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Surfing the Grant Waves: How to Deal with Social and Funding Wind Shifts

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.

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That’ll Be The Day: Searching for Grant Writing Truths in Monument Valley

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).


* 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.

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Links for 8-13-08

* 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.

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Tilting at Windmills and Fees: Why There is no Free Grant Writing Lunch and You Won’t Find Writers for Nothing

People often find Grant Writing Confidential by searching for terms like “commission only grant writers,”* “free grant writers,” “free grant writing,” or variations on those themes. I see such queries in our blog stats every week, so I’ll address these anonymous multitudes now: in grant writing, you’re likely to get what you pay for. Caveat emptor. Others find us by searching for “free examples of written grants.” Those seeking example grants shouldn’t 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 either. In looking for them, you’re wasting time. As with most services, 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, a competent grant writer offering free services would have 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.


* 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.”

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Reformers come and go, but HUD abides

Sudhir Venkatesh*, a Columbia University Sociologist, wrote “To Fight Poverty, Tear Down HUD,” and in it he suggests imploding HUD (like the infamous Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project) to increase regional collaboration. Having just finished a HUD proposal, it made me think about HUD’s evolution and previous attempts to reform the agency. Venkatesh gives a brief overview of HUD’s emergence in 1965 and its mission to carry on the Progressive Era’s notion that slums are the root of urban problems, rather than the inhabitants—see here for detail. Still, Venkatesh argues that HUD had outlived its usefulness and needs to be eliminated or reconstructed.

He uses the HOPE VI Program as a supportive example. Jake briefly covered Hope VI in “On Gangs and Proposals,” and the program more or less pays housing authorities to tear down public housing and replace projects with “mixed-income” developments, resulting in outcomes like those described in “American Murder Mystery.” Regardless of whether Venkatesh thinks HOPE VI and other competitive** HUD programs can be used to dismantle the agency, he’s wrong about the potential for reform because of the Godzilla of HUD, The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program.

CDBG agglomerates dozens of competitive HUD programs as they existed in the early 1970s into a single grant, awarded without competition to eligible cities and counties. Being designated as “CDBG-eligible” is the local jurisdictional equivalent of being elected Prom Queen. CDBG jurisdictions can spend the money however they want, provided that the use can somehow be justified under one of the eight statutory CDBG requirements—meaning that just about anything can be made CDBG eligible through the jurisdiction’s “Five-Year Comprehensive Plan” and associated “Annual Action Plans.”***

Thus, local officials often use CDBG funds as “walking around money” for favored nonprofits in the name of “developing viable communities,” which is the stated purpose of CDBG. The witch’s brew of local politicians, other people’s money, hand-in-the-till nonprofits and a plethora of interest groups involved in CDBG means that there is zero chance of HUD going away. I’ve watched the “let’s get rid of HUD” movement for years, starting in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution**** (he gave up), Jack Kemp’s appointment as HUD Secretary by Bush 41 (failed at achieving promised reforms), and most recently, HUD being on Newt Gingrich’s hit list in 1994 (HUD survived to fight another day, while Newtie ended up bloviating on Fox News and writing historical novels of questionable literary merit).

Not only has HUD lived on, with the help of its legion of CDBG-engorged supporters, but it actually continues to grow, throwing off new programs like the small monsters sloughing off the Big Guy in my favorite recent Big Animal movie, Cloverfield. We’ve come full circle: the CDBG program was created to unify a bunch of categorical programs to give local officials the ability to address their pressing local needs, and now the CDBG program, along with a couple dozen assorted competitive programs, hangs on the HUD funding tree like Christmas ornaments.

While Venkatesh can speculate on dismantling HUD or using the block grant approach “to provide incentives for municipal and county governments to collaborate,” HUD is a permanent fixture of the grant landscape because it was created to solve some of the problem he identifies, and the result of a supersized CDBG program is likely to be even more walking around money and self-interested entities at the CDBG trough, not more collaboration between cities and counties. To paraphrase, “Reformers Rail, but HUD Abides.”


* Venkatesh wrote a terrific book on life on the streets in Chicago’s Southside, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, which mirrors my experience growing up and later working as a community organizing intern in the North Minneapolis ghetto. Would-be grant writers should read it.

** Grant writing tip: government agencies mostly make two kinds of grants, formula (the grantee does nothing to get them money other than open its mouth like Jabba the Hut) and competitive (applicants submit proposals that are evaluated against one another). One will occasionally see a hybrid version, a competitive process in which the grant amount is based on a formula of some sort, but most grant writers won’t encounter this chimera.

*** I’ve read dozens of Comprehensive Plans from all around the country over the years, and, despite supposedly being individually written to reflect the jurisdiction’s unique problems, they are basically all the same—a rehash of census data, oddball stats on homeless issues and the like, and a pastiche of platitudes designed to get HUD to okay the plan and uncork CDBG funds. In other words, the local CDBG planning process is at best a cookbook exercise.

**** See Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, which is a great political read and covers the first failed attempt to disassemble HUD. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men complements it.

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Every Proposal Needs Six Elements: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. The Rest is Mere Commentary.

