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May 2010 Links: The Promise Neighborhoods Program, Federal Budgets, Upward Bound, Centers for Independent Living (CLI), the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), Restricting Fun Too Expensive, and more

* Federal programs never get delayed, unless they do. One of our clients received a letter from the Department of Education announcing that the Upward Bound program, which encourages at-risk youth to complete high school and go on to college, is being delayed until fiscal year 2012. This indicates that, as Isaac wrote in “Where Have All the RFPs Gone?,” the feds have gotten so backed up that they can’t spend all their money. To quote Isaac’s post:

Since federal agencies are running their regular programs while trying to spend additional Stimulus Bill funding and implementing entirely new programs, one imagines that our cadre of GS 10s and 11s, who are supposed to move the endless paperwork associated with shoveling federal funds out the door, simply have not gotten around to the FY ‘10 RFP processes.

Oops.

* Now that i3 madness is behind most of us, it’s time to see the other crazed, zombie-like offspring of the Department of Education. Alert reader and grant writer Shirley Nelson pointed me to the “Promise Neighborhoods Program,” which demands that one build “a complete continuum of cradle-through-college-to-career solutions (continuum of solutions) (as defined in this notice), which has both academic programs and family and community supports (both as defined in this notice), with a strong school or schools at the center.” I want those college solutions, whatever they are.

The RFP also says:

The continuum also must be based on the best available evidence including, where available, strong or moderate evidence (as defined in this notice), and include programs, policies, practices, services, systems, and supports that result in improving educational and developmental outcomes for children from cradle through college to career

In other words, the i3, quasi-evidence-based madness continues.

* The Department of Education’s Centers for Independent Living Program (CLI) program is particularly impressive because, as far as I can tell, nowhere in the 142-page application guidance does a definition of what “centers for independent living (CILs or centers)” means.

* I didn’t realize there was a U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) until I saw the announcement of its Annual Grant Competition. I wonder what it’s like compared to the Department of Defense, which used to be called the Department of War.

* On healthcare nationally and in Massachusetts:

When Massachusetts rolled out its coverage program in 2007, many more people signed up for the new heavily subsidized insurance than was originally predicted by budget officials. Almost immediately, costs far exceeded what had been budgeted, forcing state officials to scramble to find cuts elsewhere in government and other sources of revenue.

After three years, no real progress has been made on rising costs. The program remains well over budget, with no end in sight. Further, state residents who now must buy state-sanctioned coverage are bristling at their rising premiums and the inability to find coverage which covers less and thus costs less.

State politicians are responding to the cost crisis the only way they know how: by promising to impose arbitrary caps on premiums and price controls for medical services. The governor and state regulators have disallowed 90 percent of the premium increases insurers –all of whom are not-for-profit–submitted for their enrollees for the upcoming plan year. The state says premium increases above eight percent are too high and unacceptable, though they themselves don’t have a plan to make health care more efficient in Massachusetts. They just want lower premiums. The insurers have responded by refusing to sell any coverage at the rates the state wants to impose.

* In essence, the country needs to figure out how to pay for the government that its citizens want. It’s a version — albeit a less extreme one — of the problem facing Greece right now.

* Wow: Records show that since 1992, only 10 Minnesota teachers fired for poor performance have challenged their dismissals all the way through that process.

* The nasty things local telcos do to prevent municipal fiber (and why this is so important).

* Politicians find that restricting fun is now too expensive (Note: this is not from The Onion).

* Electric Avenue: Learning to love a bike you don’t need to pedal.

* Academia isn’t broken. We are.

* The Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky. As Kevin Kelly says:

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

* The Department of Education appears to have invented a new word for the i3 RFP:

Growth may be measured by a variety of approaches, but any approach used must be statistically rigorous and based on student achievement data, and may also include other measures of student learning in order to increase the construct validity and generalizability of the information.

“Generalizability?” If that appeared in a student essay, I’d circle it.

* Why men don’t listen. Except they do, as this post into the pseudo science of gender brain differences shows.

* Megan McArdle has a characteristically astute essay on Lori Gottlieb’s book Marry Him!. As McArdle says, Gottlieb’s superficial thesis is that women are too picky in getting married. But “her real message she proves all too well, and I suspect that’s why it drives young women nuts, as in this Emily Gould essay I came across yesterday. It is the same thing overanxious mothers have been telling their daughters from time immemorial: your looks matter, and they are a wasting asset.”

I have no idea if this is true.

* Peak everything? Not really.

* The drive to make cities greener. And this is from the Wall Street Journal.

