Many grant applicants are under the delusion from years of watching the Olympics and similar sports competitions that, if their application receives the highest review score, the grant will automatically be awarded. But regardless of what is true in the real world,* the proposal world is different.

We recently completed a Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) proposal for a small, rural Midwestern school district (or local education agency (LEA) in edu-speak. Our contact, the superintendent, was a amiable fellow with about 30 years of experience as a school superintendent and about 30 minutes of experience as a grant applicant. When chatting at the end of the assignment, he said something along the lines of, “I hope our application gets the highest number of points so that we get funded.” I put him on hold, opened up the RFP, and found this version of the the bad news language I knew would be lurking somewhere (in this case on page 127 of 152, in Section 5506, “Administrative Provisions,” Subpart b, “Proportionality,” rather than “grant award procedures,” where one would expect it):

(b) PROPORTIONALITY- To the extent practicable, the Secretary shall ensure that grants awarded under this subpart shall be equitably distributed among local educational agencies and community-based organizations serving urban and rural areas.

I explained to our incredulous client that grant awards are often made for reasons other than high point totals. In example above, the Department of Education is reserving its right to use “proportionality” regarding “urban and rural areas”to divvy up the pot. I have no idea what “proportionality” means in this context, other than it can be used to make an an award to any applicant the Department feels like funding.

There is a caveat of course: the applicant has to submit a technically correct proposal and reach whatever the minimum score level is. After that, apparently, anything can go. Funding decisions are often made for all kinds of reasons: urban/rural (in the example cited above, I guess no suburban applicants will be funded, since suburbs are not mentioned as a possibility), politics (upcoming elections tend to grab the attention of federal decision makers), geography (Senator Foghorn Leghorn to Secretary Arne Duncan: “Tell me again, Mr. Secretary, why have no PEP grants have been awarded in Alabama in five years?”), perceived or stated target population (e.g., African American, Latino, children with special needs, etc.), experienced/inexperienced applicants, and who knows what else.

Our client was a bit crestfallen when I explained the above, but I told him to cheer up. We think we helped him submit a technically correct proposal, which is no small achievement given the fantastic complexity of the PEP RFP and spectacularly confusing directions. His district is also fairly representative of other small, rural school districts. If his application is one of only a few technically correct proposals from similar school districts in his state/region, the chances of funding will go up enormously. Since I know from decades of experience that many more urban districts are likely to apply for PEP than rural districts, and a lot of these are likely to screw up their applications, our client’s chances are probably pretty good. I’ll find out along with everyone else when the funding announcements are made in a few months, because, as I always tell callers, we’re grant writers, not fortune tellers.

In case you think I’m picking on PEP, here are a few other examples of the same weasel words from other recent federal and state RFPs selected at random for this post:

• From the “Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools Grants for the Integration of Schools and Mental Health Systems” RFP: “Review and Selection Process: Additional factors we consider in selecting an application for an award are the equitable distribution of grants among the geographical regions of the United States and among urban, suburban, and rural populations.”
• From the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Program: FY 2010 Competitive Grant Announcement:” “Absent explicit statutory authorization or written delegation of authority to the contrary, all final grant award decisions will be made by the Assistant Attorney General (AAG), who may also give consideration to factors including, but not limited to, underserved populations, geographic diversity, strategic priorities, past performance, and available funding when making awards.”
• From the “Teen Pregnancy Prevention Community Challenge Grant (CCG) Program” from the California Department of Public Health: “Additionally, OFP will seek to achieve equitable and balanced funding via geographic distribution across California at its discretion.”

To try this exercise at home, put on safety glasses and a rubber apron, then search for the words “the secretary” or “geographical” in almost any federal RFP and you will find some version of the above.

This curious aspect of grant writing can play out in strange ways, as confirmed in this recent Wall Street Journal article by Jonathan Weisman and Alex P. Kellogg, “Obama Courts Stimulus Doubters”. Oddly, the relatively nondescript Holland, MI, is, according to this article, “a community awash in stimulus dollars.” Holland “has seen a big infusion of cash from the president’s economic stimulus plan: hundreds of millions of dollars for new automotive battery plants, tens of millions for schools, as well as millions more for housing, small businesses, university research and transportation.”

Pretty strange for a City with a population of about 20,000 in Ottawa County, which has around 250,000 residents. Call me cynical, but, unless there is a hidden nest of grant writers in Holland, the reason for this tsunami of stimulus dollars is likely because this region in Michigan used to have lots of automotive-related manufacturers, most of which have long since gone the way of the Studebaker. It would make a great story, particularly for the 2012 election, if a sprinkling of federal fairy dust in the form of stimulus grants caused green job industries to flourish.

While I have no way of confirming this, I suspect there are pin maps in various federal agencies with a bullseye on Holland and other charmed communities. As Bob Dylan put it in Idiot Wind, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.” It seems Holland is lucky and, while grant applicants can’t make their luck, they can work hard to submit compelling, technically correct proposals, ideally, with some aspect of program design that makes them stand out, and wait for that congrats phone call from their congresswoman letting them know that the Secretary of Whatever Federal Department has used “other factors” to shove their proposal to the top of the funding heap.

