Grant Writing Confidential

Before starting to write a proposal, it is good idea to understand the project concept and stick with this concept throughout the various drafts. If you don’t, the probability of creating an incomprehensible mess is high. In other words, it is a spectacularly bad idea to make big changes during the final stages of finishing the proposal.

This simple truth was reinforced during the recent HUD SuperNOFA season, when we experienced the grant equivalent of The China Syndrome. We were writing a proposal for one of the SuperNOFA programs on behalf of a public sector client for whom we had written the same proposal twice previously. Both those applications were funded. The program itself was and is very complex, and it requires close collaboration between city and county entities to meet HUD requirements. Since we were familiar with our client’s past approach and our contact person did not correct us during our scoping session, we wrote the first and second drafts based on what we thought was the project concept. After she reviewed the second draft, I got a panicked phone call from our client telling me that she had decided to radically change the service delivery model, even though we were within three or four days of the deadline. I told her this was a very bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but she persisted—with predictably disastrous results. Although the proposal got submitted, it was a nail-biter and probably went in with lots of mistakes.

Here’s why . . .

Most proposals have intertwined narratives in which program elements are threaded throughout the document. In the example above, one major issue was a collaborator, and our client decided change its role at the last minute. While I made a yeoperson’s effort to find and correct all of these instances, it is likely that some were missed, meaning that the proposal probably went in with internal inconsistencies. Such gaffes are not obvious if one has read the draft proposal a dozen times, but they will stand out like neon lights to a reviewer and lead to lowered points, if not outright laughter in the event that a group is reviewing the proposal. The particular change she made also affected the budget and budget narrative. For HUD proposals, there are up to four budget forms that must be completed, in addition to the budget narrative, so a last minute change may introduce budget errors. In federal grant reviewing, budgets are usually not scored, but inconsistencies between budget forms and the narrative can be a fast way to the exit.

The HUD example was a grants.gov submission, causing another major problem. As faithful readers will recall from Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century, grants.gov allows itself up to 48 hours to declare that an acceptable upload has been received. Thus, we always recommend that grants.gov deadlines be moved up 2 – 3 days to allow for file corruption, server downtime, etc. In this case, our client had us making last minute changes to the proposal up to the night before the deadline, which meant the application kit file was not ready for upload until the morning of the due date. Of course, when she tried to upload the file, grants.gov rejected it. It took all day and hours on the phone with grants.gov tech support for her to resolve the problem. If she had not insisted on major last minute changes, the upload attempt would have been done two days earlier and the problem resolved without drama. Since the proposal request was $3 million, there was a lot on the line.

The moral of this sad tale is to get the project concept straight at the start and resist the urge to change directions near the end of the process. Successful grant writers must be single-minded to produce a technically correct proposal on time. Radical alterations to the proposal concept at the last minute is a variation on The Perils of Perfectionism. Grant writers should work on a proposal until they’ve worked on it enough, then button it up, submit it in time to easily meet the deadline and retire to a nearby bar for a cocktail or two. Try a Negroni which is an excellent way to get over a stressful proposal writing experience. So is the terrific new Western, Appaloosa, which I saw over the weekend. Grant writers would do well to model the determination of Ed Harris’ Virgil Cole and Viggo Mortensen’s Everett Hitch, two hired-gun “lawmen,” who keep their eye on the prize in protecting a town that may not be worth protecting. They don’t get distracted and they don’t change their purpose, just as grant writers much focus on completing the proposal. High Noon imparted vital lessons in the linked post, and so does Appaloosa.

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EDIT: You can find a follow-up describing how this experience ends in Now It’s Time for the Rest of the Story.

Today’s post comes from an email sent by someone with broad experience in the grant world who prefers to remain anonymous. His speculation about one RFP demonstrates how the drafting process used to construct RFPs can contribute to an unpalatable final product. Grant writers, like lawyers, must be able to understand writing that simultaneously tries to eliminate ambiguity while conveying all the information necessary for an applicant to understand the program. These conflicting forces can cause the problems described here and elsewhere.

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Here’s what I think about how one RFP was constructed.

I know the Director of the agency in question personally. He is knowledgeable and brilliant in many ways, but not terribly good at verbal communication. He states what he wants somewhat awkwardly, even when he’s totally right. The process starts with him. He calls in his assistant, or whoever is in charge of putting an RFP together, and tells her what he wants. She gets most of it right and converts it into RFP legal-sounding gobbledegook. He can read RFP legal sounding gobbledegook, so he passes on it, probably more quickly than he should because he has a lot on his plate.

What she writes then gets passed along to various branch administrators for their comments and suggestions. They think about legal stuff and mostly about details that have to be completed if the contractor will be acceptable. They include things that are not relevant to the actual work but which make their effort to judge the proposal easier…like being sure that the contractor puts tabs on each section (numbered 1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc.) and having the contractor sign a form indicating that his company has the proper insurance and that it lists its overhead rates. Since travel expense is involved, they have the contractor price the trips but are careful not to explain what the state’s car mileage rates are or what is allowed for hotels and meals. Let them try to guess, or plow through the state rates, if they exist, on the Internet. Throw in some language that says that each 1.1.2 section etc. is totally self contained.