* One Man, Two Courts points out something that Isaac and few others seem to remember: the political party abortion flipflop. Until around 1977 or so, most Democratic politicians were mostly against abortion, while most Republicans supported it.

* In a Tough Economy, Old Limits on Welfare reads like a proposal. Except that the reporter forgets that there isn’t such a thing as “welfare;” he’s probably actually referring to TANF.

* Why humanity loves and needs cities.

* Why do colleges care about extracurricular activities? See my guess in the comments.

* For every doctor, there are five people performing health care administrative support. This may be part of our national problem, like the growth of administrators relative to professors in academia. (Hat tip Tyler Cowen.)

* Recommended: ManPacks.com. If you’re male, as I am, there’s a pretty good chance that you hate shopping for clothes and thus constantly have ratty socks, underwear, and t-shirts. ManPacks.com will send you two shirts with two pairs of underwear and socks every three months indefinitely. Once you set it up, you never have to think about the issue again, unless you move. And that set up takes maybe five minutes.

Brilliant.

* “China’s Youth Meet Microsoft,” an article, along with a rebuttal: “This article, IMHO, is written by someone who has no idea how things work just about anywhere that’s not the industrialized West, and is shocked and appalled that things aren’t as awesome as they are in the US of A.”

* A fascinating profile of Tyler Cowen, one of the proprietors of Marginal Revolution.

* “Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.”

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So What Are You Supposed to do to Respond to the Community Resilience and Recovery Initiative (CRRI) program RFP?

Subscribers to our email Grant Alert Newsletter will see a link to the Community Resilience and Recovery Initiative (CRRI), which is a program designed to provide “Grants to strength families, communities, and the workforce through appropriate, evidence-based interventions.” What does that mean applicants should actually propose to do?

You won’t really find out based on SAMHSA’s grant announcement, which says that you’re supposed to do things like “Reduce depression and anxiety” and “Reduce excessive drinking (and other substance use if the community chooses)” without saying how that is to be done. In other words, whoever wrote the announcement page forgot to answer the 5Ws and H.

From SAMHSA’s page you can download the application kit file, which has lots and lots of stuff about how important evidence is (“The CRRI will use a place-based strategy to implement multiple evidence-based interventions targeted to four levels in the community”), and how important strengthening communities are (“The intent of the program is to help communities mobilize to better manage behavioral health issues despite budgetary cuts in existing services and to promote a sense of renewal and resilience”), and so on, but no definitions of what it means to “promote a sense of renewal and resilience.” Grants are for $1.4 million—maybe you should use that for 20 giant potlucks.

In reading through the RFP, you’ll find several references to “Section I-2.2.” If you search for “2.2,” you’ll finally find what SAMHSA actually wants you to implement:

  • Triple P – Positive Parenting Program
  • Strengthening Families Program
  • Families and Schools Together
  • The JOBS Program
  • Coping with Work and Family Stress
  • Coping and Support Training (CAST)

In other words, it wants a mix of supportive family and jobs services. Even then, the RFP doesn’t tell you what these various programs entail—instead, it tells you go visit yet another website. If you want to figure out what SAMHSA actually wants you to do, you’ll have to drill through at least three levels of cruft: the announcement itself, the RFP, and then the highly intuitive “National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) Web site.”

Alas, the National Registry website isn’t easily reduced to a description appropriate for the newsletter. That’s why you’ll find our somewhat vague description in our newsletter, which mirrors the vagueness of the RFP itself. It seems to me that CRRI is really just Walking Around Money to do “something about substance abuse” for the big cities and counties that are eligible for this odd program.

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Take Time to Develop a Proposal Timeline

Many RFPs require that you include a timeline that will describe when your project will actually unfold—remember that the “when” section is part of the 5Ws and H. Even if the RFP writers forget to require a timeline, you should include one anyway, either under the “Project Description” or “Evaluation” sections because the timeline will clarify both your own thinking and the reviewer’s understanding of how you plan to sequence activities and achieve milestones.

Think of your project timeline as something like the timelines cops are always trying to establish in police procedurals. A shocking crime is committed—perhaps a socialite is killed. A rogue cop on the outs with the department is trying to solve the case. The night of the murder, the husband was at a charity ball, while the ex-husband was at the gym, while the husband’s jealous lover was at a taqueria. Could the husband have slipped away between the main course and the souffle? Did the ex-husband have time between 9:45 and 10:45 to slip out of the racquetball game, run over to the condo, and do the deed? In asking these questions, the cop is always trying to figure out if the crime is plausible. He—and he is almost always a “he”—is checking the believability of the tales he’s constructing. When you write a timeline for a proposal, you’re trying to do the same, only for the future. You’re trying to convince yourself, and the reviewer, that you’re believable in doing the job (except in this case the job is human services, not murder, for most nonprofit and public agencies).

