Faithful readers may recall “Why Winning an Olympic Gold Medal is Not Like Getting a Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) Grant;” in 2010, I wrote about having to tell a client that a high point total does not always ensure getting particular grant, including a Department of Education PEP grant. What I didn’t put in that post was an important fact: our client insisted on including program elements that were certain to reduce the point total. Although I advised her of this, she insisted on including them anyway, and the grant was not funded.

A few months ago, we were hired to edit a new client’s previously submitted but unfunded PEP proposal for this year’s RFP process. We didn’t write the original and substantially rewrote the narrative. It was funded for about $1.5 million over five years, perhaps in part because this PEP client took our advice on which program elements should be included. In addition, the project concept was unique in that it involved providing services to elementary-age children in private schools and public high school students.

In other words, the concept was different, and in grant writing, different is often good because it wakes the reviewers up. I used PEP as my example in the old post, however, not because of the project concept issue, but because funding decisions for this program are particularly opaque. As I wrote then, getting any grant proposal funded is more than telling a compelling story—a submitted proposal has to be technically correct and the applicant has to be lucky with respect to a whole host of factors, like geography, applicant believability, need, mood of the reviewers and similar stuff.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. We wrote a proposal earlier this year for another Department of Education program: Educational Opportunity Centers (EOC). In this case, the proposal one was point shy of a perfect score and was still not funded. I’m not sure why because this client provides a range of wraparound supportive services for at-risk youth and young adults in a very economically disadvantaged part of a large city (another free proposal phrase) and we’ve written many funded grants for the organization over the years. The Executive Director was incredulous, as was I, and I could not offer her any solace—other than the grant making process often appears random, even though it is not random to the funders, who always have reasons, other than the stated ones, for making the decisions they do.

Last year, however the randomness of the grant making process, however, worked in this client’s favor. We wrote a Department of Energy Recovery Act – Weatherization Assistance Program Training Centers proposal for her. The grant was funded for $1,000,000, even though this organization had no real background in weatherization job skills training. All of the other grantees were experienced weatherization job skills training providers, as were probably almost all the other applicants. This means the proposal we wrote stood out from the crowd, like the second PEP client I discussed above.

Now on to my last weird tale for the day. Earlier this year, we wrote a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT—now that’s a mouthful) program. Despite the odd name, TAACCT (rhymes with cat…?) is really just a vocational training program for community colleges.

What’s interesting about TAACCT is that the underlying federal legislation and regulations specify that at least one TAACCCT grant is supposed to be made in every state—but grants were only awarded in 33 states. So much for regs! The proposal we wrote was for a consortium of community colleges in a suburban area near a collection of very large cities and urban counties. Our client was politically very well connected, the project concept was also fairly unusual, and the proposal technically correct. Seems like the odds should have been pretty good. In this state, only one TAACCCT grant award was made: to a tiny community college in a rural area. My guess is that the Department of Labor received several grants from the big cities and other entities in which our client was located and decided not to fund any of them, choosing instead to fund an obscure rural college—that way, all the big city applicants would be equally mad.

While all of these tales may make you laugh or cry, they should not prevent your organization from applying for grants. Since one cannot know which organizations will manage to submit technically correct proposals, how program officers will interpret regs, or much of anything else, all you can do is decide to apply and submit the best proposal you can—and submit it on time.

Think of how delighted the small community college was at beating out much bigger institutions. Or how great our client felt when she got the news about the Weatherization grant. Clients new and old often ask me to handicap the odds of a particular proposal being funded and I always tell them, “I am a grant writer, not a fortune teller.” Go after the grants your organization wants and needs, disregarding oddsmakers, soothsayers and the The Voice of Doom.

Grant writing means you sit down and write a proposal. Grant management means you oversee funding; file reports; help with evaluations; hire staff; and the like. Notice that “write proposals” is not on the list. Also, some people who say they’re involved with grants are actually on the funder side of things, which means they might help write RFPs or evaluate proposals, but again: those skills are very different and of limited use when actually confronted by a proposal in the wild. Someone who writes proposals can of course be involved in grant management, but it seldom goes the other way around; if you’re going to be a grant writer, you have to be able to pass the test Isaac proposed in “Credentials for Grant Writers from the Grant Professionals Certification Institute—If I Only Had A Brain:”

If we ever decide to offer a grant writing credential, we would structure the exam like this: The supplicant will be locked in a windowless room with a computer, a glass of water, one meal and a complex federal RFP. The person will have four hours to complete the needs assessment. If it passes muster, they will get a bathroom break, more water and food and another four hours for the goals/objectives section and so on. At the end of the week, the person will either be dead or a grant writer, at which point we either make them a Department of Education Program Officer (if they’re dead) or give them a pat on the head and a Grant Writing Credential to impress their mothers (if they’ve passed).

