Category: How-to

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Perfect Proposal Production In an Imperfect World

As a companion piece to Jake’s post on YouthBuild and Isaac’s on formatting, I want to explain the science of proposal production.

1. It starts, like all aspects of grant writing and preparation, with a thorough reading of the RFP. Failing to read the RFP is the equivalent of failing to check your boat for holes before you push out to sea. You can’t discuss the finer arts of sailing if your vessel sinks.

2. Make a master checklist of every item needed for submission, even if the funding source provides a checklist. Sometimes the funding source’s list doesn’t match the funding source’s RFP. Sometimes the funder won’t remember to list optional items on their checklist. RFPs can sometimes be as hard for funders to understand as they are for you, the applicant.

Get someone to double-check the list you make. A lot of grant writing, like legal work, simply consists of making sure that you don’t miss anything. Like, say, a required document.

3. Begin to gather the requested items. Some will be very common, like a 501(c)3 letter or a list of the board of directors. Some will be esoteric. Some will have to come from others: as soon as you make the critical decision to apply, you want to be sure to write memos to stakeholders with a list of items needed, including absolute deadlines for the items you need. You should decide on those deadlines based on how much time you need to prepare the proposal. Then back those deadlines up by a couple of days, to allow for late items. So if your proposal is due on, say, May 30, and you need to assemble it on May 26, then you should give an “absolute” deadline of May 20 to your collaborators.

Managing stakeholders could be the subject of an entire blog post in itself. If managing people were easy, and if people routinely do what they say they will, we wouldn’t have an entire discipline called “management.”

4. Arrange each item in the order required by the funding source. If you have missing items, write “Commitment letter from the LEA” on a blank sheet of paper and leave a Post-it sticking out to remind you that you don’t have the letter but need it (this will help you remember what you need).

For electronic submissions, scan all the documents that are not already electronic files and note items missing. We’re fond of the Fujitsu ScanSnap, which has a cult following among the people who heroically push paper for a living, much like the Swingline Stapler. It’s also not a bad idea, but time consuming and paper producing, to print these and insert marked pages for any missing items.

5. Make a list of the information needed to complete the application forms. Then begin filling out the forms. Leave time to obtain the signature pages for paper submissions and make sure your organization is registered to submit electronically. If you’re missing any information, make a list of who knows the information you need, how you will obtain that information, and what you will do if it’s not available.

As you can probably tell, lists are your friend and help you organized.

6. Consult your checklist daily and remind stakeholders or partners about when you must have the documents. Your stakeholders—especially if they’re the staff of other agencies—are probably very busy (or at least claim to be), and it’s easy to forget a request for a letter. A handy reminder, well before the deadline, is highly advised.

7. When everything has been gathered (finally!), paginate the document, if required; we recommend it unless pagination if specifically forbidden: page numbers help you and the reader.

8. Then—and this is most important part—have a fresh set of eyes look the document over. Encourage the person or people to ask questions if they aren’t sure about something. This is the easiest and best way to catch errors, like missing signatures or signature pages. While there is no way to ensure a “perfect” proposal, this method will improve your proposal production process.

Next up: Submitting the optimal proposal.

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A Day in the Life of a Participant is Overrated: Focus on Data in the Neighborhood

I’ve seen a lot of proposals from clients and amateur grant writers that include something like, “A day in the life of Anthony” in their needs assessments. This is almost always a mistake, because almost anyone can include a hard-knocks anecdote, and they convey virtually no information about why your hard-knock area is different from Joe’s hard-knock area down the street, or on the other side of the tracks, or across the country. These stories are staples of newspaper accounts of hardship, but newspapers know most of their readers aren’t thinking critically about what they read and aren’t reading 100 similar stories over eight hours. Grant reviewers do.

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

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

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

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Making it Easy to Understand Who’s Eligible for HRSA’s School-Based Health Center Capital Program

The Affordable Care Act has made it especially hard to figure out who’s eligible for a program. This week, the “Affordable Care Act: Grants for School-Based Health Center Capital Program” is our star. The announcement says that eligible applicants must “Be a school-based health center or a sponsoring facility of a school-based health center as defined in 4101(a)(6) of the Affordable Care Act [. . .]”

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

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

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

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

(iii) is administered by a sponsoring facility;

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

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

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

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

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Teaching the Teacher: What I Learned From Technical Writing

We’re skeptics on the subject of grant writing training as such, but this summer I taught a “Technical Writing” course for juniors and seniors at the University of Arizona. The original course design wasn’t very challenging, so I decided to make it more nutritious by building a unit around grant writing; in a fit of cruelty, I gave the class the “Plan of Operations” section for the last round of Educational Opportunity Centers (EOC) funding (you can read the assignment sheet here if you’re curious). The RFP was on my mind because I’d just finished one and thought a single section of the narrative should be stretch the students’ abilities while still being doable.

Teaching a writing class shows the instructor how things that’ve become easy for him might be very hard for everyone else. Working with students and grading their assignments also made me realize how much tacit knowledge I’ve accumulated about grant writing—mostly through listening to Isaac tell war stories and berate me over missing sections when I was much younger. That was definitely a “trial-by-fire” experience. In a classroom, students should get a gentler but still rigorous introduction to grant writing, and that’s what I tried to do, even though teaching effectively is hard, just like grant writing; the skills necessary for one don’t necessarily overlap very much or very often. As a result, it’s worth describing some of what I learned, since teachers often learn as much if not more than students.

