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Seliger + Associates enters grant writing oral history (or something like that)

Seliger + Associates has been toiling away in the grant writing salt mines for over two decades, and last week we got hired to review and edit a new client’s draft proposal for a federal program we’ve been writing for years.* They emailed their draft and we were delighted to see that it’s actually based on a proposal we wrote for some forgotten client ten to fifteen years ago. While the proposal has morphed over the years, we could easily find passages I likely wrote when Jake was in middle school.

We’ve encountered sections of our old proposals before, but this example is particularly obvious. The draft was also written to an archaic version of the RFP, so it included ideas that were important many years ago but that have since been removed or de-emphasized. We of course fixed those issues, along with others, but we also left some our our golden historic phrases intact for the ages. This version will undoubtedly also linger on into the future.

We’re part of what might best termed the “oral history” of grant writing. We’re the Homer of the grant world, which is a particularly apt comparison because “Homer” may have been more than one person. For the first ten years or so of being in business, our drafts were most sent by fax, but we sent final files on CDs. For the past decade we’ve been emailing Word versions of all narratives and Excel budgets. Our proposals have probably been traded by nonprofits all over the country like Magic: The Gathering Cards.** Still, unlike some other grant writers who will remain nameless, we never post or sell our proposals. But it seems that the digital age has caught up with us anyway.

In some ways, seeing shades of our old proposals makes me feel proud, as our impact will likely last as long as there are RFPs—which is another way of saying forever.

We don’t know what strange ways brought the proposal we wrote to our current client. We’ve had hundreds of clients and written many more proposals of all stripes, and even if we wanted to trace its lineage we couldn’t.

As we’ve written before, grant writing at its most basic level is story telling. Now our stories have assumed a digital afterlife of their own. While Titanic is not my favorite film or movie theme, I’ll paraphrase Celine Dion, as it does seem that . . .”our proposal words will go on and on.”


* Faithful readers will probably know which program I’m discussing, but we’ll keep it on the down low to protect the guilty and and punish the innocent.

** When Jake was about 11, and just before his unfortunate discovery of video games, he was a huge Magic player and was always after me to buy yet more cards. As I recall, he and his little pals endlessly traded Magic cards for “value” that completely eluded me, a classic clueless dad. Eventually Jake grew up and lost interest, at which point the value of the cards became zero for him.

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A shortage of jobs for qualified grant writers? Not that we’ve seen!

Mark Peters and David Wessel’s “More Men in Prime Working Ages Don’t Have Jobs: Technology and Globalization Transform Employment Amid Slow Economic Recovery” is an article you’ve already read 10,000 times, and the intro, as usual, is a dubious vignette:

Mark Riley was 53 years old when he lost a job as a grant writer for an Arkansas community college. “I was stunned,” he said. “It happened on my daughter’s 11th birthday.” His boss blamed state budget cuts.

(Emphasis added.)

If there’s a growing industry in America, it’s software development. If there’s an industry growing very fast but slower than software development, it’s grant writing. If Riley really can’t find a job as a grant writer—or become a consultant—there’s something amiss with him, not the industry. At Seliger + Associates we hear all the time about how nonprofit and public agencies can’t find good grant writers.

Axiomatically, however, those nonprofit and public agencies aren’t paying enough to attract qualified candidates—anytime you read about an alleged “shortage” of employees mentally ask yourself, “at what price?”—but nonetheless we are skeptical that qualified grant writers can’t find work. The key word in the preceding sentence is of course “qualified.”

Usually the laid-off-and-can’t-find-work stories are about workers in manufacturing or middle-level office jobs, and that convention exists for a reason: many of those jobs are genuinely disappearing, and the workers in them are either moving up to higher skill jobs, or down. That Peters and Wessel would choose a grant writer as an example is bizarre. That such a convention exists at all is also one small datum that explains why Ezra Klein is trying to build a new kind of news organization, one that perhaps would eliminate the convention altogether or at least deploy it more intelligently.