You don’t need to pass that kind of arduous test to manage grants, issue RFPs, or review applications.

Last weekend, for example, I met a couple who said they knew a lot about grant writing and were “in” grants. Compared to a random person on the street, they did know a lot: one of them works for a regional government transportation authority and has probably helped disseminate hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in transportation funding. The other works as a development director for a university. Together, they have about 40 years of combined experience in “grants.” It turns out, however, that neither have ever even once done what I was doing about twenty minutes before I began this post: writing a proposal. Development directors often do everything in the universe to shake money out of donors except write proposals; that may be why we’ve worked for a fair number of development directors over the years. And program officers, who pass out grant funds, might write RFPs, but never the responses.

I wish more people who worked “in” or around grant writing had the experience of actually writing a proposal, because if they had, I suspect we’d get better RFPs. I’m also reminded of the theory / practice divide that arises in so many academic disciplines. Psychology, for example, has a large number of people who do a lot of research but don’t see patients, and a large number who see patients and don’t do research. Naturally, the researchers often think of the practitioners as mere carpenters and the practitioners often think of researchers as mandarins who don’t understand what life on the ground is like. Both are probably somewhat right some of the time.

Something similar happens in English: a lot of English departments these days are bifurcated between the people in “creative writing” and literature. The creative writers—novelists, poets, and so forth—produce the stuff that the literary critics and theorists ultimately discuss; I suspect there, too, the world would be a better place if critics and theorists actually took a serious stab at producing original work. If they did, many might not hold the sometimes implausible opinions they do. They’re like RFP writers who know everything the world about grant writing except what it’s like to stare down a nasty, confused, contradictory RFP. You probably wouldn’t want to eat at a restaurant run by a chef who never tastes his own food, but that’s the situation one often gets with grant writing.

There’s a moral to this story: be wary of people who say they know a lot about grant writing, since they often know a lot about everything but grant writing.

Jake just learned that he’s satisfied the foreign language requirement. This makes him “ABAMA:” A B.A. + M.A. = ABAMA. Now, on to the qualifications exam, a 100 page dissertation on a suitably obscure topic and the Ph.D. will be done.

Congratulations!!

And that’s assuming you even can get advice from Program Officers. A client recently wanted more detail about a slightly ambiguous outcome requirement in the Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood proposal we were writing, so we advised her to contact Tanya Howell, the ACF staffer assigned to the program. Our client asked two questions, and in both cases Ms. Howell began by responding with the same helpful sentence: “Applicants should use their best judgment in determining whether they are able to meet the requirements contained in the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), whether they are able to develop an application they believe to be responsive to the FOA and in designing and writing their applications.”

“Applicants should use their best judgment” is another way of saying, “I have no idea, do what you want, and if the reviewer dings you don’t come back and blame me.” Her second sentence, in both cases, said that the measures in question were “at the discretion of the applicant.” This kind of non-answer answer that leaves the applicant in the dark and is only marginally more helpful than no answer at all. It also smacks of the Program Officer simply preparing a template response to questions and applying the template in order to minimize her own need to work.

Here’s another weird example. We recently completed a WIA job training proposal for a large nonprofit in Southern California. The RFP was issued by the Workforce Investment Board (WIB) for a particular jurisdiction, and the RFP specified that applicants must demonstrate a written collaboration with Workforce Sector Intermediaries. We’d never seen this term before; it was not defined in the RFP and a Google search returned us to the RFP. Since the client is already a WIA grantee, we had our client contact call their Program Officer. The Program Officer also did not know what was meant by Workforce Sector Intermediaries and could not get an answer from her supervisors. In other words, nobody at the WIB knew what was the meaning of a requirement specified in their own RFP.

