing to drive all around the dicier parts of LA to get work. But our small fish clients also saw their neighborhoods being devastated and had an intense desire to do something. Then, as now, doing something at any sort of scale requires grants and someone to write the grants. We appeared at the right time with the right skills. We’re still here and a new recession is growing a new crop of small nonprofits, whose executive directors are calling us for help.

Today, Americans are mired in much worse economic times than when our business started. I just Googled the LA unemployment rate in September 1993, which was 9.8%—compared to 12.5% in September 2010! I could do the same with pretty much any part of the country. I’m writing a proposal this weekend for a client in Yuma, AZ, where the current unemployment rate is 27.2%, which is Grapes of Wrath / Tom Joad territory. It is not surprising that Mrs. Smith called looking for grants to kick-start her efforts to help youth falling through the safety net.

She may or may not hire us, but we’re working for lots of similar organizations once again, as the recession provides opportunities for new nonprofits to emerge to meet emerging needs (whew: this sounds like a proposal sentence). Other kinds of startups have also discovered this. We find ourselves where we started, and to quote the Grateful Dead in Truckin’: What a long strange trip it’s been.

People call or write to ask about grants for their small businesses, for child care, to pay their bills, and all kinds of other stuff, even when we say—right on our website—that most businesses and individuals aren’t eligible for grants and that we work primarily for nonprofit and public agencies. Such people are asking to be taken by unscrupulous sharks because they don’t know any better. Almost every legitimate grant writer has statements like ours on their website. We write posts (like this one) on our blog. So why keep sending the emails and calling?

Max Klein’s post “Drug dealers shouldn’t make iPhone apps” gives us a partial answer. He says:

I’ve been noticing that a great deal of successful people are very consistent in what they do and in their approach. For example, a weather man. You will see him having weather kits, weather shows, etc. It’s all about the weather. That’s what people know him for. And he leverages his knowledge to move horizontally in the weather space.

Then he tells a hilarious story about a guy in Bali who rents body boards, is a part-time gigolo, and wants to open a brothel. Klein says:

I spluttered: Why in heavens name don’t you start a motorcycle shop or something and make money legally?

He gave me an answer that is one of the most important sentences I have ever heard:

“What do I know about selling motorcycles? I know about selling bodies, that’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at, and I’m not going to throw away all I have learned over these years and do something where I have absolutely no experience.”

This is brilliant and lots of people don’t do it. They want to throw away whatever they’ve learned to chase grants, or they don’t want to learn anything in the first place. If you’re going to chase grants and you’re reading this, you should start by reading every single post in the archives of this blog. When you’re done, you will know have a reasonable understanding of grant writing and what is possible. If you don’t want to believe us, type “grant writing blog” into the search engine of your choice and read what others have to say.

In an alternate world, I am a famous and successful novelist exchanging bon mots with Jon Stewart and Christopher Hitchens. Obviously I’m not—at the moment, anyway—but in working toward that goal, I’ve read a lot about how writing and publishing works. Blogs have been great for this because they’re often written by people in the industry, and the writers have no reason to put a smiley face on things, unlike writers of how-to-get-published books that want to sell you books and make you believe in your dreams, however improbable, poorly conceived, or poorly executed.

Agent blogs like Nathan Bransford, Betsy Lerner, Janet Reid, and Dystel & Goderich have been incredibly useful. There are others as well. Taken together, they explain what it’s like to be on the other end of the slush pile (pretty ugly) and what catches their eye (voice and writers who’ve done their homework). They explain how publishing works. The novelist Charlie Stross has been explaining how the publishing industry is changing. And so on. Janet Reid also runs a blog named Query Shark, which is a snarky what-not-to-do guide for writing query letters.

If you read all this material, you’ll start to understand what you’re supposed to do if you want any shot whatsoever at getting published. If you don’t, the chances of you remaining in your current, unpublished state rise considerably because you’ll never get past the initial query letter hurdle because you don’t know anything about what you’re trying to do.

Callers to Seliger + Associates, however, routinely demonstrate that they know nothing about what they’re trying to do, and we see the unfortunate results. (Note that if you’re with a nonprofit or public agency, the preceding sentence doesn’t apply to you, and you shouldn’t hesitate to call.) Not long ago, we got an especially strange e-mail from someone who says she is a student in criminology, but has written a cookbook and also has a “business plan and letter of intent for the cookbook.” The e-mail is poorly written and says things like, “I am needing a grant to help pay for this,” which is the kind of mistake that, if my freshmen students make it often enough, means they’ll fail my class. She says, “So, What I am asking is for $10,000.00.” Asking for $10K from us? From someone else? I have no idea.

Maybe this is just the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work (“our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.” Read that again). Or maybe it’s something more.

Our correspondent should learn about what she’s trying to do, because no one is going to give her money or help her based on the query she sent. If she’s looking for financial aid, her college has an office dedicated to that task. This is basic, basic stuff. I have no idea if the woman who wrote to us knows anything about any domain, but she definitely knows as little about grant writing as I know about forestry management. In her email, she also says “This is very important to me,” which is patently untrue, because when something is very important to a person, they research the subject and pay very close attention to what they’re doing. When something is important, a person takes a lot of time to do it well or learn how to do it well. If she doesn’t, then at best she’ll fail in her stated goal and at worse she’ll pay money to someone and get nothing in return.

The guy in Bali has spent years learning about the body trade, and he’s not going to throw that knowledge away by diving into some other field. The woman writing to us should take the same lesson to heart. I realize this is probably shouting into the void, since you, dear reader, are already reading Grant Writing Confidential and thus less likely to make these kinds of egregious, wasteful errors. But now at least I have somewhere to point people.