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In Forming a Nonprofit Board, Think “Goldilocks”

When forming a new nonprofit, one of the first issues confronting the sponsor as they apply for a state charter and draft articles of incorporation and bylaws is: How many board members should the new organization have? As with most things relating to nonprofits and grant writing, while there’s no definitive right answer, there are some good answers.

Some states will approve a new profit with just a single board member—and the inherent simplicity and control of a single board member often appeals to a founder—this is a fast way to the exit when you apply for IRS 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Other founders, particularly true believers, will think they should have huge boards, perhaps as many as 25 or 30. Unless you’re really good at herding cats, this is an equally bad idea. The care and feeding of 15 or 20 board members is an enormous task and raises the real potential that you might get booted out of your own nonprofit in a coup* when grant money finally arrives. In addition, more opinions does not necessarily result in a better outcome and often results in a worse outcome than fewer. Whatever number of board members you pick, it’s critical that you be able to maintain control of the board.

If one board member is too few and twenty five too many, what’s the Goldilocks number? When we used to set up nonprofits in an earlier incarnation of Seliger + Associates**, we always recommended five, seven or nine members. An odd number of board members prevents tie votes. Five is generally enough to pass the IRS believability test. Also, IRS regs require that not more than half the board be “interested parties,” so you have to go beyond your mother-in-law for members and getting five can be a challenge. With a five member board, only two can be interested parties. Any number of board members more than nine will get unmanageable very fast. In this case, bigger is definitely not better.

Moving beyond the size issue, consider the quality of the members. It’s good if the majority of board does not have the same last name. Many foundation and some government funders will request board member affiliations. Having well-respected, un-indicted business leaders, clergy, public officials and so on is usually better than having all average Joes and Josephines. Still, it’s good grant PR to have one or two potential consumers of whatever service you’re providing. For example, if the organization will be providing affordable health care, have one or two potential patients on the board. Unless you’re forming a national/regional organization or one with a highly specific purpose like research for a obscure medical condition, claim that the board is “community-based,” and plausible evidence of that claim is an advantage. Local residents are usually better than distant “experts,” even in situations where that makes no sense.

One effective approach is to have a small, community-based, but still “respected” board of five members and a much larger “advisory board” of big shots that look good on letterhead and your website. The advisory board doesn’t actually have any power and doesn’t do much except lend their credibility and hopefully a donation every year. The advisory board idea is very common in Los Angeles, as there are many has-been actors and other entertainment industry types who’re willing to serve on advisory boards, as long as they don’t have to do anything. New York has ladies who lunch.


* It’s not uncommon for founders to get booted off their own board or for some board members to be kicked by other members in a putsch. I know because it happened to me when I was in my early 20s and still starry-eyed. I’ve heard lots of similar horror stories from clients over the years. Nonprofit boards can be intensely political, especially because the stakes are often so small.

** We no longer form nonprofits in most circumstances. As we’ve written before, it’s best to use an attorney or accountant who is familiar with nonprofits to help with the paperwork and approvals needed to form a new nonprofit.

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Issues Facing Old-Line Nonprofits Differ from Those Facing New Nonprofits: Think Bambi Meets Godzilla

We’ve written various posts on the challenges of starting a new nonprofit (like this one), mostly because we get lots of calls from fairly new nonprofits or folks trying to get one off the ground. Last week, however, I got a call from an agency in a large east coast city that’s been operating for about 200 years. I’m not making this up. The nonprofit originally was an orphanage that morphed into a broad-based children’s services agency.*

Though the caller was delighted to recite the exceptional history of his nonprofit, I didn’t get excited, as we we’ve worked for many nonprofits that have been around for decades—including one in a big Midwestern city that started in 1860s as a “settlement house” in the vein of Jane Adams’s Hull House. By now Seliger + Associates is older than many nonprofits.

While the caller was interested in a standard-issue federal RFP that’s on the street, we also talked over the challenges of keeping an Ancien Régime agency going in the face of an endless onslaught of Nouveau Riche competitors. Nonprofits face the innovator’s dilemma too. They must evolve over time and not get stuck in the “these are the services we provide” trap. It helps that most long-established nonprofits have contracts to provide capitated services or services with handy third-party payers (e.g., foster care, family reunification, residential care, primary health care, substance abuse treatment, etc.). Capitated-service agencies have a base cash flow, which they supplement with fundraising and grants (that’s were we come in).