Still, if you can find a contradiction in an RFP, you can sometimes get a correction issued. We’ve found contradictions at least a dozen times over the years, and sometimes we’ll point them out to Program Officers and get the RFP amended. That’s the only real way you can trust that your interpretation is correct, instead of an example of your “discretion” that might cause you to lose points. Thus, despite the depressing anecdotes above, you should pose your conundrum to the Program Officer.

Clients will also ask us about possible ambiguities, and we give the best answers we can. But clients regularly ask us questions about RFPs that we can’t answer. It’s not that we’re opposed to answering questions, of course—but the questions themselves sometimes can’t be answered by the RFP. At that point, it’s time to call or write the Program Officer and hope for the best.

Before you do, however, you should read the RFP and any associated guidance or CFR reference as closely as possible. That means looking at every single section that could have a bearing on your question. If you’re reading an RFP, you’re basically performing the same exercise that (good) English professors do to novels, poems, drama, and short stories, or that lawyers do to legislation and court decisions: close reading. You can find lots of “how to” guides for close reading from Google, or you can look at one of the original textbooks about close reading, Understanding Fiction. But close reading at its most basic entails looking at every single word in relation to other words and ascertaining how it forms meaning, how meanings of a text change, and what meanings can be interpreted from it. For example, if you were close reading this passage, you might look at the phrase “at its most basic” in the preceding sentence and say, “What about its ‘least’ basic? What do advanced forms of close reading entail?” and so forth.

In Umberto Eco’s Reflections on The Name of the Rose, he says that a novel is “a machine for generating interpretations.” The same is true of other kinds of texts, like RFPs, and your job in close reading is to generate the interpretations to the best of your abilities. Our skills at doing this are, of course, very finely honed, but even those finely honed skills can’t produce something from nothing. We read as closely as possible, use those readings to write a complete and technically correct proposal, and move on to cocktail hour at quittin’ time.

Faithful readers will know that I use the term “unicorn” for anything I find exceedingly unlikely in the fun-filled world of grant writing (see, for example, “No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal Is Not Hard For A Good Grant Writer“). I nearly choked on my daily ration of Chemex-brewed coffee on Saturday morning when I spotted this “unicorn” story by Alexandra Zavis in the LA Times: Homeless shelter to drop government-funded programs. How can this be?

The Union Rescue Mission (URM) is a giant homeless services provider in L.A. It is obviously a faith-based organization (FBO). Remember that there are two kinds of FBOs. The first kind gives you a bowl of soup when you’re hungry, and the second kind gives you a bowl of soup when you’re hungry but makes you listen to a sermon before you get the soup. URM is presumably the second kind, which means it is not directly eligible for government grants because it intertwines service delivery with religion.

The first kind of FBO is often eligible for government grants, and we often work for those FBOs. To get around the pesky problem of grant eligibility, URM apparently set up another nonprofit, EIMAGO, to serve as the grant applicant and recipient for federal grants. This is not unusual. EIMAGO is described in the article, however, as a secular “subsidiary” of URM. Nonprofits don’t usually describe affiliated organizations as “subsidiaries,” preferring “affiliate,” “partner,” etc., to preserve at least an appearance of independence and deflect the impression that the “subsidiary” exists only as a grant conduit.

Leaving aside the relationship of URM and EIMAGO, the article says that Alan Bates, URM President and apparently spokesperson for EIMAGO, says that they (URM or EIMAGO?) can no longer operate government-funded programs because the costs are not fully covered and it takes months to get paid:

Bales said the Christian mission has been using private donations to supplement the government contracts operated by its secular subsidiary, EIMAGO. “In the last six or seven years, we have subsidized those operations about $4.5 million because we never get enough money from the government to operate the programs as they should be operated,” he said.

But, Bates also goes on to say that “no one would be forced onto the streets because of the decision.”

Let’s do a small Gedankenexperiment or “thought experiment” to test the logic of the article.

1. URM/EIMAGO exist to help the hungry and the homeless.

2. Joe is hungry and homeless and needs three hots and a cot, as they say in the shelter biz.

3. URM/EIMAGO gets $100/day in federally derived grant funds to take care of Joe, and the money comes from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA, which is the primary homeless grant spigot in LA County), FEMA, Department of Veterans Affairs, HUD, or another government agency.

4. For whatever reason (extra piece of mystery meat in the stew, designer blanket, one too many case managers, etc.), URM/EIMAGO spends $105/day taking care of Joe, meaning they have to get Harry to donate $5 to URM/EIMAGO to keep Joe fed and housed.