Breaking down the component parts of the process requires thought. As I said above, relatively little of my knowledge about grant writing was explicit and ready to be communicated. This is probably true of all fields, but I haven’t noticed how hard it is to articulate what to do and how to do it. In response to student questions, I often had to slow down and ask myself how I knew what I knew before I could answer their questions.

For example, because I knew a lot about TRIO programs, I knew that EOC aims to provide a very large number of people with a very small amount of help, direction, and information. Think of the amount of money per student and the amount of time invested in that student as correlated: less money means less time. Which approach is “better?” Probably neither. But I needed to find a way to make sure students could figure out what the RFP is really saying without too much prompting.

You can’t teach technical writing outside of the context of regular writing. Most students didn’t have well-developed general writing skills, so we had to collectively work on those at the same time they were trying to learn about grant writing as a specific domain. You can’t write an effective proposal without knowing basic English grammar and being able to write sentences using standard syntax. Most high schools simply don’t teach those writing skills, or, if they do, students don’t retain them. I’ve learned over time to incorporate basic rules in my freshman-level classes, and I definitely had to do the same in this class—especially because most students weren’t humanities majors and hadn’t been required to write since they were freshmen.

I’m not talking about abstruse topics like the gerunds versus present participles or a finely grained definition of the pluperfect tense. I’m talking about simple stuff like comma usage and avoiding passive voice (this is actually a good test for you: do you know a couple major comma rules? Hint: “When you take a breath / pause” isn’t one. If you’ve begun sweating at this self-test, try Write Right!).

Your proposal isn’t going to be rejected outright because you misuse one or two commas. Typos happen. But if grammar and syntax errors make it difficult to read, there’s a good chance that reviewers simply won’t try to read it. The same applies to your layout, which is why Isaac wrote “What Does a Grant Proposal Look Like Exactly? 13 Easy Steps to Formatting a Winning Proposal.” In addition, a proposal filled with typos and other errors signals to reviewers that you don’t even care enough to find or hire someone to edit your work. And if you don’t care before you get the money, what’s it going to be like after you get the money?

On the subject of what students know, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses demonstrates that an astonishingly large number of college graduates effectively learn nothing, academically speaking, over their four to six years of college life. It should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in postsecondary education.

You can’t be an effective grant writer without basic writing skills. People who can’t write complete sentences or coherent paragraphs simply need to develop those skills prior to trying to write complex documents. If you, the reader, are starting to write proposals and your own writing skills are shaky, consider finding a basic composition class at a local community college and taking that.

Reading RFPs is hard. Which is why I wrote “Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP” and “Adventures in Bureaucracy and the Long Tale of Deciphering Eligibility: A Farce.” The EOC RFP is more than 100 pages, so I gave students the dozen or so pages necessary to write the “Plan of Operations.” Relatively few understood the inherent trade-off among the number of participants served, the cost per participant, and the maximum grant amount. Fine-grained details like this are part of what makes grant writing a challenge and, sometimes, a pleasure when the puzzle pieces slip into place.

There’s nothing to stop RFP writers from improving the organizational structure of their RFPs, but they simply don’t and have no incentive to. So I don’t think the inherent challenge of reading RFPs will go away over time.

A lot of students haven’t learned to write in the plain style: they use malapropisms, or pretentious diction that doesn’t feel right because they don’t trust themselves to use simple words correctly and in an appropriate order to convey meaning.

The best proposals balance imaginativeness and fidelity to the RFP. There is not a limitless number of possible activities to entice people into universities; if you’re proposing that leprechaun jockeys ride unicorns through the streets, shouting about the program through bullhorns, you’re probably erring on the side of being too, er, imaginative. If the only way you can conceive of getting students to college is by creating a website, you probably need more imagination.

Grant Writing Confidential is, in fact, useful. This isn’t just an effort to toot our own horn, but I gave students reading assignments in the form of blog posts, with about three posts required per day. The students who read the posts thoroughly and took the advice within wrote significantly better proposals than those who didn’t. When would-be grant writers ask us for advice these days, we tell give them much of the advice we’ve been giving for close to 19 years—along with a point to read all of GWC. It shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to read the archives, and someone who comes out on the other end should be better equipped to write proposals.

At some point, I’ll organize a bunch of the posts into a coherent framework for would-be grant writers and for others who simply want to sharpen their skills.

Nonprofit organization itself isn’t easy to understand. Nonprofits, despite the name and the associations with the word “corporation,” are still “corporations”—which means they have the organizational structure and challenges of any group of humans who band together to accomplish some task. People who work in nonprofit and public agencies already know this, but a lot of college students don’t realize that nonprofits require management, have hierarchies of some kind (the executive director probably isn’t doing the same thing as a “peer outreach worker,” at least most of the time, however important both roles may be), and that specialization occurs within the nonprofit itself.

People understand things better in story form. We sometimes tell “war stories” on this blog because they’re usually more evocative than dry, abstract, and technical posts. People hunger for narrative, and you need to tell a story in your proposal.