Unlike new agencies, which are struggling for recognition and any funding scraps they can find, the main challenges old-line agencies face are relevance, ossification, and the inevitable disputes that arise with donors and funders.

Old-line agency must meet emerging needs. For example, there is apparently an astounding, sudden and unexplained surge of unaccompanied Central American children crossing into Texas this year, and they are essentially begging to be “caught” by the Border Patrol. This could reach as many as 100,000 random kids this year, who will overwhelm the current residential care capacity in the border states. The border patrol turns these kids over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which then hands them off to DHHS for transportation and temporary or permanent—depending on your interpretation of immigration laws—resettlement in small and big cities across America.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration is requesting $2 billion in new funding to address this human tidal wave or humanitarian crisis, once again depending on your point of view. I’m confident much of this money will end up as competitive grant opportunities from the DHHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). As the former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel put it, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Say you’re our former midwestern client and have been around since the Civil War. You provide family and child support services but not residential care, so it’s essential to develop this capacity; thousands of Central American refugee children are likely to be dumped into your service area. You should meet this new crisis, as part of your mandate and mission, while at the same time bolstering your revenue with tidy ORR grants. This is a basic “win-win.”

Regarding ossification, old agencies are usually larger and bureaucratic, mimicking the funders that support them. It’s easy for a large, established nonprofit to become moribund, not only in the services they deliver, but also in the way in which services are delivered. Old agencies are less likely to adopt new technology and cultural practices—like contacting clients and conducing outreach through social media—because they do things the way they’ve always done things. Change is hard and inertia is seductive. This phenomenon is not limited to the nonprofit sector. Examples in business are common: huge companies like Motorola, Sears and IBM (before IBM reinvented itself under the remarkable CEO, Louis Gerstner) rise, lose focus or miss market shifts, and fall.

Finally, old-line nonprofits will often become embroiled in disputes with donors and funders. This can range from rich Mrs. Himmelfarb, who makes $100,000 annual donations, getting pissed off because she got seated at the wrong table at the nonprofit’s annual gala to the agency failing to submit required reports to the DOL for the agency’s YouthBuild grant. Once donors and/or funder program officers get annoyed with a large nonprofit, the organization may suddenly find itself in financial trouble.

Beneath the feet of every lumbering old-line dinosaur nonprofit are tiny new mammal nonprofits scouring around and trying to meet new community needs, provide nimble services in innovative ways, and eventually take away the big boy’s donations and grants.** The old-line nonprofit needs to address these upstarts by acting like Godzilla in Bambi Meets Godzilla, perhaps the best short film ever made.


* Fun fact: although it may be moving against the conventional wisdom to defend orphanages, Richard McKenzie explains why they’re often better than foster-style systems in “The Best Thing About Orphanages.” Saying “They’re better than the alternative” is not equivalent to saying, “They’re great!”

** Some grant programs are explicitly designed to provide challengers to incumbents; Community Health Centers (CHCs), for example, are eligible for “Service Area Competition” (SAC) grants. As readers of our e-mail newsletter know, the last two weeks have seen more than $150 million in SAC grants. Every geographic area in the U.S. is supposed to be covered by a SAC-funded agency, and every time a competition arises, new CHCs can try to wrest the grant from the existing grantee.

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Until you get a call from your congressman and sign a contract, grant notifications don’t count

Last week, a client got a federal funding notification e-mail for a proposal we wrote a few months ago, and and the client started celebrating… until an hour later, when the Federal department sent a second e-mail, recalling the first and saying our client hadn’t really been funded.

That hurts, but it’s also not the first time something like this has happened to our clients. It’s a truism that, in any business, until the contract is signed and the money obligated, nothing counts. There are innumerable stories in the venture capital world about analogous shenanigans, including small companies that have picked up and moved, only to be told “just kidding.”