That is, forbid the contractor from saying things like “see section 1.1.1 for this information.” [Jake's note: see my advice in Further Information Regarding the Department of Redundancy Department.] And give them firm warnings or threats. Say that otherwise the proposal will be disqualified. Include expressions like “submit one original and four copies” even though all copies look (and are) original in the electronic world. For the deadline, put in that the proposal has to be “on the desk of X person by 2 p.m. May 15th” but give only a post office box as the address, making the contractor hope that the people at the PO box will be able to find X person’s desk on time. And don’t give even a small hint about how much money is allowed for the proposal. Make them guess how much we have available. The most frustrating part is that the RFP doesn’t say how the computer generated paragraphs which are assembled into letters will get rewritten. Having already gone through this with another agency, we know what a huge task this is. We can say what’s wrong with a sample of the paragraphs and letters but our hands are tied about how they get revised and assembled.

The Director wants to have his staff be able to rewrite the computer generated letters we are to assess so he tells his assistant as much. She may not be used to this approach so she writes stuff that is rather unclear about what they want. Are we to do any teaching to accomplish this? I guess not, since we think the RFP says our work is to train the trainers how to teach the staff to write clearly, but it is not all that clear who we are to train. Experience tells us that the folks there need more than a little information if they are to revise their current training programs. The training materials we’ve seen deal mostly with grammar and usage but we know they need much, much more. We have to hope that the examples we provide will be able to be translated into teaching materials. It would be easier to do the training ourselves but we apparently won’t be allowed to do this.

We conclude that the best we can do is to outline the kinds of problems extant paragraphs and letters contain, then construct a process for their ultimate revision by someone unknown to us, who then assembles them into actual letters. We are to help prepare such people, not knowing exactly who we’re to help. So we’ll build an outline about what the department might do, if it has staff and technical capability to do it.

There’s more, of course, but that should exemplify our frustration a bit. So we propose, duck, and hope for the best. Maybe the best would be that they reject our proposal. That would be okay with us. But we sincerely want to help the Director and help our state as well.

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Isaac has experienced similar processes in working for and talking to agencies/organizations that issue RFPs. This death-by-committee effect isn’t unique to grant writing, but the combination of fear, pompousness, uncertainty, certitude and the like seems to lead to the production of especially unpalatable RFPs, and the nature of bureaucracies make potential reforms difficult to implement. In addition, RFP writers seldom have to respond to the RFPs they produce, or any other RFPs for that matter, and thus don’t understand the kinds of problems we describe. In the fifteen years Seliger + Associates has been in business, we’ve written numerous proposals across a broad array of subjects and have never been contacted by an issuing organization to ask how their RFPs might be improved. They don’t have to, of course, since as noted in Foundations and the Future and Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding, he who has the gold makes the rules.


“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” as the cliché says. In writing, the same is true, and writing done by committee usually comes out about as well as mass-produced food: serviceable at best, with the character of no character, and more commonly inedible. As the grant writer, it’s your job to deal with this output as best you can, and if you understand why RFPs are so hard to read and filled with repetition and other problems, you’ll be better equipped to deal with them.

“Dow Down 500! Dow UP 400! Lehman Brothers Bankrupt! President Proposes $700 Billion Bailout!”* It’s not been easy reading the morning paper the last few weeks without spilling my coffee. This morning’s Wall Street Journal featured Nonprofits Brace for Slowdown in Giving, a scary article about the prospect of nonprofits not being able to raise funds. The intrepid reporters, Mike Spector and Shelly Banjo, say:

The failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and pain at other big firms threaten to cut into the corporate and individual donations that more than a million nonprofit organizations rely on for basic operations and charitable programs.

Then assorted nonprofits are trotted out with tales of woe and portents of looming, dire cuts to staff and programs. The United Way of New York City is even going to sponsor “a town hall meeting on the future of nonprofits.” Yikes—maybe the sky is falling. But the magic words “grants” and “grant writing” were absent. The article assumes, like most Americans, that nonprofits exist solely with donations, art auctions, direct mail and the like, forgetting the vast amount of funding available in the form of grants from federal, state and local governments, as well as foundations. While it will undoubtedly be harder for a nonprofit to get a wealthy donor to part with their money, particularly one with ties to the financial sector, there are plenty of foundations, including those related to such booming industries as oil and technology, with tons of grant funds available, as well as billions from all levels of government.

Nonprofit executives should stop worrying about their Christmas card sale fundraiser or silent auction of obscure art pieces by even more obscure artists and get busy conducting grant source research and grant writing, especially because the federal year ends September 30 and the flood of FY ‘09 RFPs will arrive in short order like the buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio. In addition, the current chaos in the financial and housing sectors are sure to result in new programs and higher levels of funding for some existing programs, particularly those in various economic development and job training programs. For example, I would expect the Public Works and Economic Development Program of the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to get a big boost in its appropriation, which EDA will try mightily to spend quickly for the same reason nonprofits should spend their grant funds quickly. Seliger + Associates wrote lots of funded EDA grants in the mid-1990s, following the last big recession, for projects ranging from street construction in LA to rehabilitating a salmon cannery in Alaska. Similarly, expect lots of new money to be available from the Department of Labor for Youthbuild and other training programs. The bailout bill currently being negotiated between the Bush administration and Congress should be lit up like a Christmas tree with shiny “grant ornaments” before passing.