People who’re being taught usually want stories too, and when possible I tried to illustrate points about grant writing through story. But I didn’t realize the importance of this when I started. I should’ve, especially since I’m a PhD student in English Lit and spend a lot of my time studying and analyzing story.

Students prefer honest work over dishonest make-work, like most people. Too much of school consists of assignments that either aren’t hard or aren’t hard in the right way. We often call those assignments “busy-work” or “make-work.” Most group projects fall into this category. Students resent them to some extent, and I can’t blame them.

The cliche has it that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. The same is true in proposals: if an application is funded, everyone wants to maximize their perceived role in executing it. If it isn’t, then Pat down the hall wrote most of it anyway, and we should blame Pat. Having a small group talk over the proposal but a single person writing it will result in both a better, more coherent proposal and in more satisfied writers, who are doing real work instead of watching someone else type—which usually means “checking Facebook” or chatting, or whatever.

In our own workflow, as soon as we’re hired we set a time to scope the proposal with the client shortly after we received a signed agreement and the first half of our fee. We usually talk with the client for half an hour to an hour and a half, and once we’ve done that we usually write a first draft of the narrative section of the proposal and draft a “documents memo” that describes all the pieces of paper (or, these days, digital files) that make up a complete proposal. This is real work. We don’t waste any time sitting in meetings, eating doughnuts, articulating a vision statement, or any of the other things nominal “grant writers” say they do.

Time pressure is a great motivator. The class I taught lasted just three weeks, and students had three to four days of class time to write their proposals. At the end of the class, many remarked that they didn’t think they could write 15 to 20 pages in a week. They could, and so can you. The trick, however, is choosing your week: you don’t want to write 20 pages two days before the deadline. You want to write them two weeks or two months before the deadline.

If you can’t, hire us, and we will. Assuming we have enough time, of course; we also take a fair number of last minute assignments, which often happens when other grant writing consultants quit or when a staff person realizes that this grant writing thing is harder than it looks. We’re happy to take those last-minute assignments if we have the capacity for them, but it’s not a bad idea to hire us in advance if you know you want to apply for a program.

Starting early gives you time to revise, edit, and polish. This advice is obvious and applies to many fields, but a lot of people don’t think they can do as much as they can until they’re forced to act because of circumstances. But little stops you from applying the same force to yourself earlier.

Conversely, Facebook is a great scourge to concentration. I taught in a computerized classroom that had an Orwellian feature: from the master computer, I could see the screens of anyone else in the classroom. Students who spent more time dawdling on Facebook produced worse proposals than those who didn’t. This might be a correlation-is-not-causation issue—worse writers might spend more time on Facebook, instead of Facebook causing worse writing—but I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and other Internet distractions are hurting people’s ability to focus for long periods of time. I think consciously about how to disconnect distraction, and, if it’s an issue for me, I can virtually guarantee it’s an issue for many others too.

People who have never written a proposal before aren’t really ready to write a full proposal. This might seem obvious too, but it’s worth reiterating that few people who’ve never tried to write a complex proposal can do it right the first time. Grant writing, like many activities, benefits from a master/apprentice or editor/writer relationship.

This, in fact, is how I learned to write proposals: Isaac taught me. Granted, he’s a tough master, but the result of difficult training is mastery when done. Viewers like watching Gordon Ramsay on TV because he’s tough and that toughness may accelerate the learning process for those on the other end of his skewer. I can’t do the same in class, which is probably a good thing. Nonetheless, whether you’re making an egg souffle or a Department of Education proposal, don’t expect perfection the first time through. Actually, don’t expect perfection at all, but over time your skills will improve.

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Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Foundation Grant Budgets

Faithful readers will remember our post “Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets.” This is a companion post for developing foundation budgets.

Unlike federal budgets, foundations rarely provide budget forms, or, if they do, the form is usually fairly simple and most grant writers, even novices, should be able to figure out how to complete it. The challenge is deciding what to present to the foundation and what format to use when a budget form is not provided. We opt for a simple Excel spreadsheet. If the concept of using Excel makes you break into a cold sweat, stop reading and learn how to use Excel immediately. I could place an illustration of a typical foundation proposal spreadsheet here, but we never post sample work products. For our reasoning, see “If You Want Free Samples, Go To Costco; If You Actually Want Proposal Writing, Go To A Grant Writer.” You’ll have to use your imagination to visualize what the spreadsheet should look like, but you’re grant writers and should have at least a soupçon of imagination.