The cliché “money talks” exists for a reason. It’s still a pretty nasty mistake, however, for a federal agency to tell a nonprofit they’ve been funded when they haven’t. Mistakes do happen and one learns pretty quickly in grant seeking that federal bureaucrats are far from perfect.

Many of our clients first learn they’ve funded for a federal grant not from the funding department, but from their congressperson, or from a press release via their congressperson’s office. Every SF-424—which is the cover sheet for all federal proposals—has an input box for the applicant and project area congressional district(s). Congresspeople love to take credit for money going to their district, especially if the congressperson exerts no effort whatsoever.

It is common practice for federal departments to notify the affected congressperson when a grant award is made, often before the applicant is notified. Thus, an applicant may hear from their congressperson or read about it in local newspaper, before they get their notice of funding award email. The good news about this system is that it tends to make the program officers, who send out the funding award emails, marginally more interested in being correct. Congresspersons* get very angry at mistakes like the one suffered by our client. They tend to make a much louder ruckus than any nonprofit or public agency. Imagine Congressman Frank Underwood, as portrayed by Kevin Spacey in House of Cards, learning that the press release he just sent to the Gaffney Picayune Press concerning a YouthBuild grant to a local nonprofit having been sent in error because a DOL GS-12 sent award emails to the wrong list.

With our client, it’s pretty clear that both the proposal and client were fundable, but political machinations (or, more charitably, “considerations”) got in the way and the first email was sent in error. If you’re in the game, not every call goes your way. And the “game” here can refer to grant writing, but it can also refer to “life.”


* Is it “Congresspeople” or “Congresspersons”? Internet authorities appear split. Most seem to agree that it is a good idea to use “congressperson” as a lowercase, non-proper noun unless one is referring to a specific congressperson.

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The Challenges of Seeking Grants for a New Facility

Facility grants are among the most difficult grants for a nonprofit to secure and almost impossible for a new organization with no track record.

Last week, a guy in Atlanta called about grants for a transitional living facility for pregnant teens. I immediately asked the caller if his organization had received its IRS Letter of Determination of tax exempt status under Section 501(c)3 of the IRS Code, and the organization’s track record. At first he said he had the letter, but after some questioning he finally admitted that he had just applied to the IRS.*

I know from decades of incorporating nonprofits that the organization was unlikely to get the all-important IRS letter for at least six months to a year. Ordinarily, I would have brought up the potential of the caller finding a fiscal agent to serve as the applicant, but he also eventually revealed that the new organization hadn’t actually done anything yet—and he was seeking capital grants to buy a facility for the proposed transitional living facility.

The conversation declined and he eventually hung up on me. Why? Because I told him, as I always do with such callers, what I told you in the first paragraph of this post: that “facility grants are among the most difficult grants for a nonprofit to secure and almost impossible for a new organization with no track record.” I suggested he consider seeking start-up grants to lease a facility, hire staff and so on. Nonprofits, like most businesses, should test their idea first and worry about long-term real estate second, or really eighth—behind a host of other factors.

It’s also challenging to get grants of any kind for transitional living facilities, which are sometimes called group homes, board & care homes, or sober living housing, depending on the population being served. Most such facilities serve a small number of residents—often only six, because of zoning restrictions, and rarely more than 25 or so.

Let me do the math: the organization seeks $500,000 to buy, renovate and equip a building for use as a transitional living facility to house ten pregnant teens. That’s $50,000/teen, without providing staff, supportive services and so on. If the funder simply gave $50,000 to the teen, she could rent her own apartment, provide child care, hire a personal case manager and have her nails done weekly. There’s really no need for the nonprofit.

Additionally, funders all know that most transitional housing operators charge rent to residents, which is usually provided at least in part by a third-party payer (e.g., SSI, foster care system, child protective services, insurance, family, etc.). Thus, a facility grant request requires a cash flow analysis and sources & uses statement to demonstrate a funding gap. Every real estate developer trying to get investors or a bank loan knows that a positive cash flow must be demonstrated, but in the nonprofit world of facility grants, the reverse is true: a gap must be demonstrated.