5. URM/EIMAGO says its too tough to get $5/day out of Harry to supplement the $100/day from Uncle Sam to take care of Joe, so they are going to reject the $100/day from Uncle Sam.

6. Without $100/day from Uncle Sam, how much will URM/EIMAGO have to get from Harry to take care of Joe?

$105/day. If you grasped this point, you are quicker on the uptake than the reporter. Without the federal grants, URM/EIMAGO is either going to serve a lot fewer Joes or will need to find a lot more Harrys. This is why I’ve never run across any large profit that would voluntarily cancel federal grants—or any grants for that matter. URM/EIMAGO is a unicorn.

In addition to pointing out the logic problem presented above and highlight an unusual unicorn story, this post is really intended for those nonprofits who want to become “multi-program, multi-funded agencies,” and particularly nonprofits that aim to supplement project grants, general purpose grants and donations with contracts for capitated services (e.g., most homeless services, primary health care, substance abuse treatment, foster care, etc.). For these grantees, which provide a service for some agreed upon per head/per day/per visit/per whatever fee, the capitated payments, like other grant funds, are often fungible (Jake covered fungible grants last year in “Supplementing Versus Supplanting Grant Funds: Examples from the Rural Housing and Economic Development Program and the Capital Fund Recovery Competition Grants“).

In the case of a soup kitchen, you could ask: which dollar bought the carrots in the stew that Joe is eating? The LAHSA grant, the Department of Veterans Affairs Grant, the donation from Harry? Nobody knows. For that matter, Joe is fungible. If he’s a veteran, the agency can claim him on their Vets grant, if he’s an ex-offender, he could be tallied on their Department of Justice grant, if he has a substance abuse challenge, he could be covered by a CSAT grant, or, ideally, all three.

One of the unspoken realities of running large nonprofits is that clever multi-funded, multi-program agencies can often pay for services for a particular individual more than once, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident. Funders don’t seem to care, as long as this is never stated in grant proposals or reports and reporters are too naive to inquire.

I don’t know anything about URM/EIMAGO other than what I gleaned from this article, as we’ve never worked for either organization. To forestall the potential lawyer inquiry, I am not making any accusations about either organization, which I am sure are great service providers. The situation described in the LA Times article seems implausible to me, particularly given this quote from it: “The mission’s difficulties come at a time when many nonprofits are struggling to raise the funds they need to keep up with demand for their services in a bad economy.” Seems like someone at URM has been reading Grant Writing Confidential, as I have been making this point for over two years. It’s a bad time to be trying to replace hard-to-get grant funds with even harder-to-get donations.

The article also provides an opportunity to illustrate how larger nonprofits often use multiple grant sources to keep the lights on. For those newer and more nimble nonprofits in L.A. that want to provide homeless services, it looks like you’ll have an opportunity to dine on the LAHSA grants that URM/EIMAGO rejects. Some agency is going to need to serve the legions of hungry and homeless in L.A. Go get your bowl of LAHSA grant soup!

For those who do not follow college hoops, point guards run the offense, distributing the ball and acting as the “Field General,” even more so than the quarterback on a football team. Basketball is so fast that the point guard has to make decisions on the fly, maximizing the potential of the offense while blunting the defense. The best point guards can also create their own shots by breaking down defenses. This year, KU’s starting point guard is good but not great, meaning that several guards shared the duties. This is another way of saying that KU lacked a true point guard.

There is good analogy between a great point guard and an organization’s grant writing efforts. If a nonprofit or public agency is committed to getting grants, they need a quality point guard to run the grant writing offense. As I have pointed out in many recent posts (see, for example, “Federal Budget Battle Unfolds, But the RFPs Just Keep Rollin’ Along“), the competition for grants is even more ferocious than normal. This makes it essential for every grant applicant to have a great grant writing point guard to keep the organization’s Eyes on the Prize. It doesn’t matter if the grant writing point guard is the Executive Director, Grants Coordinator, or a grant writing consultant like Seliger + Associates, as long as the grant writing point guard keeps the ball in play and the focus on scoring. They need to coordinate the whole organization to make sure that it maximizes its opportunities and doesn’t let easy “points,” or, in this case, money, slip away.