Most of the foundation proposals we write are for project concepts involving operating support, a human services delivery project, start-up costs for a new nonprofit, or a capital campaign. The following applies to the first three (I’ll write a future post discussing capital campaign foundation budgets, which are structured differently):

  • Place a descriptive title at the top of the spreadsheet, such as “Project NUTRIA Three-Year Line Budget Spreadsheet and Justification.” Don’t forget to add your agency name above the title.* I like the look of the Center Across Selection tool in Excel, but choose your own actual formatting.
  • We use two broad line item categories: “Personnel” and “Other” in column A, which is usually titled “Line Items” or similar.
  • Starting with a “Personnel” header, list each administrative or project position as a line item row in descending order from the Executive Director down. Provide a subtotal row, then a row for fringe benefits. It is not necessary to itemize fringe benefits. Instead, express them as a percentage of the personnel subtotal in the first calculation column. Finally, provide a Personnel Total row.
  • Everything else goes into “Other” header. Provide enough line items to cover the activities noted in the proposal, but not so many as to make the spreadsheet print on two pages or be otherwise difficult to read. Typical “Other” line items include local travel, professional development, equipment, printing, communications, insurance, hourly staff (e.g., tutors for an after school program) expressed as hours (there are 2,080 hours in a person year, so two FTE tutors = 4,160 hours) in the first calculation column times an hourly rate in the second calculation column, and so on. Provide an Other Total row.
  • Provide a Total Cost row, which is the sum of the Personnel and Other Totals. If your agency uses an indirect rate, the Total row will be called Total Direct Costs, followed by an Indirect Costs row (expressed as a percentage of Total Direct Costs in the first calculation column) and a Total Project Costs row.
  • Moving across the spreadsheet from column A (line item names), the next two or three columns should be for calculations (e.g., numbers, months, percentages, etc., so the readers can figure out how your formulas are derived). The next three columns will be Year One, Year Two and Year Three yearly totals. The formulas in these cells will be multiplications of the calculation cells for each line. The next column will be the project period total for each line.
  • The last column should be larger and be titled, “Narrative Explanation” or similar. Place a brief description of the line item (“10 iPhones @ $200 ea. to enable Outreach Workers to connect with participating at-risk youth through social media, as detailed in the attached project narrative”). As I discussed in my post on federal budgeting, I see no reason to have long-winded budget narratives that regurgitate the proposal like Jon Voight by the eponymous snake in Anaconda.
  • Provide a bottom sum row for each project year and the project budget year total, perhaps with a cost/participant total, and you’re done.
  • Actually, you’re not quite done, as you will have to struggle with font sizes, row heights and such to get Excel to print the spreadsheet on a single, readable page. But grant writers love struggle, so this should be the fun part of the exercise.

It is OK to estimate most line items. As with all budgets, however, the most important aspect is to make sure that the budget is consistent with the narrative. For example, if the narrative discusses having Outreach Workers using social media to engage at-risk youth, there should be a line item in the budget for the cost of buying the phones and/or computers, as well as a separate line item for phone service charges. Also, I like round number budgets—say $250,000/year for a $750,000 project total. The round number can be easily achieved by making one row (e.g. participant incentives or advertising) a “plug number” (guessed flat per year number for a particular line item), rather than a calculated total. Keep adjusting the plug number in each year until you achieve the round number.

Although this kind of spreadsheet may seem too simple, it will provide enough detail for the foundation to understand your budget request. If the foundation gets interested in funding the project, you’ll know because, in most cases, the foundation will request additional budget details.

* “The Name Above the Title” is the title of a 1991 CD by the somewhat forgotten folk-rocker John Wesley Harding. I’ve been asked many times about the music I listen to while writing proposals. One of these days, I compile a playlist or two and post them. J.W. Harding might be on one of them.

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Program Officer Blues: What To Do When The RFP Is Ambiguous, Contradictory, Incoherent, or All Three

When you find an ambiguity or outright contradiction in an RFP, it’s time to contact the Program Officer, whose phone number and e-mail address is almost always stashed somewhere in the RFP. The big problem with contacting a Program Officer is simple: you can’t trust what she or he tells you. The formal RFP—particularly if published in the Federal Register and/or Grants.gov—takes precedence over anything the Program Officer tells you. Unless you’re given a specific reference to instructions in the RFP, you can’t safely rely on advice given by a Program Officer. This is the primary reason we see no point in attending bidders’ conferences, or, more likely these days, watching “webinars” about RFPs. Anything said in those forums that isn’t backed by the RFP, program guidelines, and/or the underlying section of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) means jack.

And that’s assuming you even can get advice from Program Officers. A client recently wanted more detail about a slightly ambiguous outcome requirement in the Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood proposal we were writing, so we advised her to contact Tanya Howell, the ACF staffer assigned to the program. Our client asked two questions, and in both cases Ms. Howell began by responding with the same helpful sentence: “Applicants should use their best judgment in determining whether they are able to meet the requirements contained in the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), whether they are able to develop an application they believe to be responsive to the FOA and in designing and writing their applications.”

“Applicants should use their best judgment” is another way of saying, “I have no idea, do what you want, and if the reviewer dings you don’t come back and blame me.” Her second sentence, in both cases, said that the measures in question were “at the discretion of the applicant.” This kind of non-answer answer that leaves the applicant in the dark and is only marginally more helpful than no answer at all. It also smacks of the Program Officer simply preparing a template response to questions and applying the template in order to minimize her own need to work.

Here’s another weird example. We recently completed a WIA job training proposal for a large nonprofit in Southern California. The RFP was issued by the Workforce Investment Board (WIB) for a particular jurisdiction, and the RFP specified that applicants must demonstrate a written collaboration with Workforce Sector Intermediaries. We’d never seen this term before; it was not defined in the RFP and a Google search returned us to the RFP. Since the client is already a WIA grantee, we had our client contact call their Program Officer. The Program Officer also did not know what was meant by Workforce Sector Intermediaries and could not get an answer from her supervisors. In other words, nobody at the WIB knew what was the meaning of a requirement specified in their own RFP.