But this assumes their proposal is complete and technically correct. Until you get at least that far, you have virtually no chance at all.

That being said, here’s my advice:

* Tell stories. People like stories. Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software gets zillions of visitors not because he’s a very good programmer—which he probably is—but because he imparts his lessons through real stories about software fiascos. He says in Introduction to Best Software Writing I:

See what I did here? I told a story. I’ll bet you’d rather sit through ten of those 400 word stories than have to listen to someone drone on about how “a good team leader provides inspiration by setting a positive example.”

Yeah! In “Anecdotes,” Joel says:

Heck, I practically invented the formula of “tell a funny story and then get all serious and show how this is amusing anecdote just goes to show that (one thing|the other) is a universal truth.”

Steal someone else’s stories if you have to (I just stole Joel’s, which is a pretty solid source).

There’s a reason the Bible and most other religious texts are lighter on “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” and heavier on parables: the parables are way more fun. More people read novels than read legal codes, even though the novels implicitly offer examples of how to live your life. People read stories more readily than they read “how-to” manuals. Taken together, this is we often tell stories about projects, clients, and so on; my post Deadlines are Everything, and How To Be Amazing is a good example of this, since it’s basically one story after another. So is Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing).

Real life is just a story generating machine. Which leads me to my next point:

* Do or have done something. I get the sense—perhaps incorrect—that some nonprofit bloggers spend more time blogging than they do working in or running nonprofits. This is like describing how to play professional baseball despite having never done so. A lot of grant writing bloggers, for example, don’t show evidence of working on any actual proposals; they don’t tell stories about projects, use specific examples from RFPs, and so on. This makes me think they’re pretending to be grant writers.*

* Be an expert and genuinely know the field. A lot of blogs that are putatively about grant writing don’t appear to have much insight into the process of grant writing, the foibles involved, the difficulty of getting submissions right, and so on. As I mentioned above, the writers seldom mention projects they’ve worked on and RFPs they’ve responded to.

* Dave Winer on great blogging:

1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).

2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.

3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.

I would amend 3. to say “Saying things that few people have the courage or knowledge to say.”

* Don’t do something that everyone else is already doing. Every blog has “eight tips for improving your submissions,” which say things like “read the RFP before you start” and “get someone else to proofread your proposal.” Paul Graham wrote an essay against the “List of N Things” approach that’s so popular in weak magazines:

The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there’s so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it. A real essay, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don’t know what you’re going to write when you start. It will be about whatever you discover in the course of writing it.

The whole essay is worth reading. Sometimes a bulleted list is appropriate, but more often it’s merely easy. Sometimes the “eight tips” are obvious and sometimes they’re wrong, but they often don’t add anything unique to a discussion.

Everyone else writes posts that are 100 – 200 words long and includes pictures; we made a conscious decision to write long, detailed posts that will actually help people who are trying to write grants. Stock photo pictures don’t add anything to writing, and most of what grant writing deals with can’t be shown or expanded with pictures. So we don’t use them. Isaac, of course, insists on working in old movies, TV shows and rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, but I will not comment on these idiosyncrasies.

Writing proposals is really, really hard, and the process can’t be reduced to soundbites, which is why we write the way we write as opposed to some other way. Pictures are wonderful, but I think it better to have no pictures unless those pictures add something to the story that can’t be conveyed any other way. Generic pictures are just distractions.

As you’ve probably noticed, this post isn’t really about nonprofit blogs: it’s about how to be an interesting writer in general, regardless of the medium. Being an interesting writer has been a hard task since writing was invented, and it will probably continue to be a hard task forever, regardless of whether the medium involves paper (like books, magazines, and newspapers) or bits (like blogs) or neural channels (someday).

Finally, if you can’t take any of my suggestions but you do have a shocking celebrity sex tape, post it, and you’ll probably get 1000 times as much traffic as every other nonprofit blog combined. That’s really juicy—almost as juicy as posts that are unique and don’t merely parrot back what the author has heard elsewhere and the reader has seen before.

* I also get the feeling there are a lot of pretend grant writers out there because our clients are so often astonished that we do what we say we’re going to do. That this surprises so many people indicates to me that a lot of “grant writers” are out there who prefer to talk about grant writing rather than writing grants.

That’s not surprising: trying to become a specialist NIH grant writing consultant would be really, really hard because the niche is sufficiently small that one couldn’t easily build a business solely around NIH grants. And the people who could or would want to write solely NIH grants are employed by universities or big hospitals and aren’t available for consulting.

You probably won’t be able to find a specialist in NIH grant writing even if you think you should find one. Isaac addressed this problem in “No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal Is Not Hard For A Good Grant Writer:” “Looking for qualified grant writers is about the same as looking for unicorns: don’t make a hard problem insolvable by looking for a unicorn with a horn of a certain length or one that has purple spots. Be happy to find one at all.”