In writing a grant that describes a program, you, the writer, are actually telling a story you want readers to believe. To do so, you need to make it as complete as possible. Journalists know that an effective lead paragraph in a news story tells the reader who, what, where, when, why, and how (together, the six are usually referred to as 5Ws and H) as quickly and concisely as possible. Well-written, interesting grant proposals should do the same for their readers, although not in the first paragraph. Before you start writing, you should be able to write a simple, declarative sentence answering each question.

Isaac pointed out in “Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain” that “A good way to start [learning how to write grants] is to take English composition or Journalism classes at a local college to sharpen your writing skills.” Journalism has a lot of overlap with grant writing—except that good journalism strives to be factually balanced and accurate, while grant writing strives to depict absolute need through the creative, but never outright dishonest, use of selected facts. At least, that’s what grant writers should do if they want their organizations to be funded.

The next section discusses each element in more detail:

Who: Two separate aspects of the “who” need to be covered: your organization/partners and the population to be served. Most grant applications will have a section on the applicant’s background. Give a brief history of your organization, its management structure, some of the other programs it runs, and its purpose. Do a briefer history for key partners, if space permits.

The other aspect is the group to be served. What demographic, cultural, educational, and other challenges set your target population apart from society at large? Why have you selected this population? What expertise makes you likely to serve them well?

What: You should be able to describe succinctly what you are going to do. For example, if you want to run an ever-popular afterschool program, describe the components of your program; you might say, “Project LEAD will offer academic enrichment and life skills training. The academic enrichment will include three hours per week of tutoring and three hours per week of educational games. Life skills training will include…” Almost all human service delivery projects have five fundamental components: outreach, intake/assessment, services, follow-up, and evaluation. Note that Isaac represented all these steps in his theoretical Project NUTRIA.

Where: Unless you plan to serve the galaxy, define your target area. “Inner-city Baltimore” might be one designation and “Zip codes 98122 and 98112” another. This is often included in the “Who” section and almost always in the needs assessment section. You should also describe where project services will be delivered. To continue the example above, if Project LEAD activities take place in school buildings, say so, and why the building was selected, and if they take place in a community center, describe the community center, including its facilities and equipment, and why it was selected.

When: Like “who,” “when” also has two components: the project timing/length and the hours/times for service delivery/activities. Most projects proposed for grant funding will have a project period—say, three years. You should construct a timeline, whether included as an actual table or not, demonstrating when activities will start. Don’t forget the steps necessary before service delivery starts, such as hiring and assigning staff, formalizing the partnership structure, etc. The timeline should also contain significant milestones, like stabilized case load, completion of the “Action Plan,” etc.

In addition, you must describe when project services will actually be delivered; for example, Project LEAD might operate from 3 – 7 p.m. during the academic year and from 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. during the summer.

Why: Your project should have some rationale behind it. The Request For Proposals (RFP) often gives a rationale that you must follow, but you should be able to explain factors like:

* Why you are targeting who you are targeting?
* Why you have decided on what you will do?
* Why you will provide services in a particular place?
* Why you have decided on particular times?

Take each “W” and then ask yourself why you described them in the way you did. The “why” should be emphasized in the needs assessment section and also threaded through other sections.

How: You should decide how your project will be implemented. This incorporates all the previous elements and explains, for example:

* How you will engage the target population.
* How will individuals be assessed and admitted?
* How you will provide services.
* How you will retain participants.
* How you will evaluate the project’s effectiveness.

It should explain all aspects of the mechanics of how a project will be carried out, and it should also demonstrate that the applicant has thoroughly considered the details of the project implementation strategy. This section will usually be called something like the “Project Description.”

For an example of an RFP that just asks for the 5Ws and H, see SAMHSA’s infrastructure grants:

Your total abstract should not be longer than 35 lines. It should include the project name, population to be served (demographics and clinical characteristics), whether the application is proposing service expansion, service enhancement, or both, strategies/interventions, project goals and measurable objectives, including the number of people to be served annually and throughout the lifetime of the project, etc. In the first five lines or less of your abstract, write a summary of your project that can be used, if your project is funded, in publications, reporting to Congress, or press releases.

The project name is part of the what. The population is the “who” with demographics as part of the “why,” and the proposal for expansion, enhancement, or both is also part of the “what,” while “strategies/interventions” is part of the “how.” Goals and measurable objectives are partially “what” (i.e. what will your outcomes be) and partially “why” (i.e. these explain why things will improve). As you might notice, SAMHSA forget “where,” although one could shoehorn that into the “population to be served” section, as well as “when.” As a grant writer, your job is to be smarter than the RFP writers** by realizing what they missed and filling the requests they tried to convey between the lines.

The deeper and more complete you can make the story you tell, the better off you’ll be. This is part of the reason internal inconsistencies can be so damning: if you say you’ll serve 20 individuals per month in one place, 20 families per month in another, and 40 individuals per quarter in another, you’re waking the reader from their fictional dream and casting doubt on whether you really understand what you’re doing. Even if an internal inconsistency is minor, finding one will make the reader doubt everything else you propose.

Keeping in mind the 5Ws and H will help you maintain consistency, because if you decide at the front end what those will be, you should find it easier to build supportive evidence around it at the back end. Even dim-witted RFP writers have figured this out, which is why many RFPs ask for a project abstract or summary: to get you to conceive of what the project will entail before you get mired in details.

