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Tools of the Trade—What a Grant Writer Should Have

A budding grant writer who is enrolled in a Nonprofit Management Masters program recently e-mailed me to ask if she should spend $4,000 on grant writing classes. Regular readers know how little I think of grant writing training, so I advised her to take some undergrad courses in English composition/journalism and spend her $4k on a good computer and comfortable chair instead. In addition to being infinitely more useful than grant writing classes, she’ll also enjoy them for activities other than grant writing. This led me to think about the useful tools a grant writer should have, including:

1. A great computer. After years of frustration with Windows, Jake converted the rest of us to Macs about 18 months ago and they’ve mostly been a pleasure. Mac OS X has two particularly helpful features for grant writers: “Spotlight” and “Time Machine.” If I’m writing a proposal about gang violence in Dubuque, typing keywords in Spotlight lets me easily find an article on my hard drive from the Dubuque Picayune Press about gangs that I saved two years ago. If I manage to muck up a current proposal file, Time Machine lets me go back to yesterday’s version to recover it. Trying to do these tasks in Windows XP is so difficult that having a bottle of Scotch handy is a good idea if you try, although Windows Vista is supposed to have improved the search experience.

As to which model is best, I prefer the Mac Pro because it is easy to add multiple video cards—meaning you can also attach lots of monitors. I use three and might add a fourth if I can find a good rack system. You’re thinking that I must imagine myself as Tom Cruise flipping images across displays in Minority Report,, but it is actually very handy to have multiple monitors because I can arrange relevant data on all of them by having the proposal I’m writing on my 23″ primary screen, a file from the client on the 20″ screen to the right and a pertinent website on the 19″ screen to the left. The fourth monitor would show the RFP. Avoiding opening and closing windows saves time and, for a grant writer, time is literally money. Jake prefers his 24″ iMac, which only accepts one additional monitor, but looks oh so elegant on his desktop. He can also have two windows open simultaneously:

Others like the MacBook Pro, but I’ve never liked writing on a laptop, unless forced to on a plane.* Grant writers who travel should be aware that a MacBook or MacBook Pro is easier to use in coach class because both hinge at the bottom, as opposed to most laptops, which hinge at the top. You have a somewhat better chance of using it when the large person in front of you drops their seat back into your lap.

2. A comfortable chair. Grant writers spend much of their lives sitting, so don’t skimp on the chair. Jake and I like the Aeron Chair, Herman Miller’s gift to those of us trapped in offices but dreaming of working on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise. Others prefer the Steelcase Leap Chair, but whatever you get, make sure its adjustable and makes you want to sit in it for 12 hours a day when under deadline pressure. Slashdot recently had a long discussion of the relative merits of various chairs, and the differences might not seem important—but if you spend endless hours in your chair, the value of a good one quickly becomes apparent.

3. Sound system and headphones. I like to write wearing headphones, as listening to Nelly rap “Midwest Swing” at high volume gets me in the mood for writing a proposal about East St. Louis, which I have to do as soon as I finish this post. There is no substitute for Bose QuietComfort 3 Noise Canceling Headphones, which also come in handy on planes. When everyone has left the office, you can fling off the headphones and listen using Bose Companion 3 Computer Speakers.

4. A large desk with an ergonomic keyboard holder. Any desk will do, as long as it has lots of space for papers, books, pictures of kids, empty diet coke cans, etc. But don’t forget to attach a high quality adjustable keyboard tray. We love Humanscale trays, which can be attached to most any flat top desk. Spend $20 on the desk and $300 on the keyboard tray and your wrists will thank you.

5. Desk stuff. Jake likes annoying, noisy, clicky keyboards with great tactile feel, but the rest of us are happy with Apple wireless models. Although it is no long necessary to have a stack of reference books (e.g.,dictionary, thesaurus, etc.), a copy of Write Right! and On Writing Well isn’t a bad idea. A ruler, handheld calculator, lots of post-in notes, assorted desk jewelry to play with, a message pad, speaker phone, cell phone with Bluetooth earpiece lots of markers and pens are nice accessories.

6. A window. Writing grant proposals is too confining a task to do so without a view of something. Just make sure there’s a blind, so you can shut it when you find yourself daydreaming.

