Faithful readers know that I love 50’s Si-Fi and big animal/horror films. A forgotten gem of the genre is The Incredible Shrinking Man. This post could lead to a 2025 sequel: The Incredible Shrinking Grant Proposal. Yikes!!
Faithful readers also know that I started writing grant proposals shortly after the last Ice Age ended. As we’ve written about before, proposal formatting requirements change over time. Back in the ‘70s, proposal narratives were relatively short, since we used typewriters, liquid paper, Presstype (you have to be a geezer to remember this), and Xerox machines to produce hard copy submissions—that’s right, no computers, Internet, FedEx, etc. The NOFO* drafters of the day understood this and formatting requirements were few and relatively short narrative responses were required.**
As tech tools emerged in the mid-80s to ‘90s, the NOFOs slowly changed, allowing and sometimes requiring longer narrative sections, as well as attachments like organization charts, maps, logic models, flow diagrams, etc. After 911 and the great (mostly forgotten) ricin/anthrax scare, USPS and FedEx deliveries became chaotic and unreliable. This coincided with the rise of the Internet and universal adoption of Acrobat for submission documents—both government and foundation funders began switching to online proposal uploads and our old pal, grants.gov, was born.
By 2015, almost all federal and most state, local, and foundation proposals could only be submitted online. Around that time, NOFO formatting requirements began to change again. Attachments like job descriptions and org charts disappeared from NOFOs and the maximum lengths of narrative sections and the overall proposals once again began to shrink.
Case in point: when S + A started in 1993 and began writing SAMHSA proposals, the narrative max was usually 25 single-spaced pages. It’s now ten single-spaced pages, but the NOFOs are still the same length with the same number of questions to be answered. So, grant writing is now like building a ship in a bottle—most writers will agree that it’s almost always harder to write shorter than longer.
Recently S + A wrote several Head Start proposals for a nonprofit in a large West Coast city (note that these were city, not federal, Head Start proposals). There were six narrative response sections for each proposal—the maximum length for three sections was 2,000 characters (~1 ¼ single-spaced pages) and the other three was 4,000 characters (~1.5 single-spaced pages) for a total of ~ 7 single-spaced pages. But the NOFO was 81 single-spaced pages with dozens of arcane questions and Head Start program requirements.
We next wrote several proposals for different project concepts on behalf of a very large multi-billion dollar nonprofit hospital group on the East Coast. The funder is one of 50 largest foundations in the world, so this was supposedly a state-of-the art application process. This time there were seven narrative sections with maximums ranging from 1,500 – 5,000 characters, which was about five single-spaced pages in total. Keep in mind that each project concept was very complex, so we were building ships in even smaller bottles.
Another fun factoid. In both of the above examples, the narrative sections were paste-ins to online application forms. Thus, we could not use any text formatting (i.e., bold, italics, bullets, etc.), tables, charts, etc. So, the final proposals looked about the same as the ones I’d done with an IBM Selectric in 1975 (I have working Selectric III in my office for nostalgia purposes). To continue the mixing of metaphors, it’s Back to the Future for us grant writers. I don’t know where this trend is going but it seems to me that the era of 50 page proposal narrative (once common among Department of Education proposals) is over.
* Back then, the term of art was Request for Proposals (RFP). Over the years, other terms emerged and now most are called Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), so this is the term used in this post.
** In 1979, I wrote a $1M (~$6M in today’s dollars) funded DOE proposal that enabled the City of Lynwood (I was Grants Coordinator/Economic Development Director) in LA County buy a fleet of electric vehicles. Yes, there were EVs in 1979, but not very good ones. The final proposal, including the budget narrative, was about 10 single-spaced pages!
4 comments
Dean Spaulding
I agree, grant proposals are becoming more and more like grant haikus!
Kaitlin Corwin
Your writing has a way of resonating with me on a deep level. I appreciate the honesty and authenticity you bring to every post. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.
Donna Shelley
I have been grant writing since the early 80s. There have indeed been many changes. I once wrote grants for a municipality when the processes were moving from paper forms to computerized applications. Wow, the difficulties of broken systems, finicky (perhaps, badly written, computer programs), and a city firewall that made sending the proposal from one’s city computer almost impossible. Those last minute harrowing drives to UPS to send a box of 10 each of one proposal to the funder were life-altering. The warehouse scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was my idea of where most federal grant proposals were stored. And yes, the NOFOs are shrinking. Then there is the IRS’s latest decision regarding churches and politicians. Life is getting very weird for us in this line of work.
Benjamin C. Soko
Thanks so much for the message you have provided. Your message is exceedingly fascinating to me because of my interest in Grant Writing. I need more help for knowing how to write a Grant project.