Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any RFPs that requested day-in-the-life stories in the needs assessment. If funders wanted such stories, they’d ask for them. Since they don’t, or at best very rarely do, you should keep your needs assessment to business. And if you’re curious about how to get started, read “Writing Needs Assessments: How to Make It Seem Like the End of the World.” If you’re applying to any grant program, your application is one of many that could be funded, so you want to focus on the core purpose of the program you want to run. Giving a day in Anthony’s life isn’t going to accomplish this purpose.

Creativity is useful in many fields, but those involving government are seldom among them (as we wrote in “Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity“). As a result, unless you see specific instructions to do otherwise, you should stick to something closer to the Project Nutria model, in which you describe the who, what, where, when, why, and how. Anything extraneous to answering those questions is wasting pages, and perhaps more importantly, wasting patience, and the precious attention that patience requires.

There’s only one plausible exception I can think of: sometimes writing about a day-in-the-life of a person receiving project services can be helpful, but again, you should probably leave those stories out unless the RFP specifically requests them. Some RFPs want a sample daily or weekly schedule, and that should suffice without a heroic story about Anthony overcoming life obstacles when he finally receives the wraparound supportive services he’s always wanted.

Once you track that section down, however, you find this: “(6) DEFINITIONS- In this subsection, the terms ‘school-based health center’ and ‘sponsoring facility’ have the meanings given those terms in section 2110(c)(9) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1397jj(c)(9)).” So it’s off to find the Social Security Act. Eventually you’ll find:

In general.—The term “school-based health center” means a health clinic that—

(i) is located in or near a school facility of a school district or board or of an Indian tribe or tribal organization;

(ii) is organized through school, community, and health provider relationships;

(iii) is administered by a sponsoring facility;

(iv) provides through health professionals primary health services to children in accordance with State and local law, including laws relating to licensure and certification; and

(v) satisfies such other requirements as a State may establish for the operation of such a clinic.

Note that these five subsections describe only what school-based health center means “In general.” What would a specific definition be? Notice too that the act doesn’t mention whether this program applies only to K-12 schools, or if universities count. We’re choosing to interpret Local Education Agencies (LEAs) and their subsidiaries as eligible, since IHEs aren’t mentioned and “school district” generally implies LEAs. If you have any reason to think otherwise, let us know in the comments.

This isn’t the first time we’ve investigated curious, obfuscatory eligibility requirements, and I doubt it will be the last.

Take, for example, the Small, Rural School Achievement Program, which you might have seen in last week’s newsletter. The Federal Register notice offers almost no information. The Grants.gov synopsis is little better. I read both, trying to find answers.

I didn’t find any, but I did learn that the Small, Rural School Achievement Program is offering formula grants, so the Department of Education may simply divide up the pie on a per-capita basis, or use some similar scheme. But they don’t tell you, so that’s just a reasonable guess on my part.

Other times, we get weird data and simply report what we find. Take the “Portable Assistance Program,” which offers funds to “provide services and/or develop small business assistance products that are centered on a replicable plan of action to increase small business success and viability in communities suffering economic hardship.” Aside from that description having a lot of words without a lot of content—what does a “replicable plan of action” mean? McDonald’s has one of those too, I think, and so do many science fiction monsters—the program has $1,080,542 available to make 11 grants of at most $100,000. If you can do elementary math, you’re probably wondering why they didn’t shoot for 10 grants or try to get a larger budget allocation. I don’t know. Someone in the bowels of the Small Business Administration might, but that person isn’t me.

* Is charity a major source of deadweight loss? Notice the linked column: “Increasing evidence shows that donors [to charity] often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results — the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.”

* What an awesome office! Uncomfortable chairs, though.

* Affordable housing and hilarious cognitive dissonance.

* Good legal news: Fifth Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination Protects Against Being Forced to Decrypt Hard Drive Contents.

* “Shame Is Not the Solution” for improving teachers. On the other hand, I suspect some of the districts who want to make teaching evaluations and test scores public are doing so out of desperation, or because they can’t build the kind of sophisticated evaluation systems Gates mentions. (For another discussion of this issue, see LA Times Ranks Teachers from Marginal Revolution.)

