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What to do When You Still Must Fight Through a Poorly Organized RFP: Part II of a Case Study On the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program RFP

This is the second of two posts; the first appears here.

In addition to being unsupported by the research demanded by the program, as described in this post, the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE) RFP is also poorly organized. It separates concepts and ideas that belong together for no apparent reason. This is most evident in its pursuit of the “A – H criteria” on page 2, the evaluation criteria on pages 5 – 8, and the “13 themes” on page 11. Each corresponds to parts of what appear to be the narrative on pages 52, 51, and 52, respectively. This raises the obvious question of why the RFP writers didn’t simply integrate the A – H, evaluation, and 13 themes criteria in a single spot, rather than referring endlessly back and forth between them. In addition, since the evaluation section on pages 5 – 8 tells you what you have to do for an evaluation, it might’ve been wise to just tell the applicant how to run the evaluation, rather than have the applicant pretend they’re going to design their own evaluation.

Still, this raises another important grant writing point, which is that you should, whenever possible, take elements from the RFP and regurgitate them in your proposal, like a mother bird vomiting up dinner for her young. The easiest way to conform to the RFP and program requirements is to do exactly what the requirements tell you to do in language that mirrors but does not copy the RFP. Page 7 of CBAE says:

In addition, successful applicants will be required to administer a 10-item survey to all participants as a pre-test and post-test when appropriate (e.g., when students are participating in a curriculum- based program). They will also be required to administer a post-post test to a representative sample of participants six months and/or 12 months after completion of the abstinence education program.

Such a passage can be easily rewritten as part of the evaluation section, and it’s an easy way to gain points. When RFPs give you lemons, make lemonade, and this RFP certainly gives a lot of lemons.

Notice, however, that three paragraphs above I said “what appears to be the narrative.” That’s because two sections of the RFP could arguably be the narrative: one that starts on page 41 under the header “Part II GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR PREPARING A FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTION,” and another that starts on page 48 under “EVALUATION CRITERIA.” But the one that says evaluation criteria doesn’t refer to the evaluation you’re going to run—it refers instead to how the funding agency is going to decide whether you should be funded. In other, recursive, words, they’re going to use their evaluation criteria to evaluate your evaluation criteria. Simple, right? Welcome to grant writing.

The question for the grant writer is how to choose whether to write to the narrative directions on page 41 or page 48. When in doubt, try to mimic as closely as possible whatever checklist the reviewers will use. That makes it easy for them to see that you’ve hit all the elements, and it’s more important to hit the right elements, even poorly, than hit the wrong elements well. This is another RFP trap, and a variation on some of the traps described in the linked post; I’d also bet it was constructed using the methods described in Inside the Sausage Factory and how the RFP Process leads to Confused Grant Writers.

The CBAE RFP has other traps:

*The required abstract has directions placed randomly on page 24. Miss those and your application could be thrown out. Why don’t they put the instructions with the rest of the narrative instruction? Beats me.

* Another items problem that isn’t a trap, exactly, but worth observing, is that ACF has apparently realized the drawbacks Isaac enumerated about Grants.gov. Page 28 says: “Applicants may submit their applications in electronic format through www.grants.gov (see Electronic Submission section) and/or in hard copy (see Section IV.3).”

* If those weren’t enough, the RFP also implies on page 5 one potential ordering for the evaluation. But it implies another on page 43, under the “General Instructions for Preparing a Full Project Description.” Yet page 28 says one should “[a]rrange all materials in the order listed in the Application Content section above.” Above, on page 25, we find yet another potential way of ordering the evaluation. We didn’t figure this out from the RFP, though—we called ACF to ask about the section order and a staffer tell us that our responses to the evaluation criteria in the RFP could go in any order. This alleviated the problem of the order in the narrative section, which originally asked for the needs assessment, then the evaluation, then the approach, otherwise known as “what you’ll do.” But how are you supposed to describe how you’re going to conduct the evaluation if you haven’t described what you’re going to evaluate? Not clearly, anyway. The mixed up order is yet another example of the carelessness of whoever wrote this RFP.