Doing a timeline right requires a number of elements, including:

  • Startup Period: You probably can’t start delivering services on the day you execute the contract with the funder. Chances are good that you’ll need staff, training, space, and maybe more. Some RFPs will dictate how long your startup period should last, either from the notice of grant award or from the execution date of your contract. Usually they’ll demand somewhere around 90 days, which is fairly reasonable if it’s from the date you’ve executed your contract. Even if the funder doesn’t include a minimum or maximum startup period, you should. Unless otherwise directed by the RFP or client, we usually include a 90 day startup period.
  • Staff Recruitment/Assignment and Training: Make sure to provide for staff recruitment/assignment and preservice training in the startup period, as well as periodic or annual refresher training. Funders love professional development as much as mystery writers love plot twists, so serve it up in your timeline.
  • Outreach Start: Many if not most projects will involve some effort to get the word out to the target population. You’ll probably need to start outreach prior to the start of service delivery. Outreach is usually an ongoing activity; I might eventually write a post about everything that outreach should entail.
  • Project Oversight/Participant Committee: Most projects should have some form of participant, staff, and community oversight committee mentioned in their proposal. The formation and meeting facilitation of such committees should be reflected in the timeline.
  • Referral and Intake: Once you’ve made the target population and other providers aware of your project, you need some system for deciding who gets services and who doesn’t. Put referral and intake in between outreach and service delivery.
  • Services Start: Whatever services you’re providing should have a start date, often three months after the project begins. In many projects, service delivery is ongoing. In others, the referral/take process is done on a “batch” basis, repeating annually or periodically, rather than ongoing. This is how many job training programs work.
  • Evaluation: Your project should have some form of annual evaluation. The timeline should include some time for developing the evaluation criteria, conducting the evaluation and preparing/disseminating the evaluation reports.

Those are the basic elements for a human services timeline, like the one that might go with Isaac’s hypothetical Project NUTRIA. If you’re doing a capital campaign, you’d have a different set of milestones relating to construction, like permits, architecture, engineering, the commencement of construction, burying the body of Ralph “Ralphie” Cifaretto in the foundation for Tony Soprano, and so on, but the same basic idea would remain: you’d enumerate significant steps in your project, without going into too much minutia. Most of our of timelines are 10 – 15 rows, which is enough to give the general idea while avoiding specifics the client might not want to meet.

You also have to decide how to lay your timeline out. We used to make elaborate Visio drawings, and if we did the same thing today we’d use Omnigraffle Pro. But with the rise of online submissions, it’s too dangerous to use anything but tables in Word; now we usually make tables with three columns: the “date” column, with the number of project months it will take something to happen; a “milestone” column that will say something like “evaluation begins” and a “description” column that will say something like, “The evaluation, to be conducted by an expert evaluator selected through an open bidding process, will examine both process and outcome measures, as described in section 4.b.” If required by the RFP, we will also include a “responsibility” column or similar. For most projects, it’s absolutely not necessary, and is likely to time wasting and counter-productive, to use such professional scheduling software as Microsoft Project or Primavera. Such software will drive you nuts and, if embedded in a Word document, will probably bork the upload process.

Timelines don’t have to be extraordinarily complex, but they do have to match what you’ve written in other sections of the proposal. Internally inconsistent proposals will often be rejected because they fail to make sense, which is one danger of doing when you split a proposal among multiple writers (see more about this in “Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing)“).

If you have no idea what should go into your timeline, it’s probably means your narrative lacks cohesion. Sometimes you’ll find that writing the timeline reminds you of something that should go elsewhere in the narrative, which is another use for them: back checking your own work, just as the cops in police procedures use timelines to make sure their own logic is sound. Your job might be slightly easier and less likely to leave a crazed serial killer on the loose, but it’s still important to do it well if you’re going to get the money.

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Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity

A New Yorker cartoon I like:

never think outside the box

If you write proposals, don’t be this cat.

Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going to serve 300 participants per year, not 30 or 3,000. If the RFP says, “run a three-year program,” propose a three-year program, not a five-year program. I could go on indefinitely in this vein, but I shouldn’t have to. The point is simple: do exactly what the RFP says you should do. As a grant writing rat in an RFP Skinner Box, you get the treat (money) by pressing the bar (following RFP directions), not by running in circles trying to get out of the box.