* The Rent Is Too Damn High Now Available for Preorder.

* The Social Conservative Subterranean Fantasy World Is Exposed, and It’s Frightening.

* The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions.

* The Secret to Seattle’s Booming Downtown.

* Let’s hope the MPAA ratings board dies; sample: “[. . .] while the MPAA board pretends to be a source of neutral and non-ideological advice to parents, it all too often reveals itself to be a velvet-glove censorship agency, seemingly devoted to reactionary and defensive cultural standards.”

* Sounds like fun: “With its sex-obsessed young heroine, ‘Turn Me On, Dammit!’ goes where few movies have gone,” and like the rare movie that actually goes where other movies haven’t.

* Why Don’t You Do Something Other Than Sit at Your Computer? (Side question: “Is your computer depressing you?”)

* The idea of the “food desert” is fading. I’m not sure it was ever real, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it in your proposals.

* $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners. Wow.

* A short, accurate description of the long-term problems in Europe. This is also, on some level, about how people form groups and act in those groups. (“Americans in Massachusetts and Americans in Mississippi do feel themselves part of the same country, sharing language and culture. Germans and Spaniards do not feel the same.”) See further Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind.

* “Most men won’t be allowed to admit this, but the new HBO show [Girls] is a disastrous celebration of entitlement and helplessness.”

* Why you should read Before the Lights Go Out.

* Testing the Teachers, and how do we know what we’re actually getting out of college?

More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads).

More and more, people are also writing in pieces. This isn’t intrinsically bad—this blog is a blog and not a book—but it is the kind of thing you should be cognizant of, because grant writing embodies the opposite tendencies: it’s about long-form, deliberate writing and cohesion. It rewards people who can sit down, focus on a long block of text, and emerge hours later with a coherent set of pages that string similar themes together, almost novelistically. Grant writing it closer to War and Peace than to, say, blogging.

I, like a lot of people, have become aware of the dangers posed by Internet distractions. And I’m more aware when I’m working on a proposal, since the temptation to open Firefox for non-research purposes is always there. It can be done in a second. And then I’m out of the zone for fifteen minutes or more. Furthermore, because of the need to write needs assessments, I can’t simply turn off the Internet altogether (as I can when I’m writing other long-form material).

Still: lots of us are being pulled in too many intellectual directions. We’re reading in “pieces,” or in fragments. But if we’re going to write effective proposals, we have to do the opposite: read in large wholes, and write that way too. The best proposals often have an almost novelistic sense of interwoven themes.

The rest of Cunningham’s essay discusses literature, but the point about the fragmentation of writing—and, by extension, attention—is one that grant writers and would-be grant writers should heed. Governments and foundations aren’t known for being in the vanguard of progress. They aren’t demanding written material in fragments. No RFP has asked that applicants respond via Twitter.

Be ready to write long and coherently.

* Which would a great name for a detective or fantasy hero.

Why is this [grant-making process] done at all? It continues to be a mystery to me. What is the point of grant making? If it is to give money to a qualified applicant, then what are all these games about? It appears that making the process as arcane and frankly, insane as possible.

There are at least two big issues here: why does the U.S. grant-making system persist in the weird way it does, and how did it evolve into its current state? My guess is that the two are linked, and the big reason it remains involve signaling. By creating byzantine, inefficient requirements for distributing money, government agencies and, to a lesser extent, foundations, ensure that the only people who will bother are the ones who really, really want the money.

The devotion of resources to a pointless-seeming endeavor signals the applicant’s commitment. Applicants who care the most will invest the most in deciphering RFPs, and those who don’t care as much won’t. The grant-maker can’t tell who is qualified, but they grant-maker can try to get applicants to signal their quality (one sees something similar in college applications: most colleges teach orders of magnitude more than high schools do, so one could see high school as a long signaling process for college, which is part of Bryan Caplan’s argument in his forthcoming book The Case Against Education). In this reading, insanity becomes sane because funders are trying to gauge the fundee’s commitment level using the best tools they have, which aren’t very good.