Finally, the header that appears on page 10 says: “Successful Abstinence Education Curriculum.” This is another ironic title, since the RFP is filled with references to trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Yet the header presumes that abstinence education will be successful, and the content it lists shows what elements have to be included. But if we don’t know whether programs with these elements work, how can we know that it will be successful? The answer is, of course, that we can’t. Isaac wrote in Self-Efficacy—Oops, There Goes Another Rubber Tree Plant about “those districts have ironically named “successful school guides” even as their students fail almost every ability test imaginable.” The same concept applies here: the RFP defines what kind of abstinence education will be “successful,” then tells you what to do, then expects you to tell them what you’re going to do, and then expects all this to be evaluated to figure out whether it’s successful. Follow all that? Neither do I, and I just wrote it. No wonder the bureaucrats who prepared this RFP confused themselves and applicants.

The organization of this RFP might be an example of the frustrations that come from abstinence—it’s a case of mental masturbation. The writers probably thought about a joke regarding masturbation from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: at least it’s sex with someone I love.

EDIT, August 2012: In “Parents Just Don’t Understand: A sociologist says American moms and dads are in denial about their kids’ sexual lives,” Sinikka Elliott argues about comprehensive sex education and abstinence education:

One side is saying, ”Well, they need to abstain. That’s a surefire way that they’re gonna be safe,” and the other side is saying, “They’re not gonna abstain and so they need contraceptive information.” They were basing their argument on the same things: the teen pregnancy rates, the STI rates.

Neither focuses much on pleasure, as Elliott points out.

Perhaps the most hilarious thing about the CBAE RFP is how long virginity has been ineffectively pitched in Western society. Foucault and Barzun show that in part, and now Orwell does too in his Essays, this one dating from 1947:

We shall never be able to stamp out syphilis and gonorrhea until the stigma of sinfulness is removed from them. When full conscription was introduced in the 1914 – 1918 war it was discovered, if I remember rightly, that nearly half the population suffered from some form of venereal disease, and this frightened the authorities into taking a few precautions […]

You can’t deal with these diseases so long as they are thought of as visitations from God, in a totally different category from all other diseases […] And it is humbug to say that “clean living is the only remedy.” You are bound to have promiscuity and prostitution in a society like ours, where people mature sexually at about fifteen and are discouraged from marrying till they are in their twenties […] (1217-8).

The purpose in observing this is not to endorse Orwell’s perspective, but to point out, as Isaac often does, that the kind of debates that spur RFPs and social policy and all the rest are very seldom new ones, and the various remedies offered are equally ancient.

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Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing)

Before you start writing a proposal, it’s good idea to understand the project concept and stick with this concept throughout the various drafts. If you don’t, the probability of creating an incomprehensible mess is high. In other words, it is a spectacularly bad idea to make big changes during the final stages of finishing the proposal.

This simple truth was reinforced during the recent HUD SuperNOFA season, when we experienced the grant equivalent of The China Syndrome. We were writing a proposal for one of the SuperNOFA programs on behalf of a public sector client for whom we had written the same proposal twice previously. Both those applications were funded. The program itself was and is very complex, and it requires close collaboration between city and county entities to meet HUD requirements.

Since we were familiar with our client’s past approach and our contact person did not correct us during our scoping session, we wrote the first and second drafts based on what we thought was the project concept. After she reviewed the second draft, I got a panicked phone call from our client telling me that she had decided to radically change the service delivery model, even though we were within three or four days of the deadline. I told her this was a very bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but she persisted—with predictably disastrous results. Although the proposal got submitted, it was a nail-biter and probably went in with lots of mistakes.

Here’s why . . .

Most proposals have intertwined narratives in which program elements are threaded throughout the document. In the example above, one major issue was a collaborator, and our client decided change its role at the last minute. While I made a yeoperson’s effort to find and correct all of these instances, it is likely that some were missed, meaning that the proposal probably went in with internal inconsistencies.

Such gaffes are not obvious if one has read the draft proposal a dozen times, but they will stand out like neon lights to a reviewer and lead to lowered points, if not outright laughter in the event that a group is reviewing the proposal. The particular change she made also affected the budget and budget narrative. For HUD proposals, there are up to four budget forms that must be completed, in addition to the budget narrative, so a last minute change may introduce budget errors. In federal grant reviewing, budgets are usually not scored, but inconsistencies between budget forms and the narrative can be a fast way to the exit.

The HUD example was a grants.gov submission, causing another major problem. As faithful readers will recall from “Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century,” Grants.gov allows itself up to 48 hours to declare that an acceptable upload has been received. Thus, we always recommend that grants.gov deadlines be moved up 2 – 3 days to allow for file corruption, server downtime, etc.