Clients sometimes direct us not to do what the RFP says, even when we advise them that it is best to follow the RFP. Ignoring the RFP instructions almost guarantees they won’t be funded; Isaac has already written about one example in True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales:

Writing a YouthBuild proposal is very much a “cookbook” exercise in that the DOL pretty much tells applicants what they want applicants to do, and successful proposals have to regurgitate this stuff within the absurdly short page limit and the obtuse data required by the funder. In other words, if you want a YouthBuild grant, you should, as Rupee says, just Do the Damn Thing.

The clients for the four funded proposals listened to us, and we were able to craft compelling, technically correct proposals that warmed the stone-like hearts of the DOL reviewers. In contrast, our True Believer client had a vision of how she could use a YouthBuild grant to attack a whole slew of problems faced by at-risk youth in her rural community. Almost none of what she wanted to do, however, had anything to do with YouthBuild, and she fought us throughout the proposal development process. We did our best to make the proposal fundable to no avail. Despite her passion and commitment, no YouthBuild funds are available today to help the young folks she cares so much about.

A more recent example involved a Department of Education program in which the exact student cohorts to be served are mandated in RFP, as well as the underlying legislation and regulations. It doesn’t get any more specific than this. For reasons that were not made clear to us, our client insisted on removing one of the specified student cohorts from the draft proposal, even though we told him that he could save the postage, as the proposal will likely be deemed technically incorrect, which it is, and be thrown out before it is scored. This particular RFP also includes specific fill-in-the-blanks objectives, which were to be replicated word for word in the proposal. In the first draft, our client modified the wording of the objectives.

While some RFPs provide significant latitude in program design, many do not and are essentially cookbooks. If you have a cookbook RFP, follow the cookbook. For example, YouthBuild demands that participants being trained in the construction trades have on-site training experiences in the construction/rehabilitation of low-income housing, so you shouldn’t propose a retail mall as a training site, no matter how good an idea that might be to the Executive Director or Board. On a similar subject, remember that every question in the RFP applies to you, no matter how dumb it may seem, how repetitive it may be, or how little you think it should apply. I explain how this works in RFP Lunacy and Answering Repetitive or Impossible Questions.

Part of not thinking outside the box includes telling the funding agency what they want to hear. One such example is the infamous “sustainability” sections that many federal RFPs include, which we wrote about in detail here. These sections require applicants to state how they will sustain the project after federal funding ends. As Isaac said in the post:

For the vast majority of nonprofits applicants […] grants and donations [are the only viable financial resources available]. If we know this simple truth, how come foundation and federal program officers seem clueless? If the agency had the couple hundred thousand dollars sitting around to fund a given program, it wouldn’t need the grant and wouldn’t apply.

Furthermore, the major cost for most human service providers are staff salaries and other operating costs. So it’s improbable that you’ll just need a bunch of money to get off the ground; although startup costs are real, they’re still dwarfed by staffing and ongoing operations costs in most cases. There might be a hypothetical dream project out there, somewhere, that just needs that DHHS grant to get started and then can run indefinitely off of revenue, but we’ve never seen it.

If you don’t like an RFP’s inane restrictions, remember the golden rule, as articulated in Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

Very occasionally, you have to invent a box for yourself because the funder hasn’t given it to you. Foundations will do this by not putting a maximum cap on requests and/or by having maddeningly opaque guidelines. In such cases, you should look at how much they’ve previously offered in funding; if they’ve historically made grants in the $10,000 – $50,000 range, asking for $400,000 is unlikely to work (for more on this topic, see my post “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For?“).

Most of the time, however, you’ll be given a box, and if you step outside it, you’re not going to be praised like a precocious high school student. You’re going to be treated like a cat who’s decided to show its creativity by ignoring the litter box. The RFP is your litter box. Ignore it at your peril.

EDIT 1/25/2010: Isaac wrote a follow-up to this post regarding the importance of conventional wisdom, even when it’s wrong. Debunk conventional wisdom on your blogs and through your other writing. Repeat it in proposals.

EDIT 2: For another example of the principles above at work, see “What happens to doctors who think outside the box?” Answer: nothing good, much of the time. If you’re looking to understand the many problems in medicine, this is an excellent starting point, both for the specific event and for the general principles inferred from that event.