Still, if you can find a contradiction in an RFP, you can sometimes get a correction issued. We’ve found contradictions at least a dozen times over the years, and sometimes we’ll point them out to Program Officers and get the RFP amended. That’s the only real way you can trust that your interpretation is correct, instead of an example of your “discretion” that might cause you to lose points. Thus, despite the depressing anecdotes above, you should pose your conundrum to the Program Officer.

Clients will also ask us about possible ambiguities, and we give the best answers we can. But clients regularly ask us questions about RFPs that we can’t answer. It’s not that we’re opposed to answering questions, of course—but the questions themselves sometimes can’t be answered by the RFP. At that point, it’s time to call or write the Program Officer and hope for the best.

Before you do, however, you should read the RFP and any associated guidance or CFR reference as closely as possible. That means looking at every single section that could have a bearing on your question. If you’re reading an RFP, you’re basically performing the same exercise that (good) English professors do to novels, poems, drama, and short stories, or that lawyers do to legislation and court decisions: close reading. You can find lots of “how to” guides for close reading from Google, or you can look at one of the original textbooks about close reading, Understanding Fiction. But close reading at its most basic entails looking at every single word in relation to other words and ascertaining how it forms meaning, how meanings of a text change, and what meanings can be interpreted from it. For example, if you were close reading this passage, you might look at the phrase “at its most basic” in the preceding sentence and say, “What about its ‘least’ basic? What do advanced forms of close reading entail?” and so forth.

In Umberto Eco’s Reflections on The Name of the Rose, he says that a novel is “a machine for generating interpretations.” The same is true of other kinds of texts, like RFPs, and your job in close reading is to generate the interpretations to the best of your abilities. Our skills at doing this are, of course, very finely honed, but even those finely honed skills can’t produce something from nothing. We read as closely as possible, use those readings to write a complete and technically correct proposal, and move on to cocktail hour at quittin’ time.

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Writing Conversationally and the Plain Style in Grant Proposals and My Master’s Exam

The kinds of skills you learn by grant writing don’t only apply to grant writing.

Loyal Grant Writing Confidential readers know that in my other life I’m a grad student in English Literature at the University of Arizona. Last week I took my MA written exam, which consisted of three questions that I had to answer over a four-hour period—a bit like Isaac’s recommended test for would-be grant writers:

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).

Except the University of Arizona lets you eat and drink tea if you want. Given the extreme deadline pressure, the exam demands that people who take it write quickly and succinctly. I e-mailed my answers to one of my academic friends, who replied, “You write so, well, conversationally, that I wonder how academics will view this. I find it refreshing.” Although this is an underhanded compliment if I’ve ever heard one, I take it as a real complement given how many academics succeed by writing impenetrable jargon. And “conversationally” means, “other people can actually understand what you wrote and follow the thread of your argument.”

This is exactly what I do whether completing a written Master’s exam or writing proposals. If you’re a grant writer, you should too. Proposals should be more or less understandable to readers, who probably won’t give you a very good score if they can’t even figure out what you’re trying to say. It might be tempting to follow the old advice, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” but although that might be a good strategy in arguments about politics in bars where your audience is drunk, it’s not such a good idea in proposals. I’ve spent most of my life trying to communicate clearly, in what Robertson Davies and others call the “plain style,” which means a style that is as short as it can be but no shorter, using words as simple as possible but no simpler.* The goal, above all else, is clarity and comprehensibility. If you’ve spent any time reviewing proposals, you know that an unfortunate number come up short on this metric.

Over the last decade and change, I’ve been trained to write proposals in such a way that any reasonably educated person can understand the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the proposal. This applies even to highly technical research topics, in which we write most of the proposal and include technical content and specifications that our clients provide. You should write proposals like this too. Sure, the academics of the world might raise their noses instead of their glasses to you, but they often don’t make good grant writers anyway. A good proposal should be somewhat conversational. People on average appear to like conversation much more than they like reading sentences skewed my misplaced pretension. If you manage to write in the plain style, people might be so surprised that they even find your work “refreshing.” And “refreshing” in the grant world means “fundable,” which is the final goal of all grant writing.

And, as for the exam—I passed.

* For more on this subject, read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (which I assign to my students every semester) and John Trimble’s Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing , which I’m going to start assigning next semester.

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The Art of the Grant Proposal Abstract is Like the Art of the Newspaper Story Lead

Proposal abstracts are funny beasts: they’re supposed to summarize an entire proposal, presumably before the reader reads the proposal, and they’re often written before the writer writes the proposal. Good abstracts raise the question of whether one really needs to read the rest of the document. While RFPs sometimes provide specific abstract content—in which case you should follow the guidance—an abstract should answer the 5Ws and H: Who is going to run the program? Who is going to benefit and why? What will the program do? Where will it occur? When will it run, both in terms of services and length of the project? Why do you need to run it, as opposed to someone else? How will you run it?