Our client had us making last minute changes to the proposal up to the night before the deadline, which meant the application kit file was not ready for upload until the morning of the due date. Of course, when she tried to upload the file, grants.gov rejected it. It took all day and hours on the phone with grants.gov tech support for her to resolve the problem. If she had not insisted on major last minute changes, the upload attempt would have been done two days earlier and the problem resolved without drama. Since the proposal request was $3 million, there was a lot on the line.

The moral of this sad tale: get the project concept straight at the start and resist the urge to change directions near the end of the process. Successful grant writers must be single-minded to produce a technically correct proposal on time. Radical alterations to the proposal concept at the last minute is a variation on “The Perils of Perfectionism.” Grant writers should work on a proposal until they’ve worked on it enough, then button it up, submit it in time to easily meet the deadline and retire to a nearby bar for a cocktail or two. Try a Negroni which is an excellent way to get over a stressful proposal writing experience.

EDIT: You can find a follow-up describing how this experience ends in “Now It’s Time for the Rest of the Story.”

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High Noon at the Grant Writing Corral: Staring Down Deadlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Time to read Proust again.

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

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

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

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

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Links: Finnish kids, computers in schools, bureaucrats, race, Playboy (?), and more!

* The Wall Street Journal ran “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? Finland’s teens score extraordinarily high on an international test. American educators are trying to figure out why” (the article is accessible for subscribers only). Part of the answer may include a culture that values reading, but the article also says:

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences [between the U.S. and Finland] firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn’t translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: ” ‘Nah. So what’d you do last night?'” she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely “glue this to the poster for an hour,” she says.

In other words, the numerous rules imposed by U.S. schools might not actually help educational attainment.

* High school evaluation news continues, with a paper from the Urban Institute saying that Teach For America teachers are more effective than the regular ones in the same schools.

* Years ago, there were a variety of federal and state programs designed to get computers into schools. We wrote countless proposals for just that purpose, though my experience in public schools was that computers were almost always poorly used at the time—they didn’t help me learn anything about reading, writing, or math, but they were great for Oregon trail. Now researchers have found that, based on a Romanian program in which households received vouchers for computers:

Children in household that won a voucher also report having lower school grades and lower educational aspirations. There is also suggestive evidence that winning a voucher
is associated with negative behavior outcomes.

(Hat tip Slate.com).

* A concrete example of the kind of citation that can help get programs funded. But I’m not moving to Needles if I can avoid it. Which moves us right into…

* Megan McArdle’s an excellent post on the topic of federal assistance to depressed rural areas. I’ve read elsewhere in The Atlantic that urban and rural areas are essentially subsidized by the suburbs through various forms of tax redistribution, which should be at least somewhat apparent to longtime newsletter subscribers who see the numerous grant programs targeted at rural and urban areas but virtually none targeting suburbs.

* McArdle is so good that I’m linking to her twice. Regarding bureaucrats, she says:

Having a ridiculous reaction to something is not the fault of the person who did it–even if that person is a terrorist attempting horrific acts. I don’t mind removing my shoes, particularly–indeed, my parents will testify that they had quite a problem teaching me to keep them on. I achieve minor renown in college for walking around Philadelphia barefoot all summer. But the act of moving in compliant herds through the TSA lines, mindlessly adhering to the most ridiculous procedures the government can think up, contributes to making us what Joseph Schumpeter called “state broken”. Citizens should not acquire the habit of following orders with no good reason behind them.

After flying entirely too often in the last few months, I’ve come to loathe the TSA bureaucrats and the herd mentality in airports. Similar principles are at work regarding FEMA and Grants.gov.

* In other news about incompetent bureaucracies, check out this from the Washington Post.

* Whether you want to take race into account in programs or not, you’re bound to be criticized. Get used to it.

* In the “Who knew?” category, Playboy has a foundation and is accepting applications from a “Noteworthy advocate for the First Amendment.” I’m guessing they’re not shooting for those upholding the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. A quick quiz: the First Amendment actually has six components—can you name them all? (Answers in the second link).

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What Does a Grant Proposal Look Like Exactly? 13 Easy Steps to Formatting a Winning Proposal

I was having dinner with some friends who are consultants for a multinational company, and they wanted to know who handles the “graphics” in our proposals. They are used to preparing elaborate business presentations and were startled to learn that the proposals we prepare are usually simple text documents. That got me thinking about how proposal styles have come full circle and we’ve gone Back to the Future, thanks largely to digital submission requirements.