7. Companion. Personally, I like a dog nearby to pet when I pause to take a break (I know, there could be a bad pun here). Our faithful Golden Retriever, Matzo the Wonder Dog, was our constant office companion until she laid down her burden last winter, but she was often in a festive mood:

We now have Odette, a frisky seven month old Golden Retriever puppy, who keeps us laughing with her office antics:

About $4,000 should set up a first class grant writer’s office. It is not necessary to have one, but it is nice. When we started 15 years ago, we used hand-me-down desks, $5 chairs and PCs bartered for grant writing services. If you have a bit of money, however, the grant writing experience can be made vaguely enjoyable with good tools. After all, we are nothing more than wordsmiths and any craftsperson can make due with what they have, but a good set of tools helps speed the job and make it more pleasant.


*I’ve never understood why TV shows and movies always show writers using laptops, a lá Carrie in “Sex and the City.” If there are any writers out there who actually use laptops everyday, I’d like to hear from them.

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RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions: HRSA and Dental Health Edition

I’ve talked before about RFP absurdity, and now I’ll talk about lunacy more generally: the HRSA “Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services” program (see the RFP in a Word file here) asks in Section 2.6, “Applicant describes how oral health services will be provided for special populations, such as MSFWs, homeless clients, and/or public housing residents.” The services provided are supposed to be dental—teeth cleaning, cavity filling, bridges, etc., and last time I checked, teeth cleaning is the same for pretty much everyone: you go in, sit on an uncomfortable chair, and let the dental hygienist muck around in your mouth. The RFP writer is probably trying to say, “How will you recruit these hard-to-reach populations and make sure they get their teeth cleaned?”

Furthermore, the question the RFP writer probably means to ask in Section 2.6 has probably already been asked in Section 2.5: “Applicant demonstrates how the oral health services will take into account the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse patients.” Here, once again, as far as I know “special populations” are like the rest of us—do the homeless need their teeth cleaned in some special kind of way? Don’t culturally and linguistically diverse populations also need, um, you know, clean teeth?

These two questions are also odd because they presume to demonstrate extraordinary sensitivity but actually implies that the homeless, public housing residents, and the like aren’t human like the rest of us. Every human has about the same dental procedure performed: a dental hygienist or dentist evaluates you by examining your mouth, screens for oral cancer, scrapes the plaque off, takes X-rays, and then decides what to do next. If you need a root canal, you get a root canal. As Shylock says in “The Merchant of Venice,” “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you clean our teeth, do we not have fresh breath?” Okay, the last rhetorical question is an insertion, but it shows what’s so wrong with the presumptions behind the RFP and the way those presumptions weaken the RFP itself.

Questions like 2.4 are almost as bad: “Applicant also describes how the oral health service will be delivered within the context of the patient’s family and community to address specialized oral health needs.” Oral health service is usually delivered within the context of an operatory, where the dental hygienist and dentist work on your mouth. It’s not usually, so far as I know, delivered along with a Big Mac at McDonald’s. I answered this query by writing:

Oral health service will be delivered within the context of the patient’s family and community by understanding, respecting, and integrating both family and community life into the continuum of dental care. This means that extended family will be included in the care process to the extent necessary, and community norms will be evaluated and respected in providing care.

I have no idea what this means, as when I have a toothache I normally am not terribly interested in what my family or community says—I’m interested in what a dentist says she’ll do to fix it. But regardless of what it means, it’s one of three questions in the RFP that essentially ask the same question. When you’re confronted with page limitations and repetitive questions, you have two fundamental choices: repeat what you said, either verbatim or in slightly different words, or refer to the answers given in preceding statements. In general, we think it’s better to repeat what was said previous, or at least repeat portions of it if possible, because the reviewer will at least be able to put a check in the box indicating that the question was answered. It’s in front of the reviewer, which is particularly important if different reviewers are reading different proposal sections.

But in situations with extreme page limitations, we will sometimes refer to previous answers. But to do so, it’s vital that you pinpoint the section where the preceding answers occurred. Don’t just say, “as stated above,” unless what you’ve stated is immediately above. Say, for example, that, “as stated in Section 2.4, we’re committed to delivering services to special populations in the context of family and community…” That way, if the reviewer is bold enough to look at the preceding section, the reviewer might actually be able to find the relevant material. No matter how long and dreary the proposal, it’s incumbent on the grant writer to go find where the material exists and leave a pointer to that material in the later section. It’s also vital to answer the question rather than just observing, no matter how accurately, that the question has already been answered, which is a fast way to lose points by acting superior to the reviewer.

No matter how repetitive a question might be, you should answer it.