Whenever I write an abstract, I ask myself the questions listed above. If I miss one, I go back and answer it. If you can answer those questions, you’ll at least have the skeleton of a complete project. If you find that you’re missing substantial chunks, you need to take time to better conceptualize the program and what you’re doing (which might itself make a useful future blog post).

As you write, start with the most relevant information. A good opening sentence should identify the name of the organization, the type of the organization if it’s not obvious (most of our clients are 501(c)3s, for example, and we always state this to make sure funders know our clients are eligible), the name of the project, what the project will do (“provide after school supportive services” is always popular), and who the project will serve. The next sentence should probably speak to why the project is needed, what it will accomplish, and and its goals. The next should probably list objectives. And so on. By the time you’ve answered all the questions above, you’ll have about a single-spaced page, which is usually as much space as is allowed for abstracts in most RFPs. At the end, since this is probably the least important part, you should mention that your organization is overseen by an independent board of directors, as well as its size, and a sentence about the experience of the Executive Director Project Director (if known).

If you’ve taken a journalism class, you’ve been told that the lead of news articles should be the most important part of the story. When someone important has died, don’t wait until the fourth paragraph to tell your busy reader what their name was and what they accomplished in life. Treat proposals the same way. For that matter, treat blog posts the same way, which we try to do.

You’ll have to find an appropriate level of detail. The easiest way to find that level is to make sure you’ve answered each of the questions above and haven’t gone any longer than one page. If you have, remove words until you’re on a single page. You don’t need to go into the level of specificity described in “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,” but a mention of Census or local data won’t hurt, if it can be shoehorned in. Think balance.

Here’s one open secret about reading large numbers of documents at once: after you’ve read enough, you begin to make very fast assessments of that document within a couple of sentences. I don’t think I learned this fully until I started grad school in English lit at the University of Arizona. Now I’m on the other side of the desk and read student papers. Good papers usually make themselves apparent within the first page. Not every time, but often enough that it’s really unusual to experience quality whiplash.

To be sure, I read student essays closely because I care about accurate grading, and there is the occasional essay that starts out meandering and finds its point halfway through, with a strong finish. But most of the federal GS 10s, 11s, and 12s reading proposals aren’t going to care as much as they should. So first impressions count for a lot, and your abstract is your first impression. Like drawing a perfect circle, writing a perfect abstract is one of these things that seems like it should be easy but is actually quite hard. We’ve given you an outline, but it’s up to you to draw the circle.

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Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets

Many novice grant writers, and more than a few old hands, are terrified of federal grant budgets. Oddly, I find budget development one of the easiest aspects of grant writing, so I thought I would provide Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets:

* When you first read the RFP, ignore the budget instructions, except for the following: what is the maximum grant allowed, is the maximum grant for an annual budget or project period, is there a minimum, and what are the eligible and ineligible cost items? These answers are all you’ll need to develop the project concept and write the first two drafts of the narrative. When the second draft of the narrative is finished and incorporates changes to the first draft from all interested readers, you’ll have a more or less complete narrative description of the project concept, including a staffing plan. Budget development time will arrive.

* Learn to love the SF 424A, which is, as it sounds, the federal Standard Form (“SF”) for budgeting. The SF 424A is part of the SF 424, which is the basic “Application for Federal Assistance” or cover sheet used for most federal grant applications. This being the federal government, there are of course many different versions of the not-quite-Standard Form SF 424 and 424A, including alternate versions used by the Department of Education, HUD, DHHS, etc., as well as hard copy and Grants.gov versions.

But all SF 424A variants share common “Object Cost Categories”, which are found on Section B of the form. Object Cost Categories are the categories into which you have to allocate all budget line items. You’ll notice that the SF 424A Section B includes Object Cost Categories summary input boxes for grant costs only, which means you’ll have to create a line item budget using Excel or a similar program to calculate the Object Cost Category subtotals—unless you love using a pencil, legal pad and calculator and want to return to the Disco Era.

Once you have a line item spreadsheet created using the Object Cost Categories in column one, add as many columns as you need for the number of years. Keep in mind that you will usually need three columns for each budget year (“Federal,” “Non-Federal” and “total”), as well as three columns for the multi-year total, unless it is a one-year grant. Even though the SF 424A Section B only requests information for use of grant funds, you’ll need the non-federal amount to fill in the SF 424 and Section A of the SF 424A (I know there’a a lot of “A’s” and “B’s”” in all of this, but welcome to federal grant writing), as well as for the budget narrative (see below).

It’s always handy to have two or three calculation columns as well, which enable readers to easily see how you developed each line item (e.g., 12 mo. x $4,000 = $48,000 for the salary of the Project Director). Having been in business for 18 years, we have lots of SF 424A templates to use as a starting point, but I’ve never seen the feds bother to make one available. As far as I can tell, no one has told federal grant making agencies that Excel exists and it is still 1977 at the Department of Education.

* Now that you have a spreadsheet, it’t time to dream up the costs. That’s right, I said “dream up.” This is because federal budgets are rarely scored and all you really have to accomplish is stay within any maximum/minimum amounts and eligible/illegible item instructions in the RFP (see step one above) and make sure the budget is consistent with the narrative (this is why it is a waste of time to work on the budget until the narrative is gelled). “Consistency” means, for example, that if the narrative lists two Outreach Workers and a van for them to cruise around in, the budget needs to have these two positions listed under the Personnel Object Cost Category and a van lease under the Contractual Object Cost Categories. Most human services program budgets are composed of about 75% personal/fringe benefit costs and 25% everything else.