In virtually any narrative section of a proposal, you should be able to say which of the 5Ws or H you’re addressing. If you keep them in mind as you write, you’ll be writing a better, more consistent proposal.


* A well-written abstract/executive summary will actually contain an abbreviated version of the 5Ws and H.

** This isn’t hard in general, particularly if the RFP writer is in the Department of Education; nonetheless, you need to manifest that intelligence by knowing when the RFP writer has screwed up, which occurs frequently.

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High Noon at the Grant Writing Corral: Staring Down Deadlines

Jake gave me a DVD edition of High Noon for Father’s Day, in which Gary Cooper’s Marshall Will Kane must face Frank Miller and his henchmen at exactly noon when their train arrives.* Tension builds as Marshall Kane realizes that none of the town folk will help him and that he must stand alone in the street while the large clock at the town square ticks relentlessly toward noon. This theme is played out endlessly in other Westerns, like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—another favorite.

This scenario of a person alone with a ticking clock is exactly the situation faced by a grant writers on a deadline, although I must admit that I have never actually been shot at by a pistol-wielding HUD program officer. A deranged client once threatened my life, but this is a subject for another post. Grant writers should deal with the ticking clocks of RFPs by making sure they can work under extreme time pressure. If the idea of an absolute deadline gives you the willies, run for congress instead, where the dates are always mobile. In other words, if you don’t function well with absolute deadlines, give up, find something else to do, hire us, or work in some other administrative function. In epic fantasy and capital-R Romance, not everyone can or should fight the dragon, and it takes Beowulf to kill Grendel. If you’re ready to continue the quest, however, here is my handy guide to slaying RFP monsters while avoiding resorting to the use of strong drink:

1. Construct a proposal preparation timeline backwards, giving at least a two day cushion for hard copy submissions (this gives the FedEx plane a day for engine trouble, a day for the hurricane to pass, etc.) and a three day cushion for grants.gov submissions (this provides a day or two to resolve file upload/server problems). How much time should be allocated for achieving proposal preparation milestones (e.g., completing the first draft, review time for various drafts, etc.) depends on many variables, including how fast a writer you are, how complex the RFP is, how much research has to be done, how many layers of management have to review the drafts, etc. Most proposals can be easily completed in four to six weeks from initial project conception to hatching the proposal egg.

2. Scope the project thoroughly with whoever knows the most about the idea and give them an absolute deadline for providing background info (e.g., old proposals, studies, reports, back of the napkin doodles and the like). Make sure you know the answers to the 5Ws and the H (who, what, when, where and how—the subject of next week’s post). Tell them that the minute you start writing, you will no longer look at any background info that comes in later.

3. Assume that, regardless of any representations made by the Executive Director, City Manager, Project Director, et al, writing the proposal will be entirely up to you. Like Marshall Kane, you’ll be alone in the street facing the deadline, unless you have a handy partner like I do to serve as Doc Holliday to my Wyatt Earp.

4. Don’t do anything on the project for a few days to a few weeks, depending on how much time you have, letting the project idea percolate in your subconscious while you work on other things.

5. Write the first draft, incorporating whatever background info you have, the banalities of the RFP, and your hopefully fertile imagination (see Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development for thoughts on fleshing out a project concept).** When you write, try to write everything at once with the minimum number of possible breaks and interruptions. Avoid distractions, as Paul Graham advises in that link. Depending on the complexity and length of proposal and necessary research, the first draft should take anywhere from about six to 30 hours.

This is a broad range, but there is a spectacular difference between drafting a proposal to the Dubuque Community Foundation and HRSA. When you’re done, and only when you’re done with the first draft, send the draft proposal to the contact person with an absolute deadline for returning comments. Assuming there is enough time, it is best to allow at least a week for everyone involved to review the first draft. Always insist on a single set of comments, as some people like chocolate, some like vanilla and some don’t eat ice cream at all. Comments from multiple readers will also have you changing “that” to “which” and back again.

6. Read Proust, learn to understand cuneiform or do whatever else you do while not writing proposals.

7. When you have comments, write the second draft. This is last time you should agree to make major changes in the project concept. So, if the contact person tells you the target population is now left-handed at-risk youth from East Dubuque, instead of right-handed at-risk teen moms from West Dubuque as originally scoped, let them know that, if you make the change, you are not going back to right-handed youth in the final draft—the more conceptual changes that are made in later drafts, the harder it is to thread the changes throughout the proposal and associated documents (e.g. budget, budget narrative, etc.). The net result of late changes is usually internal inconsistencies, which is a fast way to lose points and sink a submission. Once again, provide an absolute deadline for returning comments, shorter than the time allowed for review of the first draft. Remind your contact that you are only looking for major errors, typos and the like. This is not the time to add a soliloquy on tough times in Dubuque. If your contact person has a hard time meeting deadlines, call or send e-mails and faxes with reminders that dallying may jeopardize meeting the submission deadline, which after all is the point of the exercise. We don’t view these reminders as CYA (cover your ass) stuff because, unlike internal grant writers, we are focused entirely on completing the assignment, not proving the guilt of others in a failed submission process. Keep in mind that your contact person is extremely unlikely to be as good as hitting deadlines as you are, so be gentle with initial reminders, rising to SCREAMS as the deadline bears down on you like the famous scene of the train finally arriving at 12:00 in High Noon, shot looking down the tracks straight at the onrushing locomotive.