He used the same unicorn language in “I Was Right:”

Two of the qualified SGIG [Smart Grid Investment Grant] callers did not “believe” and presumably kept searching in the forest for the perfect, but ephemeral, grant writing “unicorn” I described in my original post. One caller became our sole SGIG client for this funding round. The application process culminated in a finely crafted proposal that went in on the deadline day.

The proposal got funded, even though we’d never written a Smart Grid proposal before—and neither had anyone else. How’d we do it? Through the same means described in How to Write About Something You Know Nothing About: It’s Easy, Just Imagine a Can Opener, which explains how a generalist learns to write a proposal for unfamiliar programs (and remember: all programs are unfamiliar when they first appear; this was certainly true for Smart Grid applicants). The same principles apply to all proposals; the trick is finding someone who understands and can implement those principles on a deadline.

Such people are as rare as the ones who know a lot about NIH grant writing. If you created a Venn diagram of the two, you’d probably have almost no overlap. If you were going to set up a business writing NIH proposals, you’d need at least three very unusual skills: able to write, able to hit deadlines, and health knowledge, ideally through getting a PhD or perhaps a research-oriented MD. But that would be really, really time consuming and expensive: MDs don’t come cheap, and even family docs make six figures after residency. The kinds of people capable of being NIH grant specialists are either an endangered species that’s seldom seen or hidden like hobbits in the modern world, who can vanish in a twinkle and apparently aren’t on the Internet.

In short, you’re not going to find them. We explain this fairly regularly to people who call us looking for “experts” and “specialists” in grant writing for particular fields, but they often don’t believe us, despite our seventeen years of experience.

Our Experience Trying to Hire Grant Writers

There’s one other reason we’re skeptical that you’ll find many specialized grant writers, let alone general grant writers: we’ve hired a lot of grant writing stringers, and most of them turned out to be not particularly great grant writers.* The best one had no unusual training at all—he was a journalist, which meant he understood the 5Ws and the H and was accustomed to writing against inflexible deadlines.

The number of people out there who claim they can do this or pretend they can do this is vastly larger than the number of people who actually can. If there’s something strange, and it don’t look good, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! If you’ve trying to understand a RFP, and it don’t look good, you know who to call. Alternately, you could keep searching until the deadline has passed, in which case the probability of you not being funded is 100%.

* This was mostly before my time, however; once I got to college, I tended to write more proposals, and the frustrations of stringers wasn’t worth the benefit for Isaac. In addition, I’m mostly inured to his sometimes acerbic commentary by now. Seliger + Associates has not used stringers for well over ten years.

The third element is just meeting the deadlines. If we’d said we were going to do something by a certain date, we did it, and the customers were stunned.

He goes on to say that “There was so much repeat business because customers would be amazed that we delivered on time and that it was more or less what they wanted and actually usable for the end user.”

That shouldn’t be amazing, but it often is because we’re used to dealing with stuff that doesn’t work very well and businesses that over-promise and under-deliver, if they deliver at all.

Think of airlines, which specialize in jerking you around and making you feel like everyone else paid less for their ticket than you did. Or, of consultants who set unrealistic deadlines for deliverables and then make endless excuses when they miss their often self-imposed deadlines.

Or think of car dealerships.

I’ve been trying to buy or lease a car, and probably a Toyota Prius, so I can look down on my neighbors for destroying the environment. And I hear they—the cars, not the neighbors—get good mileage. Anyway, car dealerships are on my mind because buying a car is a miserable, maddening, opaque experience. The salesmen—and they’re almost always men—lie constantly. They make things up. Last week, one of them showed me his super secret invoice price that he couldn’t possibly go below… until he did. Then he decided he was sick.

Then whoever he handed me off to couldn’t produce actual lease terms. Then I got a third guy from the same dealership who loaded a lease that should’ve had, at most, $1,799 in drive-off costs with $4,500 in drive-off costs. Another dealership had a Prius II in “Barcelona Red,” the color I wanted… with an extra $2,000 in dealer options I didn’t. I wasted half an hour there. By the time I left, I no longer wanted to buy anything.*

What’s really amazing is that car dealers stay in business. But they do, because someone with less tenacity or more money will simply put up with the dance. I know car dealers are just engaging in sophisticated forms of market segmentation, and they’re playing a much longer game than I am.

That being said, they make buying a new car as pleasant as a visit to the dentist, at least for me (Isaac actually likes wrangling car dealers, and I will leave you to decide what this says about his personality). Toyota spends billions of dollars a year trying to convince people that they’re a nice company, and then I go through the showroom wringer and come out hating them, even though I intellectually know that corporate has little to do with how the dealership down the street behaves.