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Why Seliger + Associates never responds to RFPs/RFQs for grant writing services

Faithful readers know we regularly discuss RFPs, NOFAs, FOAs, SGAs—or whatever other acronyms funders might dream up to denote that grant funds are available (Jake in particular likes to fulminate about bizarre RRPs). Despite marinating in a stew of RFPs, however,  Seliger + Associates never responds to grant writing service RFPs/RFQs (“Requests for Qualifications”), and there are two basic reasons why.

The first reason is the most important: I know from over 15 years of working for various California cities, mostly in management, that RFQs/RFPs for professional services are easily wired, with “wired” meaning that one firm is going to get the contract regardless of who submits a response. I’m not talking about Sopranos-style wiring in which the public official can expect a visit from Paulie Walnuts if the wiring job isn’t done right: the real process is more anodyne. Usually, the public official knows a certain consultant and thinks the local firm can get it done and makes sure that the local boys get the gig.

A city might also want a local consultant but need bids from qualified out-of-towners to provide cover, so a favored firm is identified before the “open” competition. Many public agencies are required to run a bid process before selecting a consultant (or vendor), and the public official in change of the RFP/RFQ process structures the document to produce the desired outcome. This is usually done by putting requirements into the document that favor the fair-haired bidder.

For example, we recently received an RFQ from a city, and 25% of the available point total was for “knowledge of the local community,” while just 25% was for “grant writing experience.” This RFQ was obviously wired for a local grant writer, as we’d receive zero points for local knowledge. So why should we bid and provide cover for the public officials?

Another favored approach is to require the successful bidder to meet regularly with agency staff in person, making it impossible for a non-local bidder to compete, due to travel costs.Other techniques are subtler, like having a ringer on the selection committee.

We receive at least a dozen RFP/RFQ notices per year. I assume this happens because we’re such a well-qualified and -known firm that we would provide exceptional cover for wired bidding processes. Not being stupid or naive, at least in this respect, we always send more or less the following response: We won’t respond to this RFP, but we’ll be happy to provide a fee quote if your process fails. This does work: the local guys often can’t get the job done. Many public agencies eventually hire us after running a true, or true-seeming, RFP/RFQ process. Years ago, when we first started, we sometimes submitted real bids—but we never got the job.

The second reason is also significant: having been in business for since 1993, we simply don’t have to respond to RFPs/RFQs. We think we’re the best grant writing outfit there is. We’re like Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who answered a reporter’s question concerning who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: “You’re looking at him!“* Responding to RFPs/RFQs wastes our time, and, like lawyers and escorts, grant writers are all about billable hours. Unlike architects, engineers, accountants and similar personal services consultants, who have tons of competition and must respond to RFPs/RFQs, we provide a unique service with few qualified competitors. Don’t believe me? Search online for grant writers and see what you get.

Despite our hard-nosed attitude, we’ve worked for hundreds of public agencies, including cities, counties, housing authorities, redevelopment agencies, and state governments. We can do so without responding to RFPs/RFQs because some public agencies have minimum contract amounts before bidding kicks in, which means they don’t have to go through a RFP/RFQ or public bid process. Additionally, all public agency purchasing rules have an exception for what is known in the trade as a “sole-source contract.” Public agencies occasionally face unexpected emergencies and can’t wait for a bid process. They also sometimes have unique needs—like, say, grant writing—for which there are so few qualified bidders that there is no point in running a competition.

As long as the public official is willing to place herself on the line, nothing prevents her from hiring us under a sole-source contract. When I was a public official and wanted to hire a favored consultant, I simply explained what I wanted to do to the City Manager and City Attorney, wrote the argument in a City Council staff report (if needed—usually it wasn’t), and signed the contract.

This is a lot less work than orchestrating a phony RFP/RFQ process. Since I know from experience that the sole-source approach is always available, and our services and fees are cleverly hidden in plain sight on our website, any public official who wants to go through an RFP/RFQ process is probably trying to wire it. The only way to win is by not playing the game.


* In the terrific film version of The Right Stuff, Dennis Quaid delivers this line as “Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you’re lookin’ at ‘im”, with a boyish charm I could never achieve even when I was a charming boy.

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Adventures in The Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), and Figuring Out Where to Start the Narrative

Although this might not seem like it should be a problem, figuring out where to start the narrative section of a proposal can sometimes be difficult: do you write to the evaluation criteria, to something labeled “narrative,” or to a series of text boxes? Federal programs are particularly fond of hiding the salami, as anyone who has had the misfortune of sitting down with a freshly issued, complex RFP can attest.