8. Time to read Proust again.

9. Write the final draft when you have comments. Ignore pointless text changes like “that” to “which,” adding redundant adjectives, etc. Instead, focus on getting the document “right enough” and technically correct for submission in time to meet the deadline (see The Perils of Perfectionism).

Grant writing is all about meeting deadlines just like Westerns are all about facing the bad guys when they show up. It doesn’t matter how perfect the proposal is if you miss the deadline. Making sure you don’t miss it requires forward planning, hitting internal deadlines, avoiding procrastination and not wasting time in internal navel gazing or donut eating sessions. If you indulge those vices the proposal will never be finished. It many seem daunting to confront the anxieties of immovable deadlines with potentially millions of dollars and the needs of hundreds or thousands of people at stake, but, in over 35 years of proposal writing, I’ve never missed a deadline and neither should you.


* If you like High Noon, you’ll love the unusual scifi remake, Outland, with Sean Connery reprising the Gary Cooper role as Marshall O’Niel on a distant mining colony somewhere in deep space. Outland replaces the town square clock with a digital clock and adds a reasonable amount of gratuitous nudity, but confirms that the original Star Wars is not the only great Western set in space.

** I could not resist the bad pun for those of you brave enough to look at tasty nutria recipes.

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Adventures in Bureaucracy and the Long Tale of Deciphering Eligibility: A Farce Featuring the Department of Education’s Erin Pfeltz

There are numerous good reasons why we often make fun of the Department of Education. One recently appeared in the Seliger Funding Report. Subscribers saw the “Charter Schools Program (CSP) Grants to Non-State Educational Agencies for Planning, Program Design, and Implementation and for Dissemination” program in the June 16 newsletter. The eligibility criteria for it, however, are somewhat confusing:

Planning and Initial Implementation (CFDA No. 84.282B): Non-SEA eligible applicants in States with a State statute specifically authorizing the establishment of charter schools and in which the SEA elects not to participate in the CSP or does not have an application approved under the CSP.

So we have two criteria:

1) States that authorize charter schools and

2) That don’t participate in the CSP.

Since it is not abundantly clear which states are eligible, the RFP also lists the states participating in the CSP:

Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin.

Great! But does the Department of Education have a list of those that authorize charter schools and don’t participate? To find out, I called Erin Pfeltz, the contact person, but she didn’t answer, so I left a message and sent the following e-mail as well:

I left a voicemail for you a few minutes ago asking if you have a list of states in which organizations are eligible for the “Charter Schools Program (CSP) Grants to Non-State Educational Agencies for Planning, Program Design, and Implementation and for Dissemination.”

If so, can you send it to me?

She replied a day and a half later, too late for the newsletter:

The information in the federal register notice includes a list of states which currently have an approved application with the CSP (http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/E8-13470.htm). Non-SEA applicants in those states should contact their SEA for information related to the CSP subgrant competition. More information on the Charter Schools Program can be found at http://www.ed.gov/programs/charter/index.html.

I replied with some quotes from the RFP and then said:

The RFP gives us a list of states that do participate in the CSP. My question is whether you have a list of states that a) have authorized charter schools and b) do not have an application approved under the CSP.

In other words, which states do not authorize charter schools?

Erin responded:

States without charter school legislation are: Alabama, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, Montana, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia.

And then I responded:

Subtracting those states and the ones that already participate in the CSP program leaves me with NV, AZ, WY, OK, IA, MO, MS, NH, RI, HI, AND AK.

So states from these states and only these states are eligible. Is that correct?

She said:

Eligible applicants from these states would be able to apply.

Notice the weasel words: she didn’t say that the states I listed were the actual and only ones eligible. So I sent back yet another note asking her to verify that and she replied “For the current competition, only eligible applicants from these states would be able to apply.”

Beautiful! Finally! After a half dozen or so e-mails, I extracted the crucial eligibility information. Based on her tenacious and expert obfuscation, she deserves to promoted, possibly to Undersecretary for Obscure RFP Development (isn’t it obvious that I’m only talking about the current competition, not every conceivable competition?).

Wouldn’t it have been easier if the initial RFP simply stated the eligible states? The obvious answer is “yes,” but it also wouldn’t leave room for potential mistakes from the Department of Education. Instead, the RFP eligibility is convoluted and hard to understand for reasons known chiefly to bureaucrats; when I asked Erin, she wrote, “The states are listed in that way to encourage eligible applicants whose states have an approved CSP grant to contact their state departments of education.” Maybe: but that reason smacks of being imagined after the fact, and the goal could’ve been more easily accomplished by just listing the 11 eligible states and then saying, “Everyone else, contact your SEA.” But the Department of Education has no incentive to make its applications easier for everyone else to understand—and it doesn’t.

When I wrote about Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP and RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions, I was really writing about how needlessly hard it is to understand RFPs. This is another example of it, and why it’s important for grant writers to relax, take their time, and make sure they understand every aspect of what they’re reading. If you don’t, you shouldn’t hesitate to contact the funding organization when you’re flummoxed.