Why so many RFPs are so poorly constructed is a fine question and one I wish I could answer well. One assumption is that the people who write RFPs almost never respond to them, or, if they ever do have to respond to respond, it’s to someone else’s RFP. With that in mind, the best rational reason I can imagine is that it’s hard to figure out who would be best at delivering services and who most needs services. The problem is similar to figuring out how much to pay should be offered in a large organization. Tim Harford discusses it in The Logic of Life:

All the problems of office life stem from the same root. To run a company perfectly you would need to have information about who is talented, who is honest, and who is hardworking, and pay them accordingly. But much of this vital information is inherently hard to uncover or act upon. So it is hard to pay people as much or as little as they truly deserve. Many of the absurdities of office life follow logically from attempts to get around that problem […] (89)

The various levels of government don’t have perfect information about who will use grant funds well, and hence they issue byzantine RFPs to try and extract this information by force. But I’m not convinced funders are really getting anything better than they would if they issued a one-page RFP that said, “Provide dental health to at-risk populations. Tell us who, what, where, when, why, and how you’re going to provide them in a maximum of 30 double-spaced pages. You must submit by June 13. Good luck!” Instead, we get mangled RFPs like the one mocked above and blog posts that, like this one, are designed chiefly to demystify a process that shouldn’t be shrouded in the first place.

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Stuck on Stupid: Hiring Lobbyists to Chase Earmarks

A faithful Grant Writing Confidential reader and fellow grant writer, Katherine, sent an email wanting my take on a public agency hiring a lobbying firm to seek federal earmarks. For those not familiar with the term, it means getting a member of Congress to slip a favored local project into a bill, bypassing normal reviews and restrictions. The Seattle Times recently ran a nice article on the subject featuring our own Representative Jim McDermott, who is skilled at the art of earmarks. The only member of Congress I know doesn’t push earmarks is John McCain. For the rest of Congress, earmarks are a way of funneling money into often dubious projects, such as the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.

Back to the local school district where Katherine lives, which decided to hire a DC lobbying firm for $60K/year to get earmarks. She suspects this is a scam. I have no idea whether this particular lobbying firm is up to no good, but in my experience hiring lobbyists to chase earmarks will make the lobbyists happy and lead to lots of free lunches and dinners for public officials visiting DC to “confer” with their lobbyist and legislators, though it is unlikely to end with funding.

A small anecdote will demonstrate this phenomenon. About 20 years ago, when I was Development Manager for the City of Inglewood,* I was directed by the mayor via the city manager to contract with a particular DC lobbying firm to chase earmarks. Since the city manager and I knew this was likely a fool’s errand, we agreed to provide a token contract of $15K. I accompanied the mayor and a few others to DC for the requisite consultation with the firm. About 10 in morning, we strolled from the Mayflower Hotel over to K street, where all the lobbyists hang out, and were ushered into a huge conference room with a 25 foot long table.

Over the next two hours or so, just about every member of the firm wandered in to opine on potential earmarks. Around 12:30, we all repaired to an expensive DC restaurant (are there any other kind?) for steaks and cocktails. We had a fine meal and I met then former Vice President Walter Mondale, who had morphed into a lobbyist himself and was taking his clients out for lunch. When I got back to Inglewood, I received an invoice from our lobbyist which exceeded the contract amount. Our contract paid for less than one meeting in DC and resulted in no earmarks. But I had a great time, since it is always fun to visit DC using somebody else’s money.

That experience schooled me on earmarks and about why Inglewood had gone about acquiring them in the wrong way. If a public agency wants to try for an earmark, the agency can do so just by contacting the chief field deputy for Senator Foghorn Leghorn. Congressional field deputies know all there is to know about the earmark process. If your representative is in a mood to support your project (e.g., needs help to get re-elected and wants to say they are standing up for schools), they will fall all over themselves directing their staff to push the earmark. If they don’t want to for some reason, all the lobbyists in the world won’t force the issue. In that situation, the school district might just as well use the money to buy lotto tickets in hopes of funding the project, rather than hiring a lobbyist. Furthermore, going through the congressional field office will avoid the EDGAR problems described below.

Another problem is that if you have almost all of the 535 members of Congress promoting various earmarks, the chances of your particular project being included are pretty slim. This is another reason we don’t recommend pursuing earmarks. If Katherine’s school district really wants to fund education projects, this is not the way to go about it. Instead, they should hire an experienced grant writing firm, like Seliger + Associates, to help them refine and prioritize project concepts, conduct grant source research, and start submitting high quality, technically correct proposals. If the concepts have merit, they will eventually be funded. The Department of Education and others provide billions of dollars in actual grant funds every year. This is a larger, more reliable source of funding than earmarks.