The challenge of keeping an organizational focus on grant writing can be seen in the differing behaviors of two Community Action Agencies (CAAs) we’re working for. As I pointed out recently in “Heavens to to Murgatroyd: Grant Competition Is About to Heat Up for Community Services Block Grant Grant (CSBG) and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Recipients,” CAAs are under enormous pressure because of threatened cutbacks to their core funding streams.

In the case of CAA client # 1, we are trying to finish a non-deadline assignment we started six months ago. Our contact, who is the Executive Director and his own grant writing point guard, is totally consumed with potential budget cuts. He’s effectively abandoned our project and, as far as I can tell, his overall grant writing efforts. In other words, he’s not handling the ball well. Regarding CAA Client # 2, the Executive Director is also the grant writing point guard. She is completely ignoring the maelstrom of potential budget cuts and focusing like a laser on the many RFPs on the street. We just finished two proposals for her and are currently writing another one. She is a consummate point guard and is distributing to ball to all shooters, not dribbling in the back court or making a bad out of bounds pass.

Even a perennial basketball powerhouse like KU can be easily derailed by lack of focus by their point guard and the general fear of tomorrow that paralyzed the team today. The best point guards keep their eyes focused on what is immediately in front of them while not losing sight of the whole court. If you organization’s grant writing team is transfixed about macro budget cutbacks that is out of their control, it is best to get their attention back to what really matters—what grants funds are available today and how can you get them. Otherwise, like CAA client # 1, you will find yourself out of time and out of money, while CAA client # 2 and others like her, race by you for an easy transition bucket. The grant funds are there for the taking.

* Never having been an athlete, I am always careful in my criticism of athletes. In some ways, being a grant writer is like being an athlete, particularly like a golfer or pitcher, in that one goes one-on-one against the “RFP opponent” to produce a winning proposal. While the grant writer may have other team members—who gather research, complete forms, edit, etc.—nonetheless, she’s in the grant writing arena along with her iMac listening to Pandora Radio on her Bose QuietComfort 3 Headphones and facing the RFP alone. When criticizing athletes, grant writers, novelists, fighter pilots or others engaged in solitary conflicts against long odds, remember this Teddy Roosevelt extract from his “Citizenship In a Republic Speech,” “The Man in the Arena”:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

But we might eventually write a book if the conditions are right. The main reason I haven’t spent a lot of time on a potential book project is because we can make far more money with far less aggravation as consultants than we can trying to get a book published. To learn why, see Philip Greenspun’s essay “The book behind the book behind the book…,” where he describes how he wrote a computer book, why most computer books are so bad, and points out the sheer amount of time he had spend not consulting for real money but instead working with publishers who removed his biting, appropriate commentary and instead insert happy-talk pablum of the kind that will be incredibly familiar to anyone who has picked up a commercial computer book. Alas, my short description doesn’t convey how hilarious and accurate his essay is; it should be mandatory reading for anyone who thinks they want to publish a book.*

In our case, we can say as much as we want about grant writing and the grant writing process on our blog without having to muck around with publishers. GWC is now sufficiently well developed that I can say to anyone who wants to learn about grant writing, “Read the archives.”

Still, if a publisher or agent came to us and said, “Organize your blog posts into book form and we’ll give you some money,” I’d probably do it because this would make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. That, and I have a compulsive desire to communicate. But I’ve been a would-be novelist for longer than I care to think about (see here for more) and don’t think much of trying to get into publishing because I’ve already been trying to do so for so long. Trying to get in without being invited is tough, tedious, and not all that rewarding even if/when you do get in.

It’s still tempting, though, because so much of the nominal competition is so bad. Most of what people know or think they know about grant writing is wrong. Most of it is based on limited impressions or single projects or single agencies. Most people don’t really know how the grant process works because you just have to have been around long enough to understand it. Very few people have. There are all kinds of things people don’t understand. No one else has simply said, “Seeking grants is also a treasure hunt.” We’ve never seen anyone else point out that just because you get the most points doesn’t mean you’ll get funded. RFPs never convey how to write to them in plain English. We’re trying to put as much plain English into grant writing as possible.

A lot of grant writing books are deficient and almost every grant writing book fails to explain how grants actually work. They haven’t been written by people who have worked across the nonprofit sector. As is often the case, we’ve seen the competition and thought, “We could do better than that.”