The material most people read most of the time, whether in newspapers, books, or blogs, is designed to be as easily comprehended as possible. Many things produced by bureaucracies, however, have other goals in mind—like laws, for example, which are designed to stymie clever lawyers rather than be understood by laymen. Such alternate goals and the processes leading to bad writing are in part explicated by Roger Shuy in Bureaucratic Language in Government & Business, a book I’ve referenced before and will no doubt mention again because it’s so useful for understanding how the system that produces RFPs like the one for the Charter Schools Program (CSP) Grants to Non-State Educational Agencies come about and why correspondence with people like Erin can be frustrating, especially for those not schooled in the art of assertiveness.* In grant writing, assertiveness is important because confused writing like the eligibility guidelines above is fairly common—like missing or broken links on state and federal websites. I recently tried finding information about grant awards made by the Administration for Children and Families, but the link was broken and the contact page has no e-mail addresses for technical problems. I sent an e-mail to their general address two weeks ago anyway and haven’t heard anything since.

Were it more important, I’d start making calls and moving up the food chain, but in this case it isn’t. Regardless, tenacity and patience are essential attributes for grant writers, who must be able to navigate the confused linguistic landscape of RFPs.


* Sorry for the long sentence, but I just dropped into a Proustian reverie brought on by RFPs instead of madeleines. Perhaps one of you readers can translate this long-winded sentence into French for me.

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Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development

Grant writers are often called on to develop project concepts with little or no input from clients or program specialists. In other words, we often invent the project concept as we write, within the confines of those pesky RFPs. We do it by taking one or more problems and applying standard implementation approaches to produce the ever-popular, but elusive “innovative” project concept. To illustrate how this slight-of-hand, or, perhaps more appropriately, slight-of-mind, is done, I have developed the fictitious Project NUTRIA to solve the problem of rampaging rodents, homelessness, job training, vacant houses, nutrition, and, yes, even global warming.*

This project idea emerged from a recent Seattle PI article, “Seattleites take up arms against ‘rat’ as big as cat.” Variations on the theme of rampaging “invasive species” show up all the time, whether it be kudzu, walking carp, or, today, nutria. These unappealing fellows apparently leave a path of destruction from Louisiana to Seattle, much like Godzilla in Tokyo but on a smaller scale. I chuckled over the breathless prose about a rodent with a very long tail, and concluded this latest crisis makes a pretty good starting point for a tale about conceptualizing project development.

Let’s assume nutria have invaded my favorite example town, Dubuque, and a new nonprofit—Citizens Against Nutria-Dubuque Organization (CAN-DO)—has formed to fight this scourge. Since not many funders are likely to be all that interested in nutria eradication, CAN-DO broadens the project scope to address other pressing community concerns and comes up with the following initiative, Project NUTRIA (Nutria Utilization and Training Resources for Itinerant Americans).

Here is the expanded project service delivery model:

1. Conduct a survey to identify nutria habitat and overlay the map with the recent survey of the homeless to determine proximity of both target populations. Graphics may be useful here.

2. Conduct street-based outreach to recruit individuals experiencing homelessness to be trained as Nutria Relocation Specialists (NRSes) and Nutria Processing Specialists (NPSes).

3. At the CAN-DO action center, provide NRSes with appropriate training in humane nutria capture and termination strategies, and provide NPSes with training in the fine art of deconstructing nutria.

4. NRSes capture nutria and prepare them for transport to a local processing facility, to be established in a property that is vacant because of the sub-prime lending crisis.

5. NPSes process the nutria meat into recipe-sized packages and prepare the fur for sale to US-based manufacturers of sporty lightweight garments—thus helping retain American jobs. This could lead to further job training possibilities, but I’ll leave them out for simplicity.

6. Conduct an information campaign to educate low-income residents about the many tasty ways of serving their families economical and nutritious nutria-based meals. If you don’t think people eat nutria, see this unappealing Nutria Recipe Page. My favorite recipe—based solely on descriptions—is for “Stuffed Nutria Hindquarters,” but I am not brave enough to find out exactly what the hindquarters are stuffed with. You could say, “I don’t give a rat’s ass,” but that might be inappropriate in a grant proposal.

7. Distribute the processed nutria meat, with a special emphasis on individuals experiencing homelessness,** TANF recipients, WIC program participants, and other income-challenged populations. Many job training programs for the homeless involve food service, and there are a number of cafes around the country, such as Seattle’s FareStart, that feature formerly homeless employees in training. Sounds like a good outlet for nutria. Also, I am sure there is a similar nonprofit restaurant in LA that foodies would flock to for a bit of the newly trendy nutria kabobs.

8. Advocate for better utilization of nutria as a way of combatting global warming. Unlike cows and chickens, the nutria raise themselves, so no unnecessary carbon is released in providing the hungry with a low fat, high protein food source.

These steps would be incorporated in a project timeline and dressed up with objectives, an evaluation section and all the other features of a well constructed proposal.

The point of this exercise is to remind grant writers that project concepts can often be made to appeal to different funding audiences by tweaking the proposal to meet the priorities of the funder. For example, if the Project NUTRIA proposal was being sent to EPA, the environmental benefit would be stressed. If it was being sent to the Department of Labor, the job training aspect would be emphasized, and so on. While it is always a good idea to have a specific focus for your proposal, it is also possible to address more than one problem, particularly to appeal to a broader range of funders.