Contrast the buying-a-car experience with what getting a proposal written is like with Seliger + Associates. We post our fees on our website. If you call us and say, “I want an Office of Community Services’ (OCS) Community Economic Development Projects proposal,” you generally get a price quote right then. If you’re not eligible for a program or if you’re running a business that is ineligible for grants, we tell you.

In Founders at Work, Paul Graham described the way he managed to sell Viaweb, his early software for building online stores:

I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent—to have some bag of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there’s also a sort of hack that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best software and then tell them, truthfully, ‘this is the best software.’ And they could tell we were telling the truth”

Notice that: he learned a trick for selling things—”tell the truth.” That this is considered a trick should make it obvious that something is profoundly wrong in a lot of businesses. Car dealers basically make everything they do a series of lies, hoops, and tricks, such that, after having to deal with them, I assume they’re lying most of the time.

Seliger + Associates also has a simple procedure: tell the truth and write proposals. If you hire us, we complete a compelling proposal on time. We never miss deadlines and never make excuses.

People are amazed! We hit deadlines, and that’s enough to impress them because so many of their experiences with employees, other grant writers, and consultants are apparently so lousy that they’ve come to expect a lack of follow through. We’ve never missed a deadline. Did I mention that already? It’s worth repeating, because deadlines are the essence of grant writing. If you’re a grant writer working for an organization and you want to be a star, never miss a deadline.

Almost everyone else does. Most deadlines imposed by businesses are artificial—get this report to me by Friday. If you don’t until Monday, it doesn’t matter. With grant writing, it does, and if you hit deadlines, you’re an unusual person.

You’ll also be a competent one. Off the top of my head, I can remember only a handful of times that I’ve been completely delighted by competence. Starwood Hotels come to mind: if you call the reservation number, whoever is on the other end will do whatever he or she can to make sure you get what you want. I had to visit Seattle last December and managed to stay in the W Hotel at a very good rate because of the friskiness of the phone rep. That kind of thing happens so rarely that I’m writing about it now.

Most of the time, you call a company’s number and get interminable music punctuated by “We appreciate your business,” which is a transparent lie, because if it were true, I wouldn’t be on hold. One car salesman said to me, “What can I do to earn your business?” just after I’d complained about another dealership and just before I discovered his own dissembling. It’s incredibly frustrating. Here’s a clue to car salesmen: try telling the truth. One good reason to tell the truth, which Isaac has told me since I was young, is that, if one tells the truth, one does not need to remember what is said to this person or that person.

Philip Greenspun understood that basic dynamic when he started ArsDigita. We understand it too. The simple thing to do is tell the truth and do what you say you’re going to do. If you do, people will be amazed, and you’ll be a superstar grant writer. This is true in human service delivery, grant writing, software development, and any number of other fields.

Faithful readers will remember that I drew lessons for grant writers from KU’s spectacular championship win two years ago in Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU! — Lessons from Basketball for Grant Writers. There is also a significant lesson to be learned from KU’s improbable flop this year. Although KU has been the favorite all year, the would-be NCAA champion must win six games in a row, sometimes against teams like UNI that haven’t gotten the memo saying they can’t win. The same phenomenon often happens in grant writing. Two cases on point:

* Our new-old friend, Investing in Innovation Fund (i3): We’ve blogged about i3 several times. This is an enormous program with huge grants that has been tantalizing LEAs and youth services nonprofits since the Stimulus Bill passed last year. I’ve had lots of recent calls along the lines of, “Will our organization have any chance of funding, since there’ll be so many applicants?” My usual response is more or less the following:

Sure, at this moment, 5,000 organizations probably think they will apply. By the time the May 11 deadline arrives, 2,000 of these will have given up, so maybe 3,000 applications will go in. Since the RFP is fantastically complex, about half of the submitted applications will be thrown out as technically incorrect. The Department of Education says 220 grants will be made. Instead of an individual applicant’s odds of being funded being 4.4%, the odds are probably three times higher, or 14.6%.

But this assumes that all scored applicants have the chance of being funded, which is of course not true, as funding decisions involve lots of factors other than raw scores, such as geography, politics, service to racial and ethnic groups, past funding history and on and on. Nonetheless, many applicants will be scared away because of the assumed competition. About two weeks ago, I received a call from the development director of a large ethnic-specific advocacy organization headquartered in D.C., with affiliates around the country. He told me the organization planned to submit three i3 proposals and I gave him the fee quotes.

This week, he called me back to let me know that for internal reasons, they’ve decided to not submit any i3 proposals, even though the Department of Education has informally encouraged them to apply. This is an example of three of the 5,000 possible applications melting away before the deadline. The same pattern is unfolding across the country and who know how many other organizations will give up before May 11.

* Our old-old friend, the Administration for Native Americans Social and Economic Development Strategies (ANA SEDS) Program: This program has been around for decades and we’ve written lots of funded ANA SEDS grants over the years. For whatever reason, when the ANA SEDS FOA was issued a few weeks ago, there turned out to only be $6,500,000 available, which is substantially less in previous years. Right on schedule, I received a phone call from the executive director of a Native American organization who wanted a fee quote but was concerned about whether they should apply because “there is so little money available this year.” I asked her if she thought other possible applicants would also be discouraged by the small amount of money up for grabs. She said yes and I said she had answered her own question: the small amount available probably means fewer applicants, improving her chances. She hired us.