Even if I am wrong, however, and no new programs or unexpected funding results from the emerging recession, there are still plenty of grant funds available for nonprofits willing to put in the hard work to find them and apply. When economic times are good, it’s relatively easy for almost any nonprofit to lure the usual suspects** into donating. But times are not good; so, if want to keep your nonprofit going, stop worrying and start (grant) writing.

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* My favorite quote on government funding was by the late Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who famously may or may not have said,“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money”.

** For a mind bending experience even harder than understanding federal regulations, see a truly great and surreal film, The Usual Suspects. Who was Keyser Soze, anyway?

Lots of bloviating on community organizing has occurred on cable news shows and in various newspaper opinion pieces in recent months due to Senator Barack Obama’s background as a “community organizer.” Regardless of what Senator Obama did as a community organizer, almost all of the commentary is wrong. A good example is Peter Applebome’s New York Times piece, Feeling the Sting of Republican Barbs in which he describes community organizers as more or less social workers or case managers. But any community organizer worth his salt who came across a low-income person facing eviction would never fool around with trying to solve the individual’s problem. Rather, the organizer would try to identify the person’s and their neighbors’ self-interest to organize around the problem and thus help the community find an overall solution, while building an organizational structure for further efforts.

Unlike Mr. Applebome’s assertions, community organizing is also neither Democratic nor Republican, but is largely apolitical, since it is by definition in opposition to the power structure presumably oppressing the target community. In fact, Saul Alinsky,* the founder of the field, spent most of his life fighting Chicago’s Democratic machine politics. Given the fact that most cities are controlled by Democratic administrations these days, an active community organizer would probably be more likely to battle Democrats than Republicans. Remember that community organizers work on tangible local problems, not grandiose social policy issues.

Hey Sarah—Organize This is another inaccurate piece on community organizing. This one is by Thomas Geoghegan and appeared in Slate. Mr. Geoghegan takes Governor Sarah Palin to task for making fun of community organizers. Leaving aside the politics, community organizers must have very thick skins and good senses of humor and are unlikely to be terribly worried about verbal insults. What caught my attention, however, was the author’s startling claim that “Organizers break laws if they have to. Mayors believe in order.” As a former community organizer, I can attest that organizers try very hard not to break laws because this is exactly what politicians want them to do in order to discredit the organization they are building. Also, politicians have their hands on the levers of power (e.g., police, building inspectors, etc.) and can easily apply legal pressure if the community organizer encourages law breaking. Rather, a good community organizer uses clever civil disobedience within the framework of laws, depending on mayors and other power brokers to themselves break the law by overreacting. Most community organizing strategies are based on the assumption that politicians and their bureaucratic minions will overreact and break the law one way or another. In other words, Mr. Geoghegan got it just backwards. He says he’s never been an organizer, but has “known some,” apparently making him qualified enough to comment. This would be like me opining on the work of circus clowns just because I ran into a guy with bright orange hair, a bulbous red nose and size 22 floppy shoes at a cocktail party one night.

I am going on and on about community organizing mainly because I am so surprised to find the topic suddenly popular due to Senator Obama having captured the imagination of Americans with tales of community organizing on Chicago’s Southside. I have a fondness for the Southside because I received some community organizing training there many years ago, and, more recently, have written lots of funded proposals for a large nonprofit that serves the community. Faithful readers will know from posts like my first, They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal, and Déjà vu All Over Again—Vacant Houses and What Not to Do About Them, that I began my career as a community organizer in 1972 in the North Minneapolis ghetto. While community organizing had a certain cachet among us college student save-the-world types in the early 1970s, the whole concept seemed to have been lost in the mists of time until Barack Obama burst on the scene. Thus, I find myself waxing euphoric about my halcyon days in organizing.

Senator Obama and I appear to have at least one thing in common, having both been trained in Saul Alinksy style community organizing.* While I am unsure about Senator Obama’s actual training, I was fortunate to have learned from an affiliate of Alinksy’s Industrial Areas Foundation, which then existed in St. Paul, and I also attended some Alinsky training on Chicago’s Southside. So, I’m about as familiar with community organizing as anyone, having not only been trained, but also actually organized some pretty interesting stuff, including a Vacant Housing Task Force, self-help seminars for low-income homeowners and tenants, and a nonprofit cooperative hardware store that operated for a time in North Minneapolis. Not bad for a long-haired 21-year-old college student who was naive enough to think that he could use community organizing techniques to overcome just about anything.

Given the spectacular misrepresentations of community organizing in the popular media during this election cycle that I note briefly above, it was refreshing to open the New York Times on Sunday morning and finally find an opinion piece by Deepak Bhargava, Organizing Principles, which more or less got it right. Mr. Bhargava says:

It’s important to emphasize that organizers like Mr. Espey aren’t there to solve people’s problems for them — they’re there to teach people how to help themselves: to learn how to speak in public, to run a meeting, or to hold their own in a negotiation with an employer, a landlord or a policy maker. Organizers teach people to work with — and challenge — politicians of every party.”