EDIT: In “Why Soup Kitchens Serve So Much Venison,” Henry Grabar reports that “a growing percentage of [venison served to the homeless and needy] comes from the suburbs of American cities, at the unlikely but unmistakably American intersection of bow hunting, pest control and hunger relief.” There are too many deer and too many hungry people, which means both problems can be solved at once. There isn’t any news about workforce development, however.


* Note to animal rights folks, homeless advocates, et al: this is parody and no harm was done to actual nutria or homeless in the writing of this blog post.

** Free grant writing tip: this is currently the most politically correct term for the homeless, as it implies that homelessness just happened; as grant writers, we always seek emerging politically correct terms. Nominations are appreciated. If we get enough of them, whether in comments or by e-mail, expect a post on the subject.

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Why can’t I find a grant writer? How to identify and seize that elusive beast

(Editor’s note: this post deals primarily with employees. We’ve also written a post on the subject of grant writing consultants to complement this one.)

Last week’s post deals with the tools grant writers should have, and although it focuses on grant writing, it’s really about equipping almost any intellectual worker, or, in Richard Florida’s atrocious and ugly phrase, person in the creative class.* Likewise, this week’s post covers the peculiarities of finding a grant writer, but much of it applies to anyone recruiting intellectual workers, whether they’re software programmers, writers, professors, or policy wonks.

Despite the similarities between grant writing and other professions, some grant writing websites or blogs spew all kinds of misleading or silly advice about finding and hiring grant writers. For example, one of the top hits on seeking grant writers is a Chronicle of Higher Education article called “Debunking Some Myths About Grant Writing.” It says things like, “Grant writing is all about power.” No: grant writing is all about getting proposals funded. Power is at most another level of abstraction out from that.

As with many such articles, some of its advice is okay and some of it is idiotic, like this: “Myth 4: Meeting the deadline is the most important goal of a successful grant writer.” If you’ve decided to apply to a program, meeting the deadline is the most important goal, because, obviously if you don’t meet the deadline, you have no chance of being funded. Incidentally, that distinguishes Seliger + Associates from other grant writers: in 15 years, we’ve never missed a deadline. If you’re not going to place meeting deadlines above all other priorities, you shouldn’t be writing grants.

If you’re going to seek a grant writer, you’ve got a choice to make: whether you’re going to hire a consultant or a full-time person. If you’re going to hire a consultant, congratulations, because your search is already done. If you’re going to hire an employee, this article is for you; given the aforementioned plethora of bad advice, we’re going to start by suggesting you read Joel Spolsky’s article “Finding Great Developers” followed by “A Field Guide to Developers.” He says things like:

“Tell me: did you have private offices for your developers at all your startups?”

“Of course not,” he said. “The VCs would never go for that.”

This doesn’t sound like grant writing language, but if you replace “developers” with “grant writers” and “VCs” with “executive directors and donors,” you’ve got the same basic idea. Ignore comments specifically about programming and pay very close attention to the ways he recruits and the things he offers. And read the book Peopleware, which is perhaps the most brilliant and yet ignored book on intellectual organizations I’ve encountered. I don’t mean “ignored” in the sense of being poorly known—many, many people have heard of it—but rather in the sense that few actually take its important recommendations into account.

Anyway, Spolsky’s best contribution is observing that the individual variation between programmers is huge, and smart companies want the best ones, but it’s hard to tell who’s who. The same is true in grant writing; there can be orders of magnitude in difference between grant writers. It’s possible for a grant writer who is a fantastic writer and hard worker (note the “AND” conjunction—one or the other isn’t sufficient) to write dozens of proposals a year, depending on the nature of the proposals, the size of the organization, etc. Big federal proposals require more effort than small foundation proposals, but one per month seems like a reasonable, easy baseline for a single grant writer with limited support staff.

Conversely, a bad grant writer will be a drag: they’ll suck up the time of the executive director and board members with useless meetings and questions, botch applications for grants the organization needs, and irritate repeat funders, especially foundations. There’s a lot of what we call “doughnut eating” in the nonprofit world, which is a derogatory term for endless meetings and discussion in lieu of action. Bad grant writers love doughnut eating. Good grant writers tolerate it to the extent necessary but would rather be finishing proposals. A really incompetent grant writer could torpedo an organization that relies principally on grant funds to survive.

You obviously want the good ones want to avoid the less good. The bad news is that the difference between great and bad grant writers usually isn’t readily apparent before they start, and if you post public messages seeking grant writers, you’re almost guaranteed to be inundated with applications from bad candidates. Great grant writers will for the most part already be with or running successful agencies. If they write lots of proposals that get funded, their agencies will flourish, be flush with cash, and in turn their grant writers won’t be on the market. If they do, they’ll likely have lots of options: they can continue writing proposals, run useless grant writing training, become consultants, or the like. The reverse is true as well: bad grant writers are always out there, because they’re “let go,” or get fired, or their organizations go under for a lack of funds, or nonprofits won’t hire them for more than 90 days in the first place (more on this in a minute).