Finally, if an organization is lobbying, it can end up closing off grant funds. The “Education Department General Administrative Regulations” (EDGARs) govern grants and contracts made through the Department of Education, and they’re designed to prevent corruption, kickbacks, and the like. Subpart F, Appendix A, deals with lobbying. It says:

The undersigned certifies, to the best of his or her knowledge and belief, that:
(1) No Federal appropriated funds have been paid or will be paid, by or on behalf of the undersigned, to any person for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of an agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with the awarding of any Federal contract, the making of any Federal grant, the making of any Federal loan, the entering into of any cooperative agreement, and the extension, continuation, renewal, amendment, or modification of any Federal contract, grant, loan, or cooperative agreement.

And so on, which you can read if you’re a masochist. EDGAR basically means that an agency which pursues lobbying can end up screwing itself out of the much larger and more lucrative grant world.

Katherine has also found questionable math regarding the particular lobbyists’ probable efficiency, and the lobbyist also makes the dubious claim that it has a “90% success rate.” But what does “success” mean in this context? Does that mean 90% of clients get some money? If so, how much? And from who? And through which means? Seliger + Associates doesn’t keep “success” numbers for reasons explained in our FAQ. We constantly see grant writers touting their supposed success rate and know that whatever numbers they pitch are specious at best for the reasons described in the preceding link.

Public agencies hiring lobbyists for earmarks is often a case of being stuck on stupid.


* “Inglewood always up to no good,” as 2Pac and Dr. Dre say in California Love.

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Finding and Using Phantom Data in the Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services Under the Health Center Program

RFP needs assessments will sometimes request data that aren’t readily available or just don’t exist. The question then becomes for you, the grant writer, what to do when caught between an RFP’s instructions and the reality of phantom data. When you can’t find it, you’ll have to get creative.

The Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services Under the Health Center Program (see the RFP in a Word file here) presents a good example of this problem. The narrative section for “B. Oral Health Review Criteria” begins on page 44. Under “Review Criterion 1: Need,” “Subsection 2,” the RFP says “Applicant clearly describes the target population for the proposed oral health service, including […]” which goes to “Subsection c,” which says, “The oral health status and treatment needs of the target population (e.g., caries rate, edentulism, periodontal disease, fluoridation in community water, oral cancer).” Such data are not tracked nationally. To the extent anyone keeps data, they do on a county-by-county or state-by-state basis, which can make finding the data hard—particularly for a service area that may not match up with a county or other jurisdictional boundary. But I had to answer the RFP and so looked for information about oral health status online but could find little if anything through state, county, or city websites.

If you can’t find important data online, your next step is to contact whichever public officials might be able to have it. The organization we worked for was in a state with dental health responsibility rolled into the Department of Health. Contact information was listed on the Department of Health’s website. So I called and e-mailed both the person at the state office and the person responsible for the organization’s county. Neither answered. I skipped the rest of 1.2.c until one of the state representatives replied—promptly, too!—with a Word file containing what data they had. While the information helped, and I cited what they offered, the statistics didn’t answer all of the named examples of the health status and treatment needs. I still had an unfilled data gap.

This left two choices: say the data isn’t available or write in generalities about the problems, extrapolating from what data are available. If you say the data isn’t there, you might score lower for the section compared to the people who have data or write in generalities. If you obfuscate and explain, there’s a chance you’ll receive some points. Therefore, the latter is almost always the better choice: this can be done by discussing what data you have in generalities, telling anecdotes, appealing to organization experience, and alluding to known local health problems that don’t have specific studies backing them up. This usually means saying something to the effect of, “While specific data are not available for the target area, it can be assumed that…” and then continuing. I used a combination of these strategies by citing what data I had from the state and filling the gaps with generalities.

When you find requests for data, do everything you can to seek it, and don’t be afraid to contact public officials. If you still can’t find the data, summon whatever construct as artful an explanation as you can and then move on. Chances are that if the RFP wants data so unusual that you can’t find it after a concerted effort, many other people won’t be able to find it either. You should also remember The Perils of Perfectionism: every hour you spend searching for data is an hour you’re not spending on other parts of the proposal. You shouldn’t invest hours and hours of time in finding trivial data, and after you’ve made a reasonably strong effort to search the Internet and contact whoever you can, stop and move on. This is especially important because you might be searching for data that simply does not exist, in which case it will never be found and you’re wasting time trying to find it. While it is fun to search for the last unicorn, you are most likely to find a horse with a cardboard horn strapped to her forehead than a mythical and elusive creature.