This is called a “but-for” analysis; but for the grant in question, the facility can not be purchased or built. In any other condition, the nonprofit faces supplantation problems. Back to my example: a sources & uses analysis might demonstrate that a $100,000 grant is enough to support a $500,000 facility acquisition, taking into account projected revenue, mortgages costs, and the like. Nonprofit executive directors, and especially founders of new organizations, never want to hear this reality; they want money for nothing and chicks for free.

Funders generally will not even fund the gap for new organizations with no track record, for perhaps obvious reasons. Most new organizations that require purchase of a facility are actually funded by a combination of a direct loan from the founder and/or a bank line of credit, secured by the personal guarantee of the founder or an “angel” who loves the project. This, of course, eliminates most would-be facility acquisition proponents, as they either don’t have much money, lack credit, and/or have yet to meet an angel.

The better, more realistic approach is to gather enough capital and/or grants to lease a facility, operate on a shoe-string and collect third-party payments. After a few years of successful operations, the organization can then plausibly seek capital grants, based on demonstrated expenses and documented projected revenues.


* For reasons that elude me, callers often lie to me about their nonprofit and operational status. Since I’ve been fielding such calls for 21 years, I recognize pointless obfuscation immediately. As Long John Baldry put it, “Don’t Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock & Roll.”

Moreover, there’s little point in lying to your doctor or grant writers: what we don’t know can hurt you.

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Seliger’s Quick Guide to Setting Up a Nonprofit Corporation and Getting a 501(c)(3) letter (I Hope You’re Not in a Hurry)

We get a couple of calls a week from folks saying, “I’m in the process of setting up a nonprofit to help _______.” We always say the same thing: “Do you have your IRS 501(c)(3) letter of determination of tax-exempt status, and, if not, have you applied to the IRS?” Too often the response is “No” and “No,” or even-more troubling, “Huh?”, which means the caller doesn’t even understand what she’s doing.

We’ve never had anywhere useful to send these callers, but we’d like to—so here’s Seliger’s Quick Guide to setting up a nonprofit:*

  • Spend some time learning about nonprofits, including the IRS tax-exemption rules, as well as the rules in your state. Presumably one goal of a new nonprofit is to secure grant funds. Most funders expect your nonprofit to be incorporated in the state in which most services will be provided. So, if you want to help cyclopses being emancipated from the foster care system in Owatonna, Minnesota, don’t randomly incorporate in Florida. This step usually takes a few weeks.
  • Apply for a nonprofit corporate charter in your state, following the state rules, as well as the national IRS rules, with respect to board membership, composition, interested parties and so on. To do this, you’ll need appropriate articles of incorporation, but you might as well draft bylaws at the same time, as these will be needed shortly anyway for your state (probably) and your federal tax-exemption applications. This step will likely take a few weeks to a month.
  • If your state has a corporate income tax, apply for state tax-exempt status. This step can take a few weeks to several months—think “several months” in a state like California, which has a very complex application process; Pennsylvania, by contrast, has a simple, quick process.
    At the end of the above steps, you’ll have a conformed copy of your formation documents. “Conformed” is just a fancy way of saying a signed, state-approval stamped copy. You’re going nowhere with the IRS without conformed documents. This is a key point.
  • Apply for a federal Employee Identification Number (EIN). This is the only part of the process that is almost instantaneous.
  • If you haven’t given up or died of old age, you’re finally read to complete your Form 1023, which is the actual IRS application for determination of 501(c)(3) status. You need the letter of determination, because without it, your new organization is not exempt from paying taxes and, even more importantly, donations to it are not deductible by the donor.

Most foundations won’t consider a proposal from nonprofits that lack a letter of determination. You can always try to find a fiscal agent while you’re waiting for the IRS to respond to your application, but that carries its own problems, as we discuss at the link.

Wait you will: it can take the IRS anywhere from three months to several years to approve your 1023. Along the way, you’re likely to get a series of interrogatories from the IRS that are designed to make you crazy, discourage you from continuing, or are genuinely aimed at ferreting out phony applicants, depending on your point of view.