I’ve never run across Mr. Bhargava before, but he understands community organizers and community organizing. I have no idea what, if anything, Senator Obama accomplished as a community organizer, since I’ve never read about any specific accomplishments. I assume, however, he must have organized something. Community organizers are goal oriented, and, as I noted briefly above, I know exactly what I organized during my time as a community organizer. It is likely that this aspect of community organizing—wanting to achieve a discrete organizing goal instead of vague “helping the community” platitudes—helped me become a successful grant writer.

Like good community organizers, grant writers focus on completing the task, not talking about the process for completing the task. Anonymity is another aspect of community organizers that closely aligns with grant writers. Good community organizers never take the spotlight, deferring to the leaders they have nurtured to take the lead at press conferences, actions and the like. Similarly, grant writers largely toil without recognition, since we are just ghost writers for the others who accept the accolades of funded projects. Hey, maybe I’m actually more like James Bond than Barack Obama, since Mr. Bond definitely stays in the shadows, unlike emerging politicians.**

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*If you want to understand community organizing, read Saul Alinsky’s seminal books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, both of which I annotated like a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works.

** I for one will lift a Vesper when A Quantum of Solace opens in November. Although the movie probably doesn’t have much to do with the eponymous Ian Fleming story in the only Bond short story collection, For Your Eyes Only, it has been one of my favorite Bond yarns since I first read it as a 13-year-old. I am delighted that the Bond film franchise was reinvented with Casino Royale two years ago and remain hopeful for the next installment.

Grant programs are not based solely around rules (e.g. you must do this, you must not do that) or around guiding principles (e.g. you’re to help the medically indigent achieve better access to healthcare). Neither approach is absolutely correct, and preferences for each tend to go in cycles, like those of leniency and harshness in criminal justice. The question is which you should adhere to, and the more general answer is: rules when you write the proposal, principles when you run a program.

This post again gets at some of the ideas behind the trade-offs inherent in running grant-funded programs, as I discussed in More on Charities and alluded to in Foundations and the Future. Isaac dealt with part of the issue last week, in It’s a Grant, Not a Gift: A Primer on Grants Management, which discusses the absolute rules of budgets. Within those rules, however, there is room for interpretation: how much of the budget travel should be allocated in travel costs, and how much within that should be dedicated to local travel, for example? Renting a Ferrari for the Program Manager probably won’t cut it, but a reasonable mileage reimbursement rate for an appropriate number of miles, given the size of the service area, probably will. If you reshuffle your budget categories by under 10% of the total budget, your Program Officer likely won’t care, but if you decide after the fact to charge 90% of the Executive Director’s time to the project and you’re audited, the auditors very much will care.

One can see the specific issues between rules and principles in novels, as when a character in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red says, “Now that I’ve reached this age, I know that true respect arises not from the heart, but from discrete rules and deference.” The problem is that strict adherence to the rules of governing a particular grant program might actually result in inferior service: you can blindly continue an activity that is ineffective or, perhaps worse, run a program with a flawed project concept. Too strict adherence to principles can cause a different set of problems: they might be the wrong principles, or, worse, the unintended use of grant funds might constitute fraud.

The easy answer is, “find a happy medium,” which isn’t of much practical use when deciding what programs to apply for and how to fund an organization. The tension between rules and principles will probably always exist, like the tension between the orthodoxy of a movement and the reformers of a movement will always exist, regardless of the movement. In The Name of the Rose, much of the conflict revolves around schisms between ecclesiastical orders that question whether or not it is right to live in poverty. This, incidentally, is similar to questions of whether nonprofits should use more of their funds for direct services at the expense of making it easier to, say, attract good people, or whether they should allocate more to administrative expenses as a way to provide better services. Rules might dictate this—or principles. Regardless of which does, those who seek simple solutions to complex problems are often wrong and often have little sense of history between the complex problems in the first place. Both the movement toward rules and toward principles can be a good thing. Too many rules are stifling, and principles that are too general can lead to abuse.

So what should you do, the person who actually runs grant programs? Should you follow what seems best regardless of rules or adhere strictly to what a program orders you to do? There is no answer—there are only particular situations that might arise as a consequence of applying to some programs rather than others, but if you have some idea of the trade-offs involved, you’re going to be better equipped to understand the issues before you. You’ll also be better equipped to understand which programs you should apply for and how you should use what money you earn.

I was in LA over Labor Day weekend and, at a pool party, chatted with a semi-retired CPA who has been hired by a large nonprofit hospital to help with an audit of a federal grant. The audit is being performed under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular No. A-133. OMB publishes a variety of circulars covering all sorts of topics. Some, such as A-133, are of great importance to nonprofit and public agency grant recipients, but are routinely ignored to the great peril of the agencies.