But the gap between “could do better” and “your local bookstore” is wide. Books usually get sold by writing an outline, then finding an agent, who pitches a publisher, who buys your book, edits it as you write it, then distributes it to someone who sells it. Each of those stages can be pretty arduous; you don’t climb a mountain just by hitting the first easy patch after a technical climb, and you can fall off a cliff and plummet, screaming, to the bottom at any time during the ascent (this metaphor sums up how people who experience the publishing industry feel about the publishing industry). At the moment, we haven’t overcome inertia to the point we want to begin the ascent. That, and we’ve got lots of work writing proposals down here in base camp.

Anyway, if think we’re awesome and you know someone who works in publishing, tell them to call us at 800.540.8906. Better yet, if you know someone who needs a technically accurate and well-written proposal completed on time, tell them to call us, because that’s still our main business. We wouldn’t mind being in the book business but aren’t likely to get there in the immediate future, unless someone in the know invites us to start the climb.

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.

Some obnoxious programs, however, won’t tell you how much you can request, which makes it harder to find guidance. Last year, an e-mail blast from the Seliger Funding Report included the National Mentoring Programs RFP (warning: .pdf link), which provides grants to national organizations who then offer mentoring services to special populations. In 2008, the RFP didn’t provide guidance about how much money to ask for or how much was available, so I sent an e-mail and called the Department of Justice (DOJ) to ask if they would tell us or were just going to play hide the salami. Patrick Dunckhorst, Program Manager, wrote back to say:

Thank you for your inquiry. Applicants should request the amount of funding they assess/deem necessary to support the requirements of the National Mentoring solicitation.

To solve the world’s problems I need all the world’s money, but that’s not likely to happen. The DOJ probably received applications with wildly divergent and zany funding requests, perhaps ranging from the absurdly small to all the world’s money. In the Funding Report, I quoted his second sentence and left it at that.

In 2009 the max grant amount is $10,000,000. Evidently Patrick got tired of inquiries like mine, because this year the contact person is Eric Stansbury, and he won’t get questions about the amount available save from those who can’t read.*

* One other recent example of random change: the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries Program, which existed under that name in 2006, 2007, and 2008, is now called the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries Competition. I feel more literate already.

One of our faithful readers wrote in with this tale of grant reviewer woe, which has been anonymized to protect the innocent:

I was a Federal Reviewer for [a Department of Education program] a few years ago. Our team of three reviewers met via phone conference to discuss the grants after we had each read and scored them independently. Amazingly, we pretty much gave each grant a similar score—within 5 – 10 points of each other, which surprised me. I remember the one that we gave the lowest score to. It was awful. The project didn’t even ‘hit’ on the required elements of the RFP and what they proposed to implement didn’t fit at all with [the subject of the program].

None of us had given them a score over 50. The moderator still asked us to discuss the score before we moved on, so we did. None of us wanted to change anything about their score in any way. When the list came out, two of the proposals we had reviewed were funded. One that had scored in the high 90′s, and the one with the lowest score. I can’t remember the location of the low scoring one, although it was somewhere out East.

I do know that the moderator told us that the competition was pretty tough (she had been a moderator in the past) and unless an applicant scored close to 100, they probably wouldn’t get funded. The moderator never mentioned anything about geographic distribution in any of our discussions, but it was in the RFP—I had gone back to check.

The review process is pretty anonymous and cut and dried. It’s done through the e-portal at e-grants, and there’s really no way to go back in and talk to the moderator or the other reviewers once the decisions are made. I do remember being hacked off about that one, though. So much so, that I didn’t go back and apply to be a reviewer for them again the next year.

(Compare this chilling real-life story to the one about how RFPs get written in “Inside the Sausage Factory and how the RFP Process leads to Confused Grant Writers“.)

This story also demonstrates why we don’t read reviewer comments on clients’ previous proposal submissions—or our own. Although the three reviewers on this program mostly agreed with each other, there’s no guarantee that three reviewers next year will agree on the same kinds of criteria or be concerned with the same kinds of things. And even if they do, other considerations often outweigh what the reviewers want.

Still, you should strive to produce the best proposal you can: notice that one funded proposal in our reader’s story did score very highly. You’re always better off with a clear, concise, well-written proposal than an incomplete, poorly written proposal that relies on improbable assistance from reviewers or decision makers that might not come through for you, even if it does for others. You don’t know who else is applying, what their proposals look like, or what non-explicit factors the funding agency is really considering.