Thus, start with personnel and estimate salary costs, based on your agency’s current salary structure, calls to other agencies or the ever popular WAG method. Keep in mind that a person year is 2,080 hours, meaning that 1.5 FTE Outreach Workers can be calculated as 3,120 hours x $15/hour. Fringe benefits are expressed as a percent of salaries. Depending on the agency, fringes usually range from 15% to 30%. Part-time employees, interns and the like who do not receive full benefits are best listed in the Other Category, using an hourly rate jacked up by a dollar or two per hour to account for their reduced benefits.

* Once the Personnel and Fringe Benefits Categories are complete, it’s time for the rest. We rarely have more than about 15 line items beyond Personnel and Fringe in our budgets because it is a waste of time to have 100 line items. Remember, the budget is usually not scored, you’ll have to create a Budget Narrative (see below), and the more line items you have, the more complex the Budget Narrative becomes. Also, after you receive a Notice of Grant Award, you’ll have to negotiate a real budget with a federal Budget Officer anyway.

* The Travel Category usually includes milage reimbursement (always a popular line item with staff) and travel for conferences (an even more popular line item with staff). Your agency probably has a reimbursement rate of around .50/mile and, depending where you are in the country, $1,500 – $3,000 / person trip is about right for conference travel and per diem.

* We rarely use the Equipment Category in federal grants and you should avoid it as well. This is because the feds consider anything with a unit cost of less than $5,000 to be a “supply” and you can buy $4,999 copiers the same way you buy paper clips. As soon as the unit cost goes over $5,000, you enter the realm of federal purchasing rules, which is not a place you want to be. This is one reason vehicles and other big ticket items are better proposed as leases, even though it may make little economic sense. Remember, you are in the Proposal World, not the Real World.

* The Supplies Category is used for consumables and things most normal people would think of as equipment,but cost less than $5,000 each. Consultants, partner subcontracts, leases and similar items go into the Contractual Category. Construction is another Category we rarely use. Most federal grant programs specifically preclude the use of grant funds for construction and, guess what, there is yet another budget form, the SF 424C, for construction programs, which I will ignore in this post. Any quasi-construction “paint-up/fix-up costs,” modular buildings, etc., that you think you can squeeze by your Budget Officer should be put in the Other Category. The Other Category is loaded up with anything that doesn’t fit in the other Categories, including matching funds from your agency and partners, if applicable. This leaves the Indirect Charges Category.

Unless your agency has a federally approved indirect cost rate, based on an approved cost allocation plan, $0 is the correct entry for this Category. If you have an approved rate, it will be expressed as a percent of salary costs, total direct costs or whatever your rate approval letter states in the Indirect Charges Category. If you don’t have an approved rate and want to claim administrative costs, they would be placed as individual line items in the Other Category, assuming the RFP states that administrative costs are allowable. Typical administrative line items would be accounting, payroll, janitorial, purchasing, personnel administration, etc.

* It’s time for the fun-filled budget narrative. Typically, the feds do not provide a format for the budget narrative, instead going on for pages about what the narrative is supposed to include. If you want to return to the Disco Era I mentioned above, you could respond with something like the following for every line line item, ending up with a 25 page budget narrative:

Two Outreach Workers are needed to reach out to the target population because the target population is difficult to reach, doesn’t trust the government and is too busy doing other things to readily accept wraparound supportive services without being dragged to the intake center. The Outreach Workers will conduct outreach, using the Project NUTRIA van (see the Van Lease line item below in the Contractual Category for more detail), since the project area is pretty big and outreach will be conducted mostly at night, when it is also pretty scary. By having two Outreach Workers, outreach will be able to be conducted seven days per week for at least ten hours per day . . . and so on. Cost calculated as follows: 2 Outreach Workers x $2,500/mo. each x 12 months = $60,000. This salary is reasonable, based on salaries paid to Outreach Workers by the applicant and other agencies in Owatonna.

It’s easy to see how the above can get pretty tedious to write and even more tedious to read, particularly since the explanation for why Outreach Workers are needed should already be in the narrative. Instead of all this regurgitated drivel, we usually present our budget narrative in one of two ways: a “Narrative Justification” column in the Excel spreadsheet or a Word table that models the spreadsheet.

For the above example, the narrative justification would read something like this: “Two Outreach Workers to conduct outreach and intake, as detailed in the attached Project Narrative, 2 @ $30,000/yr.” That’s it. In 18 years of presenting simple and easy-to-understand budget narratives, I’ve yet to see any review comments that said the proposal would have been funded if only it had included an incomprehensible 25 page single spaced budget narrative instead of a one page Excel spreadsheet or two page Word table.

Now that you know how to tackle the federal budgeting challenge, go forth and budget.

EDIT: If you’re into budgets—and really, who isn’t?—you should also check out our “Quick Guide to Developing Foundation Grant Budgets.”