In the case of the LA hospital I discussed over daiquiris*, the organization was so surprised and elated at getting the grant that they treated it like a Christmas present. In other words, even though the hospital is a multi-million dollar operation with a full-fledged accounting department, they completely failed to follow federal accounting rules in implementing the grant. They spent the money more or less without regard to terms of the RFP and did not follow A-133 requirements. When faced with the prospect of an unsmiling federal audit team and an unflattering story in the LA Times, they brought in a knowledgeable CPA to straighten out the mess.

The issue resonates with me because, in addition to writing more proposals than I care to think about, I’ve also had the thankless task of managing numerous grants. My favorite story about grant management concerns a large Department of Energy project for electric cars during the late 1970s that I wrote when I worked for the City of Lynwood. This long-forgotten program gave the city about $1 million to buy and operate ten electric vehicles, which proved to be slow and unreliable, making them perfect for a municipal fleet. We were unlucky enough to be selected for an audit and I got tagged to handle it. The auditor turned out to be from the Department of Defense, since the newly created Department of Energy was too fresh to have its own auditors. I settled the fellow down in a conference room with donuts, an essential tool for all audits, and he asked his first question: “What product do you produce in this facility?” Since we were at City Hall, I smiled and responded: “Promises.” The audit went downhill from there.

Based on that experience and many others, here are some basic tips on managing grants:

• If you don’t have a finance director familiar with grant accounting, find an outside accounting firm that is and hire them to set up your grant-related accounts and procedures.
• Make sure the person responsible for managing the grant has obtained, read and understands the relevant regulations, including OMB Circulars for federal grants.
• Spend the grant funds as quickly as you can, since funders don’t want the money back. If an agency fails to spend a grant and returns the funds, the funder will be very unlikely to award another grant.
• Make sure the funds are spent in accordance with the grant agreement. It is important that the agency can show “maintenance of effort,” meaning that whatever was being done before is not being reduced following grant receipt and that the the agency is not supplanting existing funds with grant funds. For example, if the grant is for after school programming, it is not okay to use the grant to pay for current after school programming so that the District Superintendent can remodel her office. If an audit disallows expenditures, the agency will have to pay the money back, which is not an attractive prospect.
• Keep accurate records, including expenditures, personnel records, activities and in-kind support. That’s right, if you’ve included in-kind support as a match in the budget, you may have to prove that it was provided, so keeping track of volunteer hours, value of referral services provided, etc., is essential. Even innocent and detailed records can cause problems during an audit. For example, while serving as Development Manager for the City of Inglewood**, I had to handle an audit for an Economic Development Administration (EDA) grant. The grant involved demolition, which meant Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements for all persons paid through the grant. When the auditor began pulling expenditure records (for each expenditure, this means a check request, purchase order and cancelled check) for workers, it turned out that every demolition worker had the same address, which was a check cashing store. The contractor was apparently having the workers cash their checks and return a good portion of the so-called “prevailing wages” the workers were supposed to receive to the contractor. To avoid disallowance of costs, we had to chase down the contractor once we figured this out to get him to provide back pay to a whole bunch of suddenly very happy demolition workers.

The secret to grant management is to remember that everything related to a grant is likely public information, so don’t do anything you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the local newspaper. As long as you think your grant funded trip to Las Vegas will pass the smell test for having something to do with solving the challenges facing at-risk youth being funded by a Department of Education grant, I say, Viva Las Vegas!. Just keep in mind, that, when it comes to grants, what happens in Vegas may not stay in Vegas.

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*I’m talking real Hemingway “Papa Doble” daiquiris, not the disgusting pre-made concoctions found in most bars.

** As Tupac said and as quoted previously, “Inglewood always up to no good.”

In Mordecai Richler’s hilarious novel Barney’s Version, a discussion arises:

“We’ve got a problem this year. There’s been a decline in the number of anti-Semitic outrages.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that a shame,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m against anti-Semitism. But every time some asshole daubs a swastika on a synagogue wall or knocks over a stone in one of our cemeteries, our guys get so nervous they phone me with pledges.”

In some ways, the worse things are, the better they are for nonprofits, because funding is likely to follow the broad contours of social issues. For example, before the Columbine shooting, the vast majority of money for at-risk youth and after school programs targeted inner cities. A few years later, money began appearing for suburban and rural schools, the thinking being that now all teenagers were at risk simply by virtue of being teenagers. A case in point is the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which emerged around the time of Columbine; we’ve written at least a dozen or so funded grants, mostly in non-inner city areas. In fact, one funded 21st CCLC grant we wrote served Aspen, CO—an area not usually seen as a hotbed of social needs.

It’s not even clear that the conventional wisdom of the rationale behind the programs, which attacked the conventional wisdom of what was supposedly behind the shootings, was correct, as Slate.com argues here. But for grant writing purposes, that’s less important than noticing the direction of the grant winds. If you were a suburban school district trying to fund, say, an art programs, and you read the Federal Register, you might’ve noticed new funding or shifts in emphasis. You could’ve combined your art program with nominal academic support, thus widening your program focus enough to make a plausible applicant for the 21st CCLC program and thus getting the money to carry out your central purpose: art.