Whether there is lot of money (i3) or little money (ANA SEDS) to be had in a given RFP process, don’t be discouraged if it is a program that your organization wants to run (and read our previous two posts on the subject). No matter what the imagined odds, apply anyway. Just as teams have to play the games to win the NCAA Tournament, your organization cannot get a grant unless a technically correct and compelling proposal is prepared and submitted on time.

Poor little UNI could have forfeited the game in the face of mighty KU, but they played well enough to win on that particular day, even though they probably will lose the next ten in a row. David only needed one well placed stone to take down Goliath, and your organization only needs one well prepared proposal to bag a big federal grant. Although I am a KU fan, if I was scoring yesterday’s game in the way a reviewer scores a federal proposal, I would have given the game to UNI, even if KU had caught them at the end, because they played a better game.

So far, President Obama is talking about freezing some domestic spending programs in FY ‘11, which doesn’t start until October 1. He also seems to love spending for things like education, stimulating jobs, green energy, etc. The proposed FY ‘11 budget, which debuted February 1, shows increases in a number of discretionary programs along with freezes in others. But remember that appropriations for most domestic discretionary programs in the current FY ‘10 budget are wildly higher than in the FY ‘09 budget. At the moment, there are unprecedented amounts of money available for all kinds of initiatives. As I wrote last September in “Graffiti, Windmills, CAP Agencies, and an Answer to the Question As to Whether This is 1975 or 1965,” “This really is the best of times for grant applicants, so let’s all party like its 1965.” Or, to paraphrase Max in Where the Wild Things Are,* “Let the wild grant writing rumpus continue.”

Despite the happy talk above, however, there is one not-so-minor thing to worry about—the dreaded “R” word. No, not the recession “R” word, which, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is actually good for grant writing. I’m talking about “rescission”. Rescission should strike fear into your hearts, as shown in the following Congressional definition:

“Rescission–The cancellation of budget authority previously provided by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may propose to Congress that funds be rescinded. If both Houses have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within 45 days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.”

Since the Democrats control both houses of Congress, and assuming that President Obama is good at herding cats, he could propose rescission of any authorized spending program anytime he wants to. As with so many aspects of grant writing, I actually experienced a budget rescission when I was a Community Organizer Intern in 1972 in North Minneapolis, as noted in my first post, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal.” When I started work, one of my first tasks was to explain to low-income homeowner applicants for home rehabilitation loans that they could not get their money because the funds had been rescinded by President Nixon. At that time, there was nothing Congress could do about a rescission, which led to the 1974 law that requires Congress to go along with a presidential rescission. Given the hysteria that is building over the huge budget deficits, compounded by the upcoming election, a successful rescission is quite possible, and much more worrisome that supposed spending freezes.

This means that if your organization—nonprofit, public agency or eligible business—is thinking about applying for a grant, stop thinking and start writing.

CW is an amorphous blob of assumed correctness that ping pongs through the media, popular culture, academia and everything else in America, even though aspects of it may be proven wrong. Two examples from recent newspaper articles will demonstrate how hopelessly wrong CW can be:

1) Foster Care and Orphanages: The CW about foster care is that the system, although flawed, is a much better alternative than orphanages, which conjure up Dickensian images of underfed orphans cowering in dark rooms. Although a quick Google search confirms that no one seems to really know how may kids are in foster care in America, a good guess is about 600,000. Richard. B. McKenzie, a UC-Irvine professor who grew up in an orphanage in the 1950’s, tackles the foster care/orphanage CW in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Best Thing About Orphanages.” Professor McKenzie cites a 2009 Duke University study of 3,000 orphaned children in Africa and Asia and states:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that children raised in orphanages by nonfamily members were no worse in their health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth than those cared for in their communities by relatives. More important, the orphanage-reared children performed better than their counterparts cared for by community strangers, which is commonly the case in foster-care programs.

Professor McKenzie surveyed 2,500 alumni of American orphanages and found they generally did much better than their peers in the general population across a range of educational attainment, income, happiness and related indicators. In other words, orphanages, which have largely disappeared from America and been replaced by foster care, actually did a reasonably good job given the circumstances in nurturing orphans. Having written dozens of proposals addressing the needs of foster youth over the years, I know that outcomes are not good for kids in the system. In 17 years of being in business, however, no one has ever approached us to write a proposal for an orphanage.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is one of the largest private funders for child service programs. A search of their website for “orphanages” produces two hits, both in Romania, while a search for “foster care” produces 230 hits! I have a pretty good idea of how the CW thinkers at the Casey Foundation would react to a proposal to set up a new orphanage in Owatonna*: shock and horror! But they’d probably happily fund yet another “innovative” program to provide wrap around supportive services for foster kids.