If you do the math, you’ll see the completing the nonprofit formation process typically takes about nine months to two years. This news usually comes as a shock to the hopeful but frequently hapless callers I mentioned at the top of the post. We generally advise such callers to contact an attorney or accountant in their area that works with nonprofits and can help them with the paperwork.

I incorporated my first nonprofit over 40 years ago, when I was a young and starry-eyed intern, but the process is much more complex now. Trying to to this yourself or using one of the $99 Internet incorporation outfits is penny wise and pound foolish. You have been warned; as Robbie the Robot said, “Danger Will Robinson!

There is one way of forming a nonprofit more quickly (and it is not the “expedited review” offered by the IRS for an additional fee, which I don’t think actually speeds anything up). Instead, you wait for a giant disaster and try drafting behind it like cyclists behind a big rig.

After events like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, state tax officials and the IRS will often quickly approve new nonprofits because of obvious need, even if the proposed nonprofits have no apparent connection to the disaster. Most of the time the IRS and state tax officials are as motivated as any kind of government bureaucrat. Only the possibility of widespread political heat and anger motivate them to act with the kind of haste one otherwise associates with Amazon.com.

If you have a plausible charitable purpose, don’t be discouraged by the process. Thousands of nonprofits get incorporated and receive their 501(c)(3) status every year. Even the NFL is nominally a “nonprofit,” albeit a 501(c)(6) and it made almost $10 billion last year. Stay the course. Don’t lose heart. And while you’re waiting around for a disaster, you might as well start down the IRS Yellow Brick Road.


* The various state and federal fees are going to run around $800. They’re not refundable.

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Volunteers: Nonprofits really want their money, not their bodies

Today’s New York Times has a rarely expressed view (and, almost as rarely, a view that we share): that volunteering is largely a waste of time. In it, Aaron Hurst quotes an anonymous nonprofit executive director saying that “If I get another volunteer I am going to go out of business.”

It’s a common misconception that volunteers help nonprofits to do work that wouldn’t get done otherwise. But volunteers are actually there to keep them involved in the organizations and for purposes of seeking donations—or buying tickets for galas, art auctions, and so forth. The more contact a volunteer has with an organization, the more likely they are to donate. Nonprofits, like other businesses, need money in order to carry out their activities effectively—not untrained volunteers. Volunteer labor is often not worth the money that’s paid for it.

Decades ago, Isaac was the Executive Director of a nonprofit called the Hollywood-Wilshire Fair Housing Council, and he learned quickly to dislike volunteers. Volunteers didn’t know anything about fair housing and rarely had the skills that matched what the nonprofit needed. This is intuitive in your own life. Let’s say you need to get divorced. If a plumber shows up and says, “Gee, I’ll help with the divorce paperwork,” you’re going to be pretty unhappy with the outcome (so is the judge who has to read pleadings written by a plumber). If you have a clogged toilet you are not likely to want a lawyer in a $1,000 suit standing there charging you $350 an hour to scratch his head and ask which side of the plunger goes down.

When Isaac worked in Fair Housing, he realized how much time he spent messing around with volunteers relative to the amount of real work that got done. To him it seemed a waste of time, especially because volunteers would often screwup the work that then had to be redone by staff—but because they were volunteers, no one could say, “You screwed that up and need to do it right.” Consequently, volunteering comes to resemble a game in which volunteers are praised for doing almost anything, no matter how ineptly or counterproductively, like many public school students.

It can be more expensive to do something with volunteers than it is to do something without, in the same way that giving canned food to the homeless is much, much less efficient than giving them equivalent cash.

Wrangling and deploying volunteers is difficult. Let’s say you want to hand out flyers. You have to give them T-shirts, get them breakfast, and transport them—and handing out flyers is not usually fun and exciting. Volunteers who get bored just leave. Mixing volunteers and paid staff in the same activity tends to demoralize both groups, since paid staff are having otherwise paid hours stolen from them, and volunteers feel like they’re not doing work that wouldn’t get done otherwise.