When dinosaurs walked the earth and I started writing proposals in the early 1970s, I literally wrote them—long hand on legal pads. When I was finished, I would either type them, or, if I was lucky enough to be working for an agency that had a secretary, the proposals would be typed for me. In either case, the proposals more or less looked like ransom notes, with blotchy corrections (anyone old enough to remember Liquid Paper?) and virtually no formatting, except for using tabs and the hyphen key (—–) to create separator lines. The good news was that proposals were much shorter, since they were so hard to physically produce. Eventually I moved up the managerial food chain and earned a secretary with short hand skills. I got pretty good at dictating proposals, but they still looked pretty much like high school term papers when typed.

Flash forward to more “thrilling days of yesteryear” (which started every episode of my favorite TV shows as a kid: The Lone Ranger), when we were starting our business in 1993 and PCs had come of age. We began producing fairly elaborate proposals, with color covers, pie charts, embedded org charts and flow diagrams (using Object Linking and Embedding technology), comb binding and professional appearance. We kept upgrading our color printers and the proposals were getting pretty slick as we mastered the art of formatting.

Now enter The Time Tunnel with me (another guilty TV pleasure from the ’60s) again and emerge around 2001, when we ran into digital submissions. The Feds rolled out two different digital submission platforms, finally settling on grants.gov, while state/local agencies and foundations came up with endless variations. Given the vagaries of the divers digital submission systems, however, we soon learned that there was little point in dressing up our proposals, since the chance of file corruption was simply too great. The formatting party stopped, and once again our proposals are simple text documents, stripped of the bells and whistles. Yes, I know Acrobat can be used to tart-up proposals, but one dirty little secret is that most digital submissions are not reviewed digitally, but are printed and xeroxed—so much for saving trees—and Acrobat does not always faithfully reproduce the original formatting. This is a potential sink-the-ship problem when, for example, there are page limits.

So, in this age of digital submissions, what should a proposal look like? Simple and neat is the best approach. Here are some tips to make sure that your proposals are easy to read and look great:

  • Read the RFP carefully for formatting instructions and follow them precisely. For example, if the RFP says the proposal is to be double spaced, and does not make an exception for tables, double space all tables, no matter how silly this looks. The Department of Education, for example, will often reject proposals for non-compliance for just such nitpicking instructions.
  • It is generally not a good idea to bind or staple proposals, unless otherwise directed in the RFP (e.g., sometimes a 3-ring binder will be required). Instead, fasten with a binder clip or rubber bands.
  • If you want to use a cover page, keep the fonts and colors subdued. An agency logo is a nice touch, but skip the photos unless they are highly evocative.
  • Make sure you put the agency name and program title/RFP number in the header on each page. Make sure they are right.
  • Avoid odd fonts and stick with Times New Roman when space is an issue or Arial if you have lots of room. The new default font for Microsoft Word, Cambria, is probably also okay.
  • Learn to love outlines. If the RFP has an outline format, reproduce it. If not, develop a simple outline format of your own, indenting .2 or .25 inches as the outline descends. It is easy to do this in Word by using paragraph styles. Make Outline 1 “A” with no indent, Outline 2, “1” with a .2 indent, Outline 3 “a” with .4 indent and so forth.
  • Never use the tab key or multiple spaces for indentation purposes. Just set up additional paragraph styles to align text paragraphs with outline styles (see above).
  • Use tables, rather than charts, unless you are positive the reviewers will not be xeroxing the proposal. Also, it is generally not worth the time to format charts. Instead, put your time into research and writing.
  • Avoid bold, ALL CAPS, underlining and other forms of text screaming, with the exception of bolding/underlining the start of outlined/bulleted section. If your words are good enough, the reader will get the idea, and, if they’re not, all the bolding in the world won’t matter.
  • We prefer justified text, but some may disagree on stylistic grounds.
  • Do not try to squeeze extra words in by kerning the text or narrowing the margins. This will simply make the proposal hard to read, which is not a good idea, since you want reviewers to savor every golden word. We almost never use less than one inch margins all around or tighten the text.
  • Place footnotes at the bottom of each page or on a literature citation page, which is easily done in Word.
  • Finally, buy a sequentially numbering stamp and paginate each page. This way, when the reviewers drop the proposal on the floor, it can be reassembled. This also helps when creating a table of contents.

There you have it—13 easy steps to proposal formatting. Simple, clean, and consistent are your best friends with formatting, because they help the formatting get out of the way of what matters: the text. Now, go forth and write.