2) Endangered Salmon: While living in Seattle for 15 years, I became accustomed to waking up pretty much every morning to another newspaper story about endangered salmon. Several years ago, there was even an attempt to OK killing sea lions because they were eating too many salmon, although I don’t believe a whisker on a single sea lion was actually ever harmed. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this piece in the January 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal: Fish Boom Makes Splash in Oregon. Despite the CW about the end of salmon runs on the West Coast, this year there are so many steelhead and their cousins that in some creeks, “you could literally walk across on the backs of Coho,” according to Grant McOmie, outdoors correspondent for a television news team in Portland. As the article states:

In 2007, one state office warned, “Populations of anadromous [or oceangoing] fish have declined dramatically all over the Pacific Northwest. Many populations of Chinook, Coho, chum and steelhead are at a tiny fraction of their historic levels.” The year before that, a naturalist in Seattle wrote: “It is hard to find the silver lining in a situation as dire as the collapse of wild salmon off the Oregon and California coasts.”

It turns out that the CW about salmon in Oregon is kind of fishy. This looks like a good opportunity for an enterprising homeless services provider in Portland to use the service delivery model I developed satirically in Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development. I’ll give you the acronym at no charge: Project FISH (Feed the Indigent/Salmon for Homeless). The grant writer for this proposal could make tidy use the old aphorism, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

It is almost never a good idea to go against your understanding of the presumed CW of the reviewers in writing a grant proposal. Not only do you have to stay inside in the box, as Jake wrote, you actually have to stay in a corner of the box. A case in point:

We’ve written lots of funded proposals for anti-tobacco/anti-smoking proposals over the years, particularly in California, which at one time had tons of money for such initiatives. About ten years ago, we were hired to write three proposals to prevent youth smoking in California by three different agencies for the same state RFP. While two of the clients were fairly typical youth service organizations, one was different. This nonprofit was interested in only working with white kids, which they deemed “Euro-Americans.” We almost never get good data sources from our clients, but this client provided peer-reviewed studies confirming that, with the exception of Native American youth, white teenagers in California were much more at risk for smoking than African American, Asian or Latino kids.

I told the client, however, that he would be going against CW about smoking and ethnicity and he would likely not be funded—especially if we wrote the proposal using the term “Euro-American” with a focus on white teenagers. He insisted, and we wrote it the way he wanted, using his terrific citations in one of the best needs assessments we’ve ever written. Not only was the proposal not funded, but it was also completely trashed in written reviewer comments our client later gave me. The reviewers were outraged that the agency would focus on white kids, instead of youth of color, and claimed a lack of data, despite the citations we included. In other words, their CW was so strong, they did not recognize the statistics provided right under their noses. The punch line is that the other two proposals we wrote for this competition focused on African American and Latino youth, respectively, used more or less the same service delivery approach as the first proposal and had entirely specious data that we cobbled together.

They were funded.

Now, about that discount. We’re willing to provide a 20% discount off our standard fee for a foundation appeal to the first qualified client who wants to fund an orphanage, salmon to feed the homeless or some other anti-CW project concept that we find intriguing. This means we’ll conduct basic research to identify a prospect list, complete detailed research to narrow down the list, write a foundation letter proposal (about five single spaced pages) and prepare 10 finished foundation proposals to the best identified sources for $5,600, a $1,400 discount from our standard fee of $7,000 for this type of assignment! If we get anyone to take us up on this offer, I’ll post updates on the outcome.**

** The client must be a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Seliger + Associates will, at its sole discretion, determine if the client is qualified and the project concept is appropriate for this offer.

If you write proposals, don’t be this cat.

Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going to serve 300 participants per year, not 30 or 3,000. If the RFP says, “run a three-year program,” propose a three-year program, not a five-year program. I could go on indefinitely in this vein, but I shouldn’t have to. The point is simple: do exactly what the RFP says you should do. As a grant writing rat in an RFP Skinner Box, you get the treat (money) by pressing the bar (following RFP directions), not by running in circles trying to get out of the box.

Clients sometimes direct us not to do what the RFP says, even when we advise them that it is best to follow the RFP. Ignoring the RFP instructions almost guarantees they won’t be funded; Isaac has already written about one example in True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales:

Writing a YouthBuild proposal is very much a “cookbook” exercise in that the DOL pretty much tells applicants what they want applicants to do, and successful proposals have to regurgitate this stuff within the absurdly short page limit and the obtuse data required by the funder. In other words, if you want a YouthBuild grant, you should, as Rupee says, just Do the Damn Thing.

The clients for the four funded proposals listened to us, and we were able to craft compelling, technically correct proposals that warmed the stone-like hearts of the DOL reviewers. In contrast, our True Believer client had a vision of how she could use a YouthBuild grant to attack a whole slew of problems faced by at-risk youth in her rural community. Almost none of what she wanted to do, however, had anything to do with YouthBuild, and she fought us throughout the proposal development process. We did our best to make the proposal fundable to no avail. Despite her passion and commitment, no YouthBuild funds are available today to help the young folks she cares so much about.