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Grant Writing Credentials Redux

Two comments on Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain caught my attention: one is an elegantly written response challenging some aspects of my argument and the other a screechy attack.

In the first response, Marcia Ford agrees with my statements about “bogus credentials,” but defends the credential offered by the American Association of Grant Professionals, the organization she represents. Her reply is not all that surprising, as Ms. Ford helped develop the credential and presumably supports a product she sells. Now, it may anger some to call her organization’s grant writing credential a “product,” but that’s what it is, and one that sells for $595—not a small amount for the average struggling would-be grant writer. Her primary organization has set up a nonprofit to develop and market the credential.

Many entities sell services and products to nonprofits and their personnel. These include unabashed businesses, such as Seliger + Associates or Office Depot, nonprofits like Ms. Ford’s Grant Professionals Certification Institute, and businesses that look like nonprofits, such as Charity Channel (Charity Channel is particularly interesting as they describe themselves as “a resource that connects nonprofit colleagues around the world” on their FAQ page, but don’t make it obvious that they are a for-profit business, veiling themselves behind a wall of altruistic statements).

So, are Ms. Ford’s comments accurate and is the product worth the price? I think not in both cases. She says that “writing is not all there is to grant development any more.” Grant writing has always included more than writing (e.g., imagination, being to work under pressure, etc.), but as Rabbi Hillel said when asked by a heathen to explain Jewish law, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary.” Grant writing is about writing and the rest is mere commentary, including Ms. Ford’s other eight “competencies.” If you can’t write well under pressure, who cares if you know all there is to know about “grant readiness,” whatever than is. I’m heartened to know that “major training companies” are “aligning their curriculums to cover these skills.” I assume she’s talking about The Grantsmanship Center, which is also a “nonprofit” business that exists to sell products to other nonprofits. If there are others, I would be interested to learn of them.

Ms. Ford is also proud that the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NOCA) will soon accredit their certification. According to her, they accredit certifications from “poison control to nurse practitioners.” It might be meaningful if they accredited journalists, novelists, or other writers, although it is interesting to think of grant writing in the context of poison control. But writing has nothing to do with vocational skills like nursing. In addition, the GPC exam was developed by an Institute at the University of South Florida, which certifies public teachers in the state. This might not be an optimal comparison, since competency tests for teachers are notoriously lax (Jake can attest to this, as he took the Washington test, which he says is slightly more complicated than holding up a mirror to check for breath). Just for fun, I went to the Florida Department of Education website to see how effective the certified teachers are doing in Florida and found that 34% of 12th graders achieve a score of 3 or higher (5-point scale) on the FCAT Reading Test, meaning that 2/3 of high school seniors have not learned to read adequately. Even more fun is that 69% of 3rd graders score 3 or higher on the test—apparently the longer a young person is subjected to certified teachers, the worse the outcome.

Now, I’m just having fun manipulating data, so don’t get too excited. I appreciate the work of public school teachers, sent all three of my kids to public schools and am myself a graduate of Cooper High School in Robbinsdale, MN (go Hawks!). But the tests necessary to become a teacher don’t seem to have much to do with teaching skill or establish anything more than a bare minimum of knowledge. Going back to Ms. Ford, she concludes by alluding to “industry-recognized standards,” without stating what industry and who is doing the recognizing, other than her own organization, which sells the certification, the contractor that developed the exam, and the accrediting agency, all of which are collecting fees and none of which is a disinterested party. But I would guess that she is a good grant writer because as her comment is a great example of specious writing, an essential competency for all grant writers.

The more grating comment comes from the self-proclaimed “Ethical Grantwriter,” who confuses training and testing. For example, she/he wants to know if I would hire an accountant who “wasn’t a CPA” or a lawyer who “didn’t pass the bar.” Probably not, but then again, the CPA exam and bar exam are well established credentials with decades of broad society recognition. I’ll check back in 50 years and, if Ms. Ford’s certification is still around, perhaps I’ll take the test. Also, our Ethical Grantwriter fails to point out that one cannot take the CPA or bar exams without first completing years of post-secondary education. Anybody with $595 can take Ms. Ford’s exam and perhaps pass, but I can’t just trot down to take the bar exam. Finally, the “academic study” of grant writing means taking college journalism and English classes, which is what I suggested. Perhaps, he does agree with me, but is just confused. I suggest she/he stop staring at RFPs and have a couple of cocktails.

So, keep those comments coming. One of the central reasons for starting Grant Writing Confidential was to encourage the exchange of ideas about grant writing and it seems we’re succeeding.