Professional grant writers—like us—are a logical byproduct of this process: many nonprofit and public agencies specialize in providing services rather than in writing abstruse, detailed proposals. So people who are good at service delivery specialize at that, and they don’t specialize in plumbing, vehicle repair, grant writing, and so forth. This may also be why nonprofits find it hard to hire good grant writers: most don’t actually specialize in grant writing.

If you’re curious about how signaling works more generally, there is a rich evolutionary biology literature summarizing it.

The next sentence is the sort that, like any sentence using the phrase “the Progressive Era,” may come dangerously close to boring you to death, but bear with it and me. As far as I can tell, the roots of the grant-making process lies in political reforms that got started in the Progressive Era and reached their culmination in the 1960s. Prior to the 1930s and the New Deal, the Federal government and state governments basically didn’t spend enough money to have a grant-making apparatus and bureaucracy like they do now. To the extent such activities happened at all, services were provided directly, or via pass-throughs straight to agencies.

Such practices engendered lots of corruption—see further Chicago, New Jersey, All the King’s Men, etc. In addition, there were problems related to whether, say, the feds in DC actually had any idea what people in urban Chicago, or rural Mississippi, or Oxnard, California, might actually need. So the inability to decide need and the problem of corruption yielded a solution: instead of the feds (or state governments) simply funding services directly or picking organizations to run programs, they’d run competitions to see who has the best proposal for the provision of services.

This being the government, however, anything that starts simple rapidly complexifies, like cellular automata (for another example of this phenomenon, see the tax code). So over the last couple of decades, Congress creates lots of well-meaning laws; rule-making bodies make well-meaning rules; courts probably throw their spices into the broth; some organizations steal or misuse the money, thus leading to more rules so that Won’t Happen Again; and finally one gets to something like Upward Bound, which was the subject of my original post, and had something like a hundred pages of guidance written in a style only especially obtuse lawyers could love. Not only that, but the difficulty of understanding an entire RFP becomes hard even for the agency issuing the RFP, which increases the likelihood of errors or internal contradictions on their part—without even discussing the grant writers who are trying to decipher the instructions.

Around the office, we’ve observed that a lot of grant applications could be done via postcard: will you perform these services for x participants over y months and achieve z outcomes? Then you’re in the running. If that happened, we’d be out of business, of course, but there’s no real political constituency for the simplification of the grant-making process. There is a real constituency for the simplification of the tax code, and that’s an issue that’s gone nowhere and appears likely to continue to go nowhere, like that one bridge.

This isn’t a surprise to Seliger + Associates, as we’re on the pre-approved grant writing vendor list for the City and didn’t receive any calls or RFPs from the City inquiring if we had the capacity to prepare one or more grant applications, as we have in the past. And if we had, this is the daunting gantlet we would have faced before writing a single word in the grant proposal:

• the City has separate pre-approved lists for almost every City department;
• apparently none are in a database easily accessed by departments that need grant writing assistance;
• just because you have been approved by one department of the City, does not mean that you will not have to prepare and submit, almost, if not exactly the same paperwork for each and every department you want to work for.

If you bill by the hour, you could go out of business just preparing paperwork.

Then, if you’re chosen to bid on the specific job, you have to again fill out the same/similar paperwork again to turn in with your bid documents.
These problems, combined with the incompetence or laziness cited in the article, are the real reason the City lost out on more than $125,000,000 in stimulus funds. The City hasn’t realized that every check has a cost.

Nonprofits, however, can learn something important from this: pursue every opportunity you can. Be nimble, like a small business, instead of sclerotic, like the City of Los Angeles.

* Stop Fixating on the Administrative Overhead of Non-Profits:

I’ve heard from more than one frantic foundation fundraiser who can’t raise a dime for overhead–everyone wants their money earmarked for programs. None of the donors seem to realize that even at a very well run charity, the electric bill, accountants, IT staff, grantwriters, compliance experts, investment managers, and yes, fundraisers do not actually get paid by good fairies who drop off wee buckets o’ gold at the beginning of every month. Or that unless you have all those boring-yet necessary things, you cannot actually run any programs.

* The Internet won the Congressional battle against censorship. This time.