If you’re trying to hire good grant writers, you’ll need to identify and recruit them. A word concerning one popular method of finding them: writing samples. Writing samples are a mixed bag: if you’re hiring someone, a sample might not be a bad thing to see, but they’ll a) have no relevance for someone who knows how to write but hasn’t written proposals, b) are easy to fake, c) still might not mean the person can hit deadlines or write quickly, or d) can write about a topic about which they know nothing, which is the hallmark of a really great grant writer. The false positive rate on writing samples seems far too high; Costo gives free samples; grant writers usually don’t. For what it’s worth, we have never provided writing samples.

In addition, most employers will have a 90 day trial period, which is sufficient time to see if the would-be grant writer actually writes. You’ll get all the writing samples you need—and samples that can’t be faked, aren’t written by committee, taken from the Internet, or whatever, and are on point for your organization. Does that grant writer spend those 90 days or so “familiarizing” themselves with the organization instead of seeking and writing proposals? Do they talk about writers block? Or do they take your background materials, write whatever proposals you’ve given them, and maybe find a few RFPs you’re not familiar with and bring them to your attention? In those 90 days, you’ll find out whether your grant writer is really a grant writer. Oh, and you should also make it a binary thing. As Spolsky says in “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0),” “There are only two possible outcomes to this decision: Hire or No Hire.” He goes on:

Never say “Maybe, I can’t tell.” If you can’t tell, that means No Hire. It’s really easier than you’d think. Can’t tell? Just say no! If you are on the fence, that means No Hire. Never say, “Well, Hire, I guess, but I’m a little bit concerned about…” That’s a No Hire as well. Mechanically translate all the waffling to “no” and you’ll be all right.

Why am I so hardnosed about this? It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people’s time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It’s just a bad scene.

Grant writing diverges from software programming here because you can’t throw questions about subroutines or abstraction or recursion or the other computer science concepts any good computer scientist should know. You could spring an essay test on them, but that wouldn’t show much more than whether they perform well under “gotcha”-style pressure. We advocate for the trial period: it should give you the information you can’t just get from an interview. Grant writing, unlike software, also has a better defined, more easily delineated work product: a finished proposal. It’s analogous to the piecework versus salary debate, which you should read if you want to understand the problems. Software eventually has to ship, but judging output can be much murkier, which both Spolsky and Paul Graham talk about elsewhere.

Regardless, if you can’t tell who is good by writing samples, interviews, and the like, you can tell by working with them for a period of time. That’s why a 90 day trial makes sense. It will help you find grant writers who are not only good writers, but also take care of the corollary work that can actually take up most of a grant writer’s time. Good grant writers read Seliger Funding Report. They bring new opportunities to your attention. When you hand them an assignment, they start on it right away because there’s no reason not to. They read many newspapers and books that are likely to contain information about new research and ideas that could relate to grants. Bad grant writers ask for a meeting with key stakeholders in two weeks, and spend the intervening time playing Solitaire. They wait too long to start proposals and then rush to make the deadline, and as a result are missing a key letter of support and have proposals that are badly formatted and filled with typos. They will make excuses as to why they couldn’t complete the proposal by the deadline. Good grant writers get the job done without blaming others.

None or very little of this will be apparent from interviews and resumes.

Still, you have to look at resumes and conduct interviews to remove the grossly unqualified. Spolsky once again has a useful article on the subject. Virtually all the criteria apply to grant writing with the exception of “hard-core,” and even that has some element of grant writing in it—preparing a HUD Lead Hazard Control or Section 202 proposal is more hard core than most foundation proposals, for instance. Nonetheless, it gives some idea of how to sort candidates and why resumes are not very good at separating the so-so from the great candidates. They’re effective for filtering out the weakest people (Can’t spell or write coherent sentences? Experience is entirely as a barista at Starbucks with no writing education? Toss ’em.) Once you’re through those, you’re still going to have a giant stack, and when you do have that stack, you should remember this:

One temptation of recruiters is to try and add a few extra hoops to the application process. I’ve frequently heard the suggestion of including a programming quiz of some sort in the application procedure. This does work, in the sense that it reduces the number of applications you get, but it doesn’t work, in the sense that it doesn’t really improve the quality. Great developers have enough choices of places to work that only require the usual cover letter/resume application to get started; by inventing artificial hoops and programming tests and whatnot simply to apply, you’re just as likely to scare away good programmers as weak programmers. Indeed, you may be more likely to scare away the best programmers, who have the most alternatives, and get left with a pool of fairly desperate candidates who are willing to do extra work to apply simply because they don’t have any alternatives.

That’s the equivalent of having a candidate write a proposal on the spot. It’s not really going to work, and it’s more likely to backfire than succeed in somehow weeding out more candidates. One thing you can do to make it easier to find and attract good grant writers is by making your office an attractive place to work, thus making it more likely that, if you do find a good writer, they’ll want to come to you.

Peacocks have big, attractive feathers that might help them attract peahens, or vice-versa, depending on which sex has the feathers. By a similar but more useful token, you also have feathers to display. Isaac discussed some, which is how this post got started. There are others: Does your office remind candidates of the Department of Education, or of a high-end law firm? Are they going to be shoved in a noisy cubicle next to the guy who cold calls donors all day, or are they going to have a door that shuts so they can concentrate on writing and get in the zone? This is essentially paraphrased from Spolsky’s articles, and with good reason: you’re going to spend an appreciable portion of your life in your office, so most people want one, consciously or not, that’s at least as pleasant as possible. Good candidates have lots of choices and will be able to find jobs that offer an attractive place to work. If not, there’s a good chance they’ll make their own jobs by starting businesses. Since such people are likely going to be the best grant writers, giving your grant writer nice tools is a major advantage.