Many would-be volunteers also find working with kids and helping the next generation to be more satisfying than working with average adults or “elders.”* But working with kids today means police background checks, constant supervision, and limited if any one-on-one time. Arranging the police background checks can be expensive and time consuming, and the costs for screwing up the background checks or not doing them properly could be catastrophic.

Finally, as Tyler Cowen points out in Average is Over, low-skill labor is not in short supply. The number of people willing to work for $9 an hour is high. The news is filled with stories about 20,000 people applying to work at every new Wal-Mart. In addition, anyone who wants to learn about teamwork or whatever else volunteering is supposed to teach can try working at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. Those places are as good as anyone for learning such virtues and at least as good as volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.

To return to Hurst, he also says something that’ll resonate with our readers:

Working in a nonprofit is no guarantee of having meaning in your daily life. Many nonprofit employees lack purpose in their work. Their organization may be doing inspiring work in the world, but the day-to-day job doesn’t generate much involvement.

Find meaning elsewhere. There is nothing intrinsically not-meaningful in working for a corporation. In the past decade who has provided more net happiness to the world: Apple Computer or every nonprofit in America? It’s not an answerable question but one could create a reasonable set of arguments for each side in a debate.

In the grant world, there seems to be a general trend away from volunteering: we don’t see many RFPs that require volunteers or even mention volunteers. But almost every proposal requires collaboration with other organizations. That’s ascendent. When even the Department of Labor or Education stops talking about volunteers, you know the idea is dead.


* Free proposal word here; I prefer the more accurate, direct term “old people.”

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Guest Post: Tales of the Grant Manager

This guest post was inspired by “Grant Writer Vs. Grant Management: Two Essential Nonprofit Job Functions Separated by a Common Word” and describes what a Grant Manager does and how that differs from what grant writers do. Like many of our guest posts, it is published anonymously to protect the guilty and the innocent.

I’ve been a Grant Manager for about two years. I had spent much of my career as a public sector urban planner, but the Great Recession devastated the planning field. Like a lot of planners, I was on the chopping block for a layoff. I ended up taking a position as Grant Manager for a medium-sized community development nonprofit with a really excellent reputation.

As a planner I’d written plenty of grants, so it was all old hat. Before I joined my current organization, there were two grant-related positions, both vacant when I started: a Grants Manager and a Contracts Administrator, with the former handling new funder research and proposal writing and the latter dealing with outcomes management. But I was left to do both tasks. The higher-ups in the organization thought that both functions could be managed by one staff person (me) temporarily, and, if it worked out, permanently.

It was completely unmanageable. Those first few months were a blur. I was fortunate in that the organization eventually authorized me to interview candidates. When I was attempting to do two jobs, 60+ hour weeks were the norm.

There was just not enough time to pursue new sources of funding, write the proposals, pull together the umpteen redundant attachments for each proposal, AND ensure that we are doing everything that we said we would do in our existing grant agreements and contracts. The latter function requires a whole separate set of skills, as you have to pry reams of time-sensitive (and when involving individual clients, often confidential) data out of staff that are already overworked to begin with. It’s easy to become the person that program staff dreads to speak to. It takes a certain personality to get that information without becoming as welcomed as a knock on the door from the KGB.

Fortunately, I managed to hire someone who is absolutely excellent at every aspect of the work. He and I are such a good team that we should be able to wear capes to work, honestly. We make up for one another’s weaknesses—I’m a stronger writer and he’s an ace at data analysis, spreadsheets, etc. He and I cross train one another whenever possible, which certainly comes in handy during vacations, or when a big deadline looms and it’s “All Hands on Deck” to get a giant Federal proposal out the door or to get an annual performance report compiled and submitted on time.

An example of the kind of skills one needs as a Grants Manager: I was at a recent info session conducted by a longtime government funder with whom we were seeking renewed funding. As soon as the presentation starts, the government rep conducting the session says “Now everyone, I want to emphasize that this is all just an informal conversation—we’re all here to do everything we can to serve our clients, so no secrets in this room—we are all on the same team”.

Present at this session were staff from several other nonprofit organizations seeking this same funding—of those present, only my organization and one other nonprofit were current grantees. The other two attendees were gunning to replace us. Like chickens who get to vote on dinner, we were not in favor of serving ourselves.