Novice grant writers often start writing to the wrong section, and Isaac described one example of this occurrence in Professional Grant Writer At Work: Don’t Try Writing A Transportation Electrification Proposal At Home. As he said, “The problem is that [review] criteria are invariably hidden somewhere in the bowels of the RFP and may or may not be referenced in the RFP completion instructions.”

You can see a particularly pernicious example of this in the Broadband Initiatives Program, whose application guide is available at the link. Oh, and you can also read the NOFA that was included in the Federal Register.

There are a few different areas within the NOFA and application guidance you could conceivably respond to. Check out page 16 of the NOFA, which says, “1. BIP Infrastructure Projects. a. General.” It has some point totals, which we usually write against when dealing with, say, YouthBuild. In the case of BIP, however, that would be logical, but wrong, because the application guide has more detailed instructions. If you look in it, you’ll be tempted by page 8 (though it’s labeled “7” in the hard copy) because it has scoring criteria similar but not identical to what’s in the NOFA.

Confused yet? Me too. But if you keep looking, you’ll find that the the place you actually want to start is page 14 (which is labeled 13) in the guidance, which says “Executive Summary.” As far as I know, however, no part of the NOFA or the application guidance actually come right and say, “write to the questions/criteria starting on page 14, which is actually labeled page 13 in the hard copy!” If you don’t take the time to study both the application guide and the NOFA, you could end up with an incomplete and totally wrong application on which you’ve spent dozens of work hours.

There’s another amusing part of the BIP NOFA, which has implications for this and other programs. It says, “Describe the methodology, source of data, and analytical approaches used to determine whether the proposed funded service areas are classified as “unserved,” ”underserved,” or for BIP, at least 75% rural.” But the NOFA already describes what “unserved” and “underserved” mean on page 7:

Specifically, a proposed funded service area may qualify as underserved for last mile projects if at least one of the following factors is met, though the presumption will be that more than one factor is present: 1. No more than 50 percent of the households in the proposed funded service area have access to facilities-based, terrestrial broadband service at greater than the minimum broadband transmission speed (set forth in the definition of broadband above); 2. No fixed or mobile broadband service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least three megabits per second (‘‘mbps’’) downstream in the proposed funded service area […]

And it goes on from there. The most obvious maneuver to answer this question is to copy the exact language from the NOFA and spit it back in the response. They’ve given you the answer: you just have to use it. This isn’t a college exam, where you get extra credit for creativity; you get extra credit for staying in the lines. Save your imaginative powers for writing novels or composing software—in many grant writing exercises, imaginative powers will be wasted and possibly harmful, because your job is often to stack one two by four on top of another two by four to build the application following the RFP blueprints. The only question is where you need to build your foundation, and that’s what I’ve tried to answer in this post; the foundation issue will have to wait for another.

Oh, and the best part of all this: the narrative section for our client turned out to be around 30 pages long. The application guide is 72 pages long. I would propose a test of an RFP: if it takes longer to explain how to apply to a program than to describe what the applicant will actually do, the RFP writer has failed in some significant way.

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Grant Advice is Only as Good as the Knowledge Behind It

As faithful readers know, in my other life I’m a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Arizona. A few weeks ago, first years were required to attend a brief seminar on grant writing, which amused me given GWC’s low opinion of training sessions, courses, and the like. Isaac is fond of telling a story about his first encounter with one: he was younger than I am and began a two-day grant training session. It started with the instructor writing the 5Ws and the H on a board, at which point Isaac realized they were really teaching journalism and that grant writing similar to writing feature stories, which he already knew how to do. He got up and left.

I didn’t have the same reaction Isaac did, largely because I was required to attend.

The seminar’s major problem was its vagueness. We like to call this “hand waving” or “donut eating.” Grant writing advice of any sort is only as good as the details contained within it—saying there is “money available” is not nearly as helpful as saying the Department of Education issued an RFP on September 3rd with a deadline of October 15th and eligibility requirements x, y, and z. The more general you are in grant writing, the less useful the advice is. That’s why this blog works toward specificity: by citing real RFPs, real problems we’ve encountered, real issues with examples backing them, and the like, we aim to show what struggling with the grant beat truly entails. It’s also why our grant newsletter only contains only live RFPs with actual deadlines; we don’t want to say “the money is out there,” as if describing UFOs—we want to provide a concrete map to the money. Our advertising slogan for years has been, “We know where the money is,” and we strive to live up to it. Until you struggle with an actual RFP—or finding one—you’ll know little if anything about what grant writing is. For someone who had never heard the term “grants” or “grant writing” before might have found it useful, much like a person who’d never seen a large body of water might find it useful to stand it a pool before learning how to swim. But for almost anyone else, the seminar’s content wasn’t optimally useful because so much was conducted via hand-waving, and the leader—I’ll call her “Linda” because I can’t remember her name—said a variety of things that were vaguely correct, but lacked detail:

* Elections affect grants and grant making. Although elections have some effect on the distribution of money in terms of funding priorities, elections have made relatively little difference in the amount of money distributed, which seems to go perpetually up, and in the actual programs used as distribution vehicles. Some programs will become zombies and some phoenixes, as discussed in this post. But politics won’t change grant funds that much for public and nonprofit agencies, and politics will affect graduate students even less. (Politics and its tenuous connection to the grant world will be discussed in a future post.)

* Conflating grants, contracts, and fellowships. The first two are similar and have a fuzzy border but shouldn’t be used identically. Human service delivery grants are usually made to nonprofit and public agencies to solve some perceived social problem. RFPs for grant programs usually give general guidance, about what to do but don’t offer specific metrics, as the applicant should substantively design the program and state how they’d approach the problem and their own measurements. It’s usually not performance-based and will essentially say, “Tell us how you will decrease the rate of heart disease and diabetes in the target population,” for example.

In contrast, contracts are usually offered by public agencies on what is more or less a vendor/vendee relationship. You could have a contract for providing toilet seats or substance abuse treatment slots, and the metrics for a contract are usually specific, defined, and fixed. You’ll deliver X units of something per month, and you’ll be paid on a capitated (per head), per day or per service unit delivered. For example, a nonprofit agency might agree to provide job training and receive $1,000 per person in training per week. A childcare provider might have 50 slots and receive $50/day per slot filled.

Finally, fellowships are usually given to individuals or occasionally small groups to perform some kind of specific research or do some kind of specific thing. They’re a subset of grants, and we discuss an example of a fellowship program below.

* We were advised to “value the process” of finding a grant. While I’m not entirely sure what that means, I’ll go ahead and disagree with it anyway because the process is a means to the end. You need to value the outcome. The process of applying for a grant can’t be neglected, but it’s less important to do the process well than it is to, say, turn in the application on time.

* Paying close attention to reviewer feedback. This issue should be very familiar to faithful readers. To quote one of Isaac’s recent posts:

The primary reason for not taking reviewer comments seriously is the nature of the people reviewing it. Any proposal is read at a point in time by a set of reviewers, who are likely reading other proposals submitted for the same competition and may or may not be interested in the task at hand. For example, if the proposal is read by five peer reviewers brought to D.C. by DHHS, one may be hung over from bar hopping the night before in Georgetown, one may be anxious to meet their Aunt Martha for dinner, a third may be itching to get to the Air and Space Museum before it closes, and two might be vaguely interested in the review process. And, of the last two, one may have gotten a speeding ticket in your jurisdiction 20 years ago and hates the city.

The same applies to graduate students or anyone else engaging in grant writing.

* Make the grant be whatever you want. Although you shouldn’t apply for grants of any sort you have no intention of running, you should still stretch your program concept to fit guidelines to the extent you can, as we discuss in Surfing the Grant Waves: How to Deal with Social and Funding Wind Shifts:

If you were a suburban school district trying to fund, say, an art programs, and you read the Federal Register, you might’ve noticed new funding or shifts in emphasis. You could’ve combined your art program with nominal academic support, thus widening your program focus enough to make a plausible applicant for the 21st CCLC program and thus getting the money to carry out your central purpose: art.

* Failure to customize applications. Linda emphasized several points that were completely correct: one must pay attention to rules, guidelines, and requirements for a particular program, whether government or foundation. With the latter, a blanket pitch to foundations is most likely to result in total rejection; each foundation has its own persnickety needs and requirements, and anything sent to a particular foundation should be customized to those requirements. As a result, you’re better off sending a small number of applications to a limited number of foundations and making sure those applications follow the foundation’s guidelines precisely. This is a corollary of another thing Linda said, which is that one should seek good matches in funding. Come to think of it, this is also a pretty good rule for dating.

* The difference between the grant and real worlds. Just as you should stretch ideas to fit program guidelines, you should also realize that the grant world and real world aren’t necessarily the same things. We discuss the issue in Studying Programs is Hard to Do: Why It’s Difficult to Write a Compelling Evaluation and Know Your Charettes!. As Linda said, programs like the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program are supposed to help you finish school faster because you have money and thus should be able to focus on your work. But the reality is that many recipients finish their Ph.Ds. slower because they don’t have a financial ax looming over their neck. This is the kind of reality you shouldn’t mention in your application, because you’re building an argument that needs to agree with the premise of the program, even if everyone knows what really tends to happen.