It’s not even all that expensive an advantage—those tools are so cheap relative to the cost of good personnel. Think about it this way: if the one-time $4,000 expense for making sure your grant writer is comfortable enables her to write an extra proposal a year and even just one gets funded for a relatively small amount like $100,000, you’ve come out $96,000 ahead. Even then, you’ve probably come out ahead by a little bit more, since your grant writer will need at least some computer, desk, space, and supplies, and those probably can’t be had for much less than $1,000.

The marginal difference between a nice computer, desk, and supplies and shoddy ones is so small that it’s astonishing how many nonprofits will do with hand-me-downs just because it’s the nonprofit way. The shabby chic culture is not unique to nonprofits, as any visitor to Wal*Mart headquarters can attest, and Jeff Bezos was famous for making desks out of sawhorses and plywood in the early days of Amazon.com. This structure could function for an organization, but only if it has committed and competent idealists. Even so, committed and competent idealists would probably be more efficient with better tools and a better environment, and both will help you get the much larger pool of the competent and idealistic who aren’t as idealistic as nonprofit founders.

In addition, the grant writer is often directly tied to the financial performance of your organization. Most skilled professions, whether they be lawyers, accountants, or doctors, directly tie compensation and status to the person who does the most to bring money into the organization. Law is an extreme example of this phenomenon: the lawyers who bill the most hours win. They’re treated accordingly. If you don’t want your grant writer to go to law school instead of working for your organization, you should give them nicer chairs than they get in law firms. Even doctors who run free clinics or who donate services will often have quality medical and personal equipment because they realize they can help the maximum number of people if they’re in an environment that allows them to use their skills optimally.

Nice tools will help with retention—the recruiting process is long and arduous, and to avoid having that person jump ship, you should give them a pleasant working environment. It’s probably not going to be money that causes them to leave, unless you aren’t paying them enough to start with.

So far we’ve discussed how a) there’s tremendous variation between grant writers, b) why it’s wise to recognize this and look for the good grant writers, c) why it’s hard to tell the difference between them and d) some of the things you can do to try and e) some of the things you can do to make your organization more attractive to prospective grant writers.

Once you’ve gone through your resume pile, conducted interviews, and have a short slate of candidates, you’ll eventually have to hire one. The problem is that you probably won’t know whether you’ve actually found a good grant writer or whether you’ve found a doughnut eater until you test someone out on a couple of proposals. Isaac wrote:

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

Do the same with your new grant writing hire. If they don’t produce proposals, go back to that slate you’d drawn up previously. By the end of 90 days, you’ll know whether that person can write proposals. If they can’t, send them on their way and see if the next person on it is still available. This requires being “hardnosed,” but if you want to run the best organization you can, you have to be. If the person you’ve hired can’t write proposals, you might have to start the recruiting process over again. As with searching for software developers, there’s a real chance that you’ll constantly be recruiting grant writers. Be ready for that, and be ready to release any supposed grant writers who are really doughnut eaters in disguise.

We’ve had e-mails along the lines of one that goes, “I also appreciate that you know that there is more than enough grant work to go around so that you are not threatened by posting other opportunities for us to investigate.” There are more grants to be written than there are qualified writers to write them, and that will always be the case because there is always a shortage of talent at the top of any intellectual field since most people lack the skills, tenacity, fortitude, and internal training drive to reach the top. Those people are very good at blending it with those who do have those qualities, and this article is an algorithm for sifting through candidates so you can distinguish one from the other. The only real metric is whether the candidate, when faced with a computer, an RFP, and a deadline, can produce a finished proposal.

The rest is mere commentary.

What you’ll notice about this advice regarding grant writers is that it’s time consuming and demands lots of work—unless you want to hire a contract grant writer, in which case, as we said previously, you’re already done with your research. Just reading and digesting this post and all the relevant links in it could take a few hours. Like many things, however, work you put into the process of finding a grant writer is proportional to the quality of the grant writer you’re going to find as a result. One reason to hire outside consultants is to minimize these problem by a) making it easy to fire bad consultants and b) minimizing donuts eating and related problems by having a person with a single purpose: writing and submitting a proposal.

If you find a good consultant, you can hire that company over and over again and make an offer to one of its people to become a full-time staff member. If you don’t go that route, remember that smart organizations are going to offer Embody chairs, Mac Pros, and lower-case-w windows. They’re going to keep their ear to the figurative physical and Internet streets. If you want to maximize your organization’s reach through grant writing, you should be prepared to do the same and more. The trouble is implementing all this advice; just as it’s relatively easy to describe how to become a good writer and really, really hard to actually become one, it’s easy to read this advice compared to making it part of your organization’s plan. At the very least, you have a blueprint about how to become a grant writing powerhouse, and you only need to build the house so you can provide the services your organization offers.


* For a truly self-indulgent bout of navel gazing, read his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. If you’re interested in a more readable treatment of the same general subject, David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise is worthwhile. Both quarry different veins in the same mine as Spolsky and this post.