A more recent example involved a Department of Education program in which the exact student cohorts to be served are mandated in RFP, as well as the underlying legislation and regulations. It doesn’t get any more specific than this. For reasons that were not made clear to us, our client insisted on removing one of the specified student cohorts from the draft proposal, even though we told him that he could save the postage, as the proposal will likely be deemed technically incorrect, which it is, and be thrown out before it is scored. This particular RFP also includes specific fill-in-the-blanks objectives, which were to be replicated word for word in the proposal. In the first draft, our client modified the wording of the objectives.

While some RFPs provide significant latitude in program design, many do not and are essentially cookbooks. If you have a cookbook RFP, follow the cookbook. For example, YouthBuild demands that participants being trained in the construction trades have on-site training experiences in the construction/rehabilitation of low-income housing, so you shouldn’t propose a retail mall as a training site, no matter how good an idea that might be to the Executive Director or Board. On a similar subject, remember that every question in the RFP applies to you, no matter how dumb it may seem, how repetitive it may be, or how little you think it should apply. I explain how this works in RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions.

Part of not thinking outside the box includes telling the funding agency what they want to hear. One such example is the infamous “sustainability” sections that many federal RFPs include, which we wrote about in detail here. These sections require applicants to state how they will sustain the project after federal funding ends. As Isaac said in the post:

For the vast majority of nonprofits applicants [...] grants and donations [are the only viable financial resources available]. If we know this simple truth, how come foundation and federal program officers seem clueless? If the agency had the couple hundred thousand dollars sitting around to fund a given program, it wouldn’t need the grant and wouldn’t apply.

Furthermore, the major cost for most human service providers are staff salaries and other operating costs. So it’s improbable that you’ll just need a bunch of money to get off the ground; although startup costs are real, they’re still dwarfed by staffing and ongoing operations costs in most cases. There might be a hypothetical dream project out there, somewhere, that just needs that DHHS grant to get started and then can run indefinitely off of revenue, but we’ve never seen it.

If you don’t like an RFP’s inane restrictions, remember the golden rule, as articulated in Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

Very occasionally, you have to invent a box for yourself because the funder hasn’t given it to you. Foundations will do this by not putting a maximum cap on requests and/or by having maddeningly opaque guidelines. In such cases, you should look at how much they’ve previously offered in funding; if they’ve historically made grants in the $10,000 – $50,000 range, asking for $400,000 is unlikely to work (for more on this topic, see my post “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For?“).

Most of the time, however, you’ll be given a box, and if you step outside it, you’re not going to be praised like a precocious high school student. You’re going to be treated like a cat who’s decided to show its creativity by ignoring the litter box. The RFP is your litter box. Ignore it at your peril.

EDIT 1/25/2010: Isaac wrote a follow-up to this post regarding the importance of conventional wisdom, even when it’s wrong.

The first reason is the most important: I know from over 15 years of working for various California cities, mostly in management capacities, that RFQs/RFPs for professional services are easily wired, “wired” meaning that one firm is going to get the contract regardless of who submits a response. Now, I am not talking about Sopranos-style wiring in which the public official can expect a visit from Paulie Walnuts if the wiring job isn’t done right. Instead, the public official is usually just more comfortable with a certain consultant or has a personal relationship. A city might also want a local consultant but need bids from qualified out-of-towners to provide cover. So a favored firm is identified before the competition takes place. Many public agencies have a requirement to run a bid process before selecting a consultant, and the public official in change of the RFP/RFQ process structures the document to produce the desired outcome. This is usually done by putting requirements into the document that favor the fair-haired bidder.

For example, we recently received a RFQ from a city. I looked quickly at the document and saw that 25% of the available point total was for “knowledge of the local community,” while 25% was for “grant writing experience.” This is obviously wired for a local grant writer, as we would have received zero points under the local knowledge category. Another favored approach is to require the successful bidder to meet regularly with agency staff in person, making it impossible for a non-local bidder to compete. There are other similar techniques, including having a ringer on the selection committee. We receive up to a dozen RFP/RFQ notices per year. I assume this is because we are such a well-qualified and well-known firm that we would provide exceptional cover for a wired bidding process, if we were dumb enough to respond. Not being stupid or naive, we always send more or less the following response: We will not respond to this RFP, but would be happy to provide a fee quote if your process fails to turn up a qualified consultant. Over the years, exactly one public agency eventually hired us after running a RFP/RFQ process. Years ago, when we first started, we would sometimes submit real bids but never got the job, and about 12 years ago stopped wasting our time by responding.