This isn’t to say that you should fraudulently misrepresent what you do, because you shouldn’t, or that it’s necessary to change your program’s purpose haphazardly; you want to notice the wind but not necessarily be driven by it. Nonetheless, smart nonprofits find ways of getting the grant funds they need by shackling one idea to another, more fundable idea, particularly if “fundable” means a live RFP is on the street. Sometimes clients have ideas for programs they want to run that can be made vastly more fundable with relatively minor tweaks. We often suggest and execute those tweaks.

It’s not uncommon for nonprofits to shift their focus with time, funding, and opportunities. This will correlate to some extent with the general media landscape. To use another trend, homeless programs were more prevalent in the late 80s and early 90s. Today, an organization that once worked solely on homeless issues might expand its area of expertise to related areas, like affordable housing, prisoner reentry, or foster care emancipation. The latter problem has gained some traction in recent years as various levels of government have come to realize that few 17-year-olds are ready to be self-supporting the moment they turn 18, resulting in in crime, drug use, and prostitution as common outcomes among this population, as depicted in Charles Bock’s novel Beautiful Children.

Finally, organizations that pursue grants in other areas should remember that administrative funds from one area might end up subsidizing another; this commonly happens with service contracts, such as substance abuse treatment and foster care and can also occur with grants. In the near future, Isaac is going to describe how and why to acquire a Federally Approved Cost Allocation Plan and resulting Indirect Cost Rate, which is a great way to secure general purpose administrative funds to support multi-program operations. By pursuing grants related to your nominal field of expertise, you can in effect diversify and avoid major problems if there’s a decline in your version of the number of anti-Semitic outrages. Don’t put all your investments in a single stock, and don’t invest all your grant writing and service energy in a single cause, lest you discover that specialization has led you to an evolutionary dead end.

Faithful readers know of my Blue Highways post about driving to LA with my daughter following her college graduation last spring. This is my year for road trips, as I recently drove with Jake from Seattle to his new life as a English Literature Ph. D. candidate at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I insisted on a somewhat circuitous route via Salt Lake City, eventually winding up driving on a quintessential blue highway through one of my favorite places—Monument Valley.* Many readers would immediately recognize Monument Valley because they’ve been there vicariously in endless Westerns and other movies, particularly seven films directed by John Ford. To most most of the world’s movie fans, Monument Valley is the American West. One of the most interesting aspects of visiting or staying in Monument Valley is that one hears a cacophony of languages, since it is so popular with European and other foreign tourists.**

John Ford’s greatest Western is undoubtedly The Searchers, an epic tale of single-minded determination that shows off Monument Valley in all the glory of VistaVision. I got out the commemorative DVD of The Searchers that Jake gave me a few years ago and watched it again with a fried who’d never seen it. He was impressed, as most are by the striking themes and images. John Wayne’s maniacal lead character, Ethan Edwards, spends five years tearing around Monument Valley looking for his kidnapped niece, Debbie, played by a young and beautiful Natalie Wood. Accompanying Ethan is Debbie’s naive, but equally determined, half-brother, Martin Pauley, played by Jeffrey Hunter.*** The movie’s tension is built around whether Ethan will kill Debbie, because of the implied “fate worse than death” she has presumably suffered at the hands of her American Indian captors, or if Martin protect her from Ethan’s wrath. I will not spoil the outcome, except to note the last scene, which is of Ethan standing alone in the doorway of the ranch house framing Monument Valley in the distance, having rejected the comforts of hearth and family for the anti-civilization of the wilderness:

This is one of the best ending images of any movie, as it establishes the otherness of the character in the best tradition of Cooper’s Natty Bumpo in The Leatherstocking Tales.

This has much to do with grant writing: throughout the movie, Ethan teaches Martin how to stick with a challenge, tossing off the most famous line of the movie, “That’ll be the day,” when confronted with suggestions that he give up, can’t possibly find Debbie, etc. Grant writers, who must persevere to complete the proposal no matter what happens, need this attitude as well. Just as for Ethan, the task is all about finding Debbie, the grant writer’s job is to complete a technically correct proposal in time to meet the deadline no matter what.

We keep harping on the importance of meeting deadlines in this blog, but this really is the heart of grant writing. So, the next time someone tells you that you’ll never finish your needs assessment, budget narrative, or attachments, just lean back in your Aeron chair like John Wayne in the saddle, and say, “That’ll be the day.” In addition, the way Ethan informally tutors Martin during The Searchers illustrates how grant writing is best learned: by hanging around an accomplished grant writer. Perhaps instead of the foolish grant writing credentials we like to poke fun at, we should start a medieval-style Grant Writing Guild in which we indenture would-be grant writers at age 12, since apprenticeship is a pretty good model for learning such obscure skills as grant writing, glass blowing, horse-shoeing and seafaring. That could lead to a great memoir entitled, “Two Years Before the RFP.”**** For more on the subject of never giving up, see Seth Grodin’s blog post, The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue).

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* For those planning to visit Monument Valley, try to a get a room at Goulding’s Lodge, the historic inn on the Navajo Reservation that was used by John Ford and many other filmmakers as a base for operations. The Lodge has an unsurpassed view of the Valley, along with a small but engaging museum.