* Funny grant fact of the day: the Family Planning Services Grants program was released on Valentine’s Day. One other curious fact about the program: it promises “grants” in the plural, yet only one award is expected.

* California dissolves redevelopment agencies.

* The Affordable Care Act continues to give; the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Research Program first appeared in 2010 and, as our subscribers know, it came back for another round recently.

* “This might seem a small thing — hey, so what if these foreign jet-setters endure some hassle? — but I think it is emblematic of some cumulatively larger issues. Americans are habituated to griping about our airports and airlines, but I sense that people haven’t internalized how comparatively backward and unpleasant this part of our “modern” infrastructure has become.”

* Do STEM Faculties Want Undergraduates To Study STEM Fields?

* Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive.

* “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.”

* Great idea: “Legislation in Florida would allow parents to vote to restructure a public school into a private or charter model.”

* Make playgrounds are safe but boring and kids won’t use them.

* For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage. This quote from the article: “Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind” reminds me of Bryan Caplan’s post “Poverty, Conscientiousness, and Broken Families,” where he says, “even when [the authors] are talking about men, low female conscientiousness is implicit. After all, conscientious women wouldn’t associate with habitually unemployed men in the first place – not to mention alcoholics, addicts, or criminals.”

* Government is not the only field in which people routinely have trouble using language.

* “How to Fight The Man:”

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition. This is more or less what happened to Jefferson Bethke. [. . .]

Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.

* Here’s some counterintuitive advice for literary critics: don’t read other critics before you write your review or criticism.

* Why the video pros are moving away from Apple. And I can’t blame them.

The RFP was an extraordinary work of indirection, with 130-something pages of instructions supporting a 72-page narrative (counting “Competitive Priorities”). Upward Bound is one of the Department of Education’s “TRIO” programs—there used to be three: Upward Bound, Educational Opportunity Centers, and Student Supportive Services, but now there are five or six. Another TRIO program, Educational Opportunity Centers (“EOC”), was released last May, and that RFP is particularly close to my heart because I used its “Plan of operation” section to teach my University of Arizona students technical writing. The EOC RFP was also overly long and overly verbose, but its similarity to Upward Bound meant that looking at that proposal would help me with the new one.

It also included a trap, because the Department of Education made subtle but real changes between the way they phrased requirements from one program to the other. For example, under “Project Need” in EOC, the first two major headers said something like, “Low-incomes in the target area” and “High percentage of target area residents with education completion levels below the baccalaureate level.” The UB RFP says, “The income level of families in the target area is low” and “The education attainment level of adults in the target area is low.” So an applicant who applies for both EOC and UB can reuse data—but a straight copy-paste will result in the Department of Education knowing that you’ve done so. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Department of Education does this intentionally, like Van Halen and their legendary M&M Rider:

The rider’s “Munchies” section was where the group made its candy-with-a-caveat request: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance–lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

Van Halen uses brow M&M’s as a signal, and the Department of Education is using section headers the same way. If your section headers are identical to the EOC section heads, your proposal will be thrown out altogether, or at least have its points lowered.

There are other perils stashed in this RFP, too: its writers practically hide the location of the material you’re supposed to respond to. The RFP directs you to page 102, but the actual narrative requirement in the form of the “selection criteria” to which you’re supposed to respond starts on page 70 (of a 132-page RFP). And the narrative section lists “Objectives” on page 71, but you have to be cognizant enough to know that you have to copy the objectives listed on page 93.

Read and tread carefully when preparing to write a grant proposal.

EDIT: A former Department of Education reviewer wrote us to say:

I read with interest your article on Upward Bound grants in which you spoke of “traps” by the Department of Education. You clearly are experienced and are doing a great service for fledgling grants writers. However, I have served as a reader for several TRIO programs, and my experience is that the Department of Education NEVER puts traps in their RFPs. They work very hard to see that readers are fair and generally positive about the grant process. Of course, they also want consistency to keep down on appeals. The reason that I am writing is that you are doing your readers a disservice by making them think that there is a “magic phrase” that might result in acceptance for funding or rejection of a grant. The Department of Education wants writers to address the problems in a straightforward manner and teachers readers to reward clear writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) Good luck.

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