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Sign Me Up for Wraparound Supportive Services, But First Tell Me What Those Are

Most social and human services get delivered in one of two ways: on a drop-in basis or a case-managed basis. The latter is often characterized as “wraparound supportive services,” and is the subject of this post. If you’ve ever been to a Boys and Girls Club or YMCA, you’ve received services on a “drop-in” basis, which means you usually don’t have someone reminding you to do things or recommending that you do them. In high school, I’d swim and practice Tang Soo Do at a YMCA, and taking punches (with padding!) made me want to return for more. Note that we don’t recommend this approach for most drop-in programs unless you have an unusual audience in mind.

The alternative involves wraparound supportive services, which are intended to help an individual or family achieve some overarching goal by offering a suite of services over a period of time, based on needs identified through a comprehensive assessment. The basic idea behind Talent Search, for example, is to make sure that at-risk youth with college potential actually go to college. One could theoretically run a Talent Search program on a YMCA-style model, where you offer academic enrichment, PSAT and SAT prep classes, college tours, life skills training, and what not to whoever happens to wander past the school library that day. But most offer wraparound supportive services instead.

Why? The problem is that many high school students are like I was: indifferent. They’ll see a flyer or be told by a teacher they should do Talent Search program. Then they go home and play computer games or smoke pot or whatever and forget about all this Talent Search nonsense because Halo 3 is more immediately satisfying, while college, if it’s visible at all, is off in the blurry distance.

Colleges, of course, like forward planning and high GPAs, so if you want to go to a four-year school, waking up in October of your senior year isn’t going to help you much, even if you’re smart and have a lot of potential. I spent most of my first two years of high school not doing much of anything for no particular reason. Students like me (back then) won’t by and large spend much time in drop-in programs, which sometimes end up primarily helping the kinds of students who don’t need that much help anyway.

In response to these kinds of pressures, a lot of organizations offer wraparound supportive services. As the name implies, this entails wrapping the participant up with all the kinds of things they might need: referrals to drug or mental health treatment, transportation assistance, and life skills training (basically small group process for things like stress management, nonviolent conflict resolution, relationships, anger management, and so forth). Usually there’s a staff person, often called a Case Manager, Counselor, or Coach, charged with doing intake, developing an assessment to figure out who needs services (this would be part of steps 2 and 3 in Project Nutria), creating a supportive services plan, monitoring activities, and overseeing follow-up. Since most free social and human service programs have more people who want to participate than slots, the idea is to provide coordinated, concentrated services to a smaller number of clients instead of scattering a smattering of services across many.

Most importantly, the Case Manager will keep an eye on each participant and try to shepherd them through the program. If Student Joe promised to do Talent Search at least until he graduates from high school, then Case Manager Jane will make sure he’s attending activities and making progress toward his goals. She’ll also help him pick activities and get help with other things he needs—like legal services for the Minor in Possession he gets after the Homecoming Dance—as new crises arise.

Sometimes funders will sneak a requirement to provide wraparound supportive service in through backdoors, like “collaboration” (see “What Exactly Is the Point of Collaboration in Grant Proposals? The Department of Labor Community-Based Job Training (CBJT) Program is a Case in Point” for more). The The Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) program provides a case in point. It specifies:

The Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) program, which is funded under FIE, encourages coordination of academic, social, and health services through partnerships between (1) Public elementary and secondary schools; (2) the schools’ local educational agencies (LEAs); and (3) community-based organizations, nonprofit organizations, and other public or private entities. The purpose of this collaboration is to provide comprehensive academic, social, and health services for students, students’ family members, and community members that will result in improved educational outcomes for children.

Whoever wrote FSCS wants every obvious social problem to have a solution, only the solution is supposed to come from nominal “partners” who usually don’t get a piece of the grant pie. The partner is supposed to magically provide the referral service through some other imagined funding stream. And guess who’s going to tell Joe to visit the community-based organization that will provide him with whatever he needs? Jane. Joe doesn’t know the services exist, and if he does, he probably won’t know how to access them.

The dirty little secret of wraparound supportive services is that they can very seldom be sustained over the long or short term. If you really have a case manager, an education specialist, a child care consultant, a life coach, etc., you have to pay for all those positions. Virtually no grant will actually cover the full costs, and organizations also face trade-offs between the number of people who can be served through wraparound supportive services versus drop-in offerings. If you need case managers as well as all the other positions that need to be staffed, you’re naturally not going to be able to serve as many people because the cost per person rises.

As a result, more wraparound supportive services happen in the proposal world than the real world. A lot of RFPs want you to say you’ll provide wraparound supportive services even if the funding agency knows you can’t really provide them or doesn’t provide enough funding to make such services happen.

To some extent, these problems can be mitigated through the ever-promising referrals to other agencies in the target area: promise that you’re going to send John to the local drug rehab organization for that, the local community college or Workforce Investment Act (WIA) One-Stop Center for job training, and so on. That’s what the FSCS RFP is shooting for. But local “partners” have their own problems, their own full caseloads, and their own oversubscribed services that lead to waiting lists, which is how you get the kinds of problems already mentioned in our collaboration post.

Still, many RFPs want you to propose wraparound supportive services, which you can’t do unless you know what the term means. Now that you do, remember to include such services in your proposal.