** Jake and I helped a Swiss crew push their rather odd looking solar powered car out of a ditch. Like John Ford, they could find no better backdrop than the Valley for showcasing their work.

*** TV cognoscenti will remember that Jeffrey Hunter was the original captain in the pilot for Star Trek.

*** I’ve never actually read Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, but I lived in San Pedro many years ago and this book arose endlessly in cocktail party chatter. I’m not sure anyone has actually read it in about 100 years, but I am sure I will hear from at least one devoted Dana fan.

* Imagine our surprise at seeing a client on the front page of CNN:

“AIDS in America today is a black disease,” says Phill Wilson, founder and CEO of the institute and himself HIV-positive for 20 years. “2006 CDC data tell us that about half of the just over 1 million Americans living with HIV or AIDS are black.”

We wrote a two-million dollar funded CDC Capacity Building Assistance to Improve the Delivery and Effectiveness of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Prevention Services for Racial/Ethnic Minority Populations grant for the Black Aids Institute in 2004.

* I discussed how to attract and retain grant writers by relying on Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software for guidance. He also wrote a short book, Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent on the subject. To reiterate my earlier point: although Spolsky is writing about programmers, much of what he says is equally applicable to any intellectual worker—including grant writers. Buy a copy and put it on your bookshelf next to Write Right!.

(37signals has a good article on environment and productivity echoing Spolsky’s points.)

* The L.A. Times ran an article attempting something unusual—fresh perspectives on teen pregnancy:

Teenage motherhood may actually make economic sense for poorer young women, some research suggests. For instance, long-term studies by Duke economist V. Joseph Hotz and colleagues, published in 2005, found that by age 35, former teen moms had earned more in income, paid more in taxes, were substantially less likely to live in poverty and collected less in public assistance than similarly poor women who waited until their 20s to have babies. Women who became mothers in their teens — freed from child-raising duties by their late 20s and early 30s to pursue employment while poorer women who waited to become moms were still stuck at home watching their young children — wound up paying more in taxes than they had collected in welfare.

Eight years earlier, the federally commissioned report “Kids Having Kids” also contained a similar finding, though it was buried: “Adolescent childbearers fare slightly better than later-childbearing counterparts in terms of their overall economic welfare.”

To evade the set of angry e-mails and comments likely to follow, I’ll point out that the thrust of the article isn’t that teen pregnancy is a great idea—it’s those involved, rhetorically and otherwise, in the issue might want to consider alternate viewpoints and explanations rather than go back to the usual birth control and sex ed versus abstinence debate.

“Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment” uses a very clever method to get around the correlation-is-not-causation problem in research areas like this, and it’s one of the academic papers underlying the article. You can read it at Duke economist V. Joseph Hotz’s website (warning: .pdf link).

EDIT: In addition, compare these pieces to our later post, What to do When Research Indicates Your Approach is Unlikely to Succeed: Part I of a Case Study on the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program RFP.

* The Wall Street Journal has done excellent reporting on the housing perhaps-crisis, as Isaac mentioned previously. Now comes “Philadelphia’s Housing Woes May Provide Lesson for Lawmakers:”

One point is being missed in this squabble: No matter what Congress does, some cities will end up owning more crumbling houses as owners fail to pay taxes and do their maintenance. Taxpayers will foot the bill. The bigger question is: How can cities quickly get this property back into productive use?

For perspective on this debate, it helps to stroll through Philadelphia’s Ludlow neighborhood, about a mile north of the city center. In this neighborhood and others like it, the Philadelphia Housing Authority became one of the main property owners in the 1970s and 1980s, acquiring homes through foreclosures after owners failed to pay their mortgages or taxes.

One thing you can be sure the solution will involve: grants.

* Well-run career programs that incorporate college counseling and prep classes help low-income students according to a study cited by the New York Times. This is at least a somewhat better study than most, as the New York Times says:

To compare similar students, all those who volunteered to join a career academy at each school were randomly assigned either to participate in the academy or to serve as part of a control group outside the academy.

Nonetheless, it still suffers from the cherry-picking flaw most grant-funded programs do, and it’s encapsulated in one word: volunteered. Those who are at least smart and willing enough to seek help are be definition more likely to do better than those who don’t. Nonetheless, that the group receiving services did better still than the control group is encouraging.

* Freakonomics discusses advice to young and ludicrously rich philanthropists who don’t know much about the world:

They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.

* For those of you interested in the academic and systematic aspects of philanthropy more generally, check out the heavy hitters at Creative Capitalism, including Bill Gates, Richard Posner, Gary Becker, Clive Crook, Larry Summers, Ed Glaeser, and Gregory Clark. Alternately, if you want to wait, a book based on the discussions is supposed to be released in 2009. Conor Clarke explains why you might pay for something you can get free online.

* What’s mystery ingredient X for improving school outcomes? Marginal Revolution considers.

* More on parsing RFPs: The Partnerships for Innovation program wants you to:

1) stimulate the transformation of knowledge created by the research and education enterprise into innovations that create new wealth; build strong local, regional and national economies; and improve the national well-being; 2) broaden the participation of all types of academic institutions and all citizens in activities to meet the diverse workforce needs of the national innovation enterprise; and 3) catalyze or enhance enabling infrastructure that is necessary to foster and sustain innovation in the long-term.