A staffer from one of the non-funded nonprofits asks the government rep, “So, based on the amount of potential funding available, how many clients should we plan to serve?” The gov’t rep smiles and says “we want to see what you all come back with.” Surprisingly, the staffer from the other current vendor says “we serve around 30 per year.” I’m sitting there thinking two things at the same time: “why would you surrender this critical piece of information so easily? Dumb.” and “is this some kind of eleven dimensional chess move?”

The eyes of the other nonprofit reps and the government rep all turn to me, so I state “yeah, we serve the same number”—which was the truth, but not a piece of data I had planned to surrender. There was no getting out of it. Thankfully, I was able to get through the meeting without having to give up any other “secrets,” so to speak.

This was one of those situations where you can win the battle, but lose the war—I could’ve said nothing, or said a number lower or higher than the truth—but the government rep knows how many clients its vendors serve. There was no winning, and it doubtlessly would’ve been worse had I said nothing, because we are “all on the same team” – even though the reality is that we’re actually at each other’s throats to get the same pot of funding to pay for staffing, fringe, OTPS, and all of the other things you need to make a nonprofit work. It’s a subtle dance, for sure.

Meanwhile, as I’m doing that, my Contracts guy is back at the office harassing program staff (in the most charming and diplomatic way possible) for data needed for a quarterly report, so it’s all good.


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Grant writer vs grant manager: Two essential nonprofit jobs separated by a common word

George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde allegedly said, “England and America are two nations separated by a common language.” “Grant Writer” and “Grant Manager” are two allegedly related functions separated by a common word: grant. Many nonprofits and public agencies combine the functions of Grant Writer and Grant Manager into a single position, often called the Grant Coordinator.

This is not a good idea.

This bit of common organizational stupidity was recently brought up by a faithful reader, frequent commentator and now-former grant writing consultant competitor (we’ll call him Milo). As Milo put it in an email, after several years of being a grant writing consultant, he’s given up* and decided to “come in from the [consulting] cold.” He’s been offered a job at a fairly large nonprofit ($13 million annual budget) as their combined Grant Writer/Grant Manager, even though he has no management experience.

Milo’s question: “At what size do nonprofit organizations typically make grant development and management separate jobs?” Unlike with new latest remake of Godzilla, size does not matter and I advised him that nonprofits and public agencies, small and large, usually combine these disparate functions, apparently only because the word “grant” is in both job titles. I assume this happens because most senior managers actually have no idea of what a grant writer does.

Having had the unenviable experience of having been the “Grant Coordinator,” albeit over 35 years ago when I worked for the woebegone City of Lynwood, I assured Milo that grant writing has little to do with grant management. As GWC readers know, a grant writer is essentially a Steppenwolf—a solitary figure who spends long hours alone sitting at a computer, churning out proposals. Coffee, snacks, and books go in and a proposal comes out.

To be a grant writer, one has to like working alone, be a good and fast writer, be unafraid of deadlines and have an active imagination about how to structure programs in the proposal world. The job of a grant manager, by contrast, is all about extracting fiscal and program information from line staff regarding existing grants and then regurgitating the info back to funders on convoluted forms and stultifying reports that nobody reads.

The grant writer is usually respected and/or feared by other staff, as they are the organization’s warrior, whose job is to conduct single mortal combat with a RFP dragon, over and over again, to keep the paychecks flowing and the lights on. The grant manager is typically hated and shunned by line staff, since the grant manager is always badgering them for performance data, and, even worse, outcome data. In military terms, the grant writer is the tip of the spear and the grants manager is a classic REMF (“Rear Echelon Mother Fucker”).

Assuming one has the skills and no fear of working without a net, it’s much more fun to be a grant writer than a grant manager. To use a scientific terms, being a grant manager blows.


* I wish Milo well. Having been in business for 21 years, we’ve seen lots of consulting competitors rise and and eventually give up. Being a grant writer is hard, but being a successful grant writing consultant is much harder, as Milo and many others have learned.