The second reason is also significant: having been in business for almost 17 years, we simply don’t have to respond to RFPs/RFQs for grant writing services. We think we’re the best grant writing outfit there is. We are like Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s response to a reporter’s question concerning who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: ““You’re looking at him!”* For better or worse, we’re as good as it gets with respect to** grant writing. Responding to RFPs/RFQs wastes our time with no reliable prospect of reward. Like lawyers and escorts, grant writers are all about billable hours. Unlike architects, engineers, accountants and similar personal services consultants, who have tons of competition and must respond to RFPs/RFQs, we provide a unique service with few qualified competitors. Don’t believe me? Try a Google search for grant writers and see what you get.

Despite the above, we’ve worked for hundreds of public agencies, including cities, counties, housing authorities, redevelopment agencies, and state governments. We can do so without responding to RFPs/RFQs because some public agencies have minimum contract amounts before bidding kicks in, which means they don’t have to go through the process. Additionally, all public agency purchasing rules have an exception for what is known in the trade as a “sole source contract.” This is because public agencies occasionally face unexpected emergencies and can’t wait for a bid process or will eventually have a unique need—say, grant writing—for which there are so few qualified bidders that there is no point in running a competition.

As long as the public official is willing to place herself on the line, nothing prevents her from hiring us under a sole source contract. When I was a public official and wanted to hire a favored consultant, I simply explained what I wanted to do to the City Manager and City Attorney, wrote the argument in a City Council staff report, if needed, and signed the contract. This is a lot less work than orchestrating a phony RFP/RFQ process. Since I know the sole source approach is always available, and our services and fees are cleverly hidden in plain sight on our website, I assume that any public official who wants to go through an RFP/RFQ process is probably trying to wire it and, thus, is not worth our time to respond.

** Free Grant Writing Tip: when responding to disjointed RFPs and searching for phases to connect disparate thoughts, alternate between “With respect to . . .” and “Regarding . . .” See, it was worth reading this post for this transition tip alone.

The SGIG program came along with $4 billion to enable electric utilities to add whiz bang features to their distribution systems. The enormous amount of money, along with the the media Stimulus Bill hype, produced a flood of callers. Most were inventors, start-up companies, quick-buck artists and dreamers, but among the assorted flotsam and jetsam were calls from three qualified SGIG applicants—electric utility companies.

All three had more or less the same reaction to my pitch: “Since you’re just a general purpose grant writing firm and don’t have electrical engineers on staff, what makes you think you can write a SGIG proposal?” My response became: read the above blog post and accept at face value my observation that, in almost 17 years of being in business, we’d never run across a topic we couldn’t write to, assuming we’re provided with technical content, fava beans* and a fine Chianti (the last two are a test to see if you’re paying attention: they actually come from Hannibal Lector discussing how to enjoy liver). Basically, I said the same thing I often tell potential clients: hiring us is a lot like Demi Moore in Ghost being advised by Whoopi Goldberg—if you want to see Patrick Swayze again, you’re going to have to believe. Similarly, the client has to suspend their own preconceptions, which are usually misconceptions, about grant writing, to believe we can write on any topic for any funder.

Two of the qualified SGIG callers did not “believe” and presumably kept searching in the forest for the perfect, but ephemeral, grant writing “unicorn” I described in my original post. One caller became our sole SGIG client for this funding round. The application process culminated in a finely crafted proposal that went in on the deadline day. Flash forward to this week, when I took a small break from toiling over a hot Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging Supportive Services Program (SSP) proposal to check Cnn.com to see if space aliens had landed on the White House lawn or what have you. President Obama was off somewhere announcing the SGIG awards, so I immediately found the DOE press release to see which applications were funded and saw the proposal we wrote.** I also checked for the other two utility companies, which were not on the list. Perhaps they never found their unicorn, or the unicorn they found turned out be be just a pony with a party hat.

Score one for our general purpose grant writing approach. Still, the writing process for the SGIG was complicated by the fact our client, an electric utility, had never submitted a federal proposal but had lots of bright and talented staff and consultants, so we were endlessly explaining and defending the “Seliger method” for writing proposals. Fortunately for the client, who paid us on hourly basis, we could simply say, read blog post x, rather than forcing us to tediously explaining why we were doing what we were doing or not doing at $200/hour.

I would like to share more about the proposal, but I can’t because we signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). I think, however, that the proposal was funded because of a “national security” argument we developed that the client had not considered. Once again, to paraphrase what I wrote last May in another post on writing DOE and similar high-tech proposals, Professional Grant Writer at Work: Don’t Try This At Home, Seliger + Associates is tanned, fit, relaxed and ready. Now that a DOE proposal we wrote has been funded, we could always claim to be “experts,” but we’ll just keep on keepin’ on as general purpose grant writers to get our clients “tangled up in green.”

** As is often the case, our client forgot to let us know that the SGIG proposal we wrote was funded, so I had to dig around to find out. I know the client knew because federal funding agencies always send an award letter to the applicant and almost always lets their congressperson know about the grant before the press release is sent out. This is why the applicant’s congressional district number is required on the SF424. I am used to clients forgetting who wrote their funded proposals and, as pros, we do not need “attaboys.”