That’s not easily understood and doesn’t answer the essential “what” question that an RFP should: what does the program demand that an Institute for Higher Education (IHE) do? The answer is probably “nothing,” and the National Science Foundation (NSF) probably could’ve just said, “We’re giving walking around money to universities so they can use it to fund research or donut eating. Enjoy!”

* An unintentionally funny RFP called the Sexually Transmitted Infections Cooperative Research Centers says:

The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to stimulate multidisciplinary, collaborative research that is focused on control and prevention of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) [...]

Surely I can’t be the only one to read a certain double meaning into “stimulate” in this context, given its juxtaposition with the program title.

* Slate points to a study that found TV watching among the very young might cause or contribute to autism.

People often find Grant Writing Confidential by searching for terms like “commission only grant writers,”* “free grant writers,” “free grant writing,” “free grant writing attorneys,” or variations on those themes. I see this just about every week when checking our blog stats, and so I’ll address these anonymous multitudes by saying that, in grant writing, you’re likely to get what you pay for. Caveat emptor. Others find us by searching for “free grant writing attorneys” and “free examples of written grants.” Those seeking example grants would do well not to use them, both because the writing is probably of low quality and, even if it isn’t, if one person can find them, so can everyone else—readers aren’t likely to be amused by three proposals all cribbing from the same source. Buying papers for college assignments exposes the lazy or indifferent student to the same manifold dangers.

The cliché goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In grant writing, many snake-oil salespeople of various stripes want to entice you with promises of vast quantities of free money that turn out to be nothing but a mirage. For example, you may have seen infomercials for Matthew Lesko, the doofus dressed in a question mark-covered suit who touts billions of dollars for the average guy. Think about it logically: were there really this vast flow of money out there, wouldn’t everyone be seeking or taking it?** The story doesn’t pass the credulity test. Free grant writing services don’t exist, and in looking for them, you’re wasting your time. As in most things, you have three choices: pay a professional, learn how to do it yourself, or hope your sister marries a grant writer who wants to ingratiate himself with you. The first costs in monetary terms, the second in time terms, as well as being impossible for some people, and the third is just thrown in to illustrate the absurdity of the proposition. Notice that all three options have costs.

Even if someone did write high-quality, free proposals, they’d be so swamped by nonprofits seeking their services that they’d probably have a backlog stretching far into the future—certainly further than any live RFP. As a result, they wouldn’t be of any use to you, meaning that you’ve once again substituted time for money, just in a different sense. All this would be obvious to readers of Greg Mankiw’s excellent and surprisingly readable textbook, Principles of Economics, which deals with many of these issues and provides attractive graphs of supply and demand to boot. In this case, one would portray a grant writer offering free services as having far more takers than she has time, creating a shortage situation where the quantity of time available is less than the number of people who want to use that time. The Soviet Union discovered the hard way that goods and services without prices tend to produce sub-optimal outcomes, and I’m sure that most seekers of anything for nothing, including grant writing services, will find the same.

The search for “free grant writing training,” and variations on that theme is both more and less pernicious. Free grant writing training is about as likely to materialize as free grant writing, but since grant writing training is probably useless to begin with, as Isaac discussed in Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain, you won’t actually be losing much outside of your time, and you won’t be paying for bogus training. On the other hand, you’ll still be wasting your time, as you’d be better off paying for a journalism or English course at your local community college than you would with grant writing training, no matter the cost. Free grant writing training would lead to the same quality problems as free grant writers.

That’s the theory, anyhow, and the manifestation of that theory appears when people search for free grant writers. They’re never going to find those grant writers, and even if such grant writers are found, they won’t be very good, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be accessible. It would probably be more effective to focus on alchemy and through that invent a way to transmute base metals into gold and then sell that gold to fund the nonprofit.

Given that the history of humanity is one of credulous people being hoodwinked or duped by their own false hopes with the assistance of charlatans, I’m not expecting this post to stop many from searching for the philosopher’s stone, a cousin of alchemy. This post does at the very least explain why the quixotic search for free grant writing help will prove futile.

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* Fewer discover us using the terms more common to grant writers, like “contingent fee,” demonstrating perhaps the knowledge of those involved; last time I searched for “contingent fee grant writers,” every hit in the top 10 on Google explained why this is a bad idea or why the grant writers in question wouldn’t or shouldn’t do it, including us. Other nomenclature problems exist in queries: the person who sought “free grant writing attorneys” doesn’t get legal jargon right, as attorneys who donate their time do so pro bono, or “for the public good.” Even then, there’s no guarantee that attorneys are going to be any better at grant writing than anyone else, and they might very well be worse. At the very least they’re likely to be more expensive, as law school doesn’t pay for itself.

** An old joke: An economist is walking down the street and passes $20. A pedestrian stops him and says, “Hey, why didn’t you pick up that cash?” The economist says, “In an efficient market economy, if it were worth doing, someone would’ve already done it.”