Posted on 1 Comment

We imagined foundations would hire us to help improve RFPs/funding guidelines. We were wrong.

Twenty and change years ago, Isaac was starting Seliger + Associates and expected to be hired by foundations and perhaps even some government agencies who might want help streamlining their RFPs or funding guidelines. Seliger + Associates has unusual expertise on grants, grant writing, and RFPs, which could, in theory, make helping funders part of the firm’s regular practice. Isaac imagined that funders would want real world feedback  to improve the grant making process, make themselves more efficient and efficacious, ensure their money was being channeled in useful directions, and so forth. Even in the early days of Seliger + Associates, we knew a lot that could help funders, and we waited for the calls to start coming.

I was about ten at the time. Now I’m considerably older and we’ve long since stopped waiting. Funders, it turns out, strictly follow the golden rule in this respect: he who has the gold makes the rules. Funders routinely ask applicants and other stakeholders about how to make the world a better place, but they have no interest at all in talking to the people who could conceivably help them most with respect to the funding process. Isaac’s initial expectation turned out to be totally wrong.

Isaac and I were talking about the vast silence from funders in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he and his wife, Pricilla Chan, plan to donate tens of billions of dollars to nonprofits in the coming decades through newly formed Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) LLC.* That’s a laudable effort and we’re happy they’re doing this. Still, we wonder if they’ll talk to people who toil daily in the grant writing mines to make sure that the funding guidelines CZI uses and the RFPs CZI issues are grounded in the reality of what would make it easiest to identify applicants most likely to achieve their charitable purposes with the minimum friction for nonprofits. Based on past experiences, we doubt it.

Despite the headlines you may have read, philanthropy as we know it is quite resistant to change—especially on the government side. On the private sector side, signaling and status are far more important than efficiency. Gates and Zuckerberg may be challenging the signaling dynamic, and we’re on their side in that respect, but we think signaling is too ingrained in human nature to have much effect. Overcoming signaling is hard at best and impossible at worst. Look at the way ridiculous SUVs continue to be a status-raiser among many suburbanites for one obvious, easy example of this at work. Geoffrey Miller’s book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior details many others.


* The name of the LLC, “CZI,” amuses us: it’s an unpronounceable acronym that sounds like a Cold-War-era Soviet ministry. The first rule of developing grant-related acronyms to to make them pronounceable.

Posted on Leave a comment

Links: Classrooms, Sex Economics, Hackers, Bill Gates, Drugs, and Keep It Short

* Good news if true (and long overdue, whether this report turns out to be a true trend or a false growth): “Shaking Up the Classroom: Under an increasingly popular system called competency-based learning, students are promoted after they master material—not just because they have spent a year in a class.”

* “In-Depth Report Details Economics of the Sex Trade;” the funniest thing is the way pimps fill a niche created by prohibition. Take away the laws and the pimps likely go too.

* Have liberal arts degree, will code.

* The Bill Gates Rolling Stone interview; pay special attention to the sections about anti-poverty programs.

* Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime. In other words, virtually anyone can be arrested for something in the contemporary United States.

* Keep it short.

* “Made in the U.S.A. (Again): The new industrial revolution won’t be in India or China. It will be right here in America.” But it likely won’t include a lot of jobs.

* Someone found Grant Writing Confidential by searching for “best grant writing certification.” There is no such thing because they’re all bad and pointless.

* “The Value Of An Engineering Degree,” which complements “Have liberal arts degree, will code.”

* Crowd funding is market research.

* “It’s Time to End ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria.”

* “One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard.” If I had Zuckerbergian money I’d fund ISPs.

* “Judge says prosecutors should follow the law. Prosecutors revolt.”

* Deeply chilling sentences.

* “Is HUD threatened by a Christian group’s plans to expand?” Unlikely; although Todd Starnes, the reporter, has probably never heard of this, it’s more probable that the group doesn’t want to join the local Continuum of Care.

* “Why RFPs Waste Time – Choose a Better Approach to Finding a Great Consultant;” almost all the other nonprofit-world blogs we’ve found are bogus, but this one isn’t. See also our post Why Seliger + Associates Never Responds to RFPs/RFQs for Grant Writing Services.

* Phages versus drug-resistant bacteria—really?

* It’s been at least 800,000 years since carbon-dioxide levels were this high.

* Addict. Informant. Mother. If rural towns in Eastern Pennsylvania have a heroin epidemic what hope do the rest of us have? So much for 40 years of the War on Drugs. Clearly, drugs have won this war.

David L. Kirp argues that Head Start should work like Section 8. He should consider how successful school bussing was.