* Persistence. As Isaac often tells prospective clients, he’s a grant writer and not a fortune teller and thus doesn’t know whether any particular agency will be funded for a particular grant because too many factors outside the applicant’s control can change whether a grant is funded or not. The best one can do is turn in a complete and technically accurate proposal and hope for the best. That’s true of any individual proposal. Nonetheless, over the long term, the organizations that get funded are the persistent ones that never give up and continually refine their approach and work to improve their grant writing skills. The same is true of graduate students and individuals. As Randy Pausch says in The Last Lecture, barriers and walls are there to show how badly you want something. It’s true of grant writing, job searching, novel publishing, date finding, and a variety of other complex undertakings with multiple interlocking parts based on imperfect knowledge and equally imperfect judgment.

Now, it’s true that the seminar might have been helpful for someone who’d never heard the term “grant” or “fellowship” and had never even thought about the issue. But even so, it wasn’t maximally helpful. Had Linda been more knowledgeable about particular grant programs graduate students in English are eligible to apply for, it could have been better. If she’d had a potential program most of us were eligible for, she could have assigned all of us to prepare application packages. Now that would be useful. Part of the problem is that very few programs exist for graduate students who aren’t writing their dissertation: as a result, graduate students might spend too much time searching for opportunities that don’t exist. One program that does, for example, is the aforementioned Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program. It’s only available for first-year students, however, and the deadline for it has already passed, which is a good metaphor for the seminar’s overall utility.

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Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP

The breathless SAMHSA RFP, “Targeted Capacity Expansion Program for Substance Abuse Treatment and HIV/AIDS Services (Short Title: TCE/HIV)” (.pdf link to the RFP) has already been mentioned and also features one of my favorite proposal verbal quirks: the automatic success assumption. The last bullet in Section C (page 26) says:

Demonstrate success in referring, and retaining clients in aftercare and recovery support services/programs following substance abuse treatment.

I read that, noted the grammar mistake (see the last paragraph of this post for more about it) and called Isaac. I initially assumed the RFP wanted to know how the applicant had helped others similar to the target population get drug treatment. In other words, it just asked the applicant to show previous experience in similar programs. This, however, would be too easy. It’s also not exactly what’s being asked: they want to know about referring, and retaining clients in other services/programs. So they don’t necessarily want information about a program that the applicant has run, but presumably such services would be as a result of some program, or an aspect of another program.

The question is hard to understand because its form and hard to answer because it doesn’t define “success,” and the only way to answer it straight would be with data that says something like, “In 2007, 120 people were referred to other substance abuse clinics, and of those, 77 went, which we think is successful because other programs/the literature/our therapist/numbers we made up indicate that normally less than half of people in the target population when referred actually made it to treatment.”

For a program dealing with substance abuse or medical care, there are further complicating factors because of third-party payer issues and whether clinics are willing to treat the uninsured or publicly insured. Many clinics aren’t willing to take such patients, which is an important treatment gap the current political debate around healthcare is ignoring: many of the uninsured are eligible for public support programs but don’t enroll or, if they do enroll, cannot find providers.

That was a long tangent, the point of which is that even if a program like the ones being created in response to TCE/HIV do refer clients, there’s no guarantee that the treatment provider on the other end will accept the client, even if the client manages to find her way to the other program for help. Furthermore, the question itself is confusing and, once you understand what it means and its implications, you realize that it’s asking for data that don’t really exist and, even if they did, probably wouldn’t be useful for the reasons I just described. Finally, the question asks about aftercare and recovery/support programs, which, for an organization providing outreach and pretreatment services, also doesn’t exist. Initial referrals have nothing to do with recovery and support. The deeper into this question one gets, the worse it appears.

Finally, note the bizarre comma inserted after the fourth word: “referring, and retaining clients…” Commas should be used between independent clauses (meaning complete sentences that could stand alone) joined by “but, nor,” or “for,” and they’re optional if the sentence is joined by “and” or “or.” You can also use them to separate things in a series, between consecutive adjectives, or to set off phrases and clauses. All of this is courtesy of Write Right!, which I mentioned previously here. Notice that none of those rules say “drop a comma randomly in a sentence that would otherwise flow smoothly, even if its content is incoherent.” The comma is symptomatic of a deeper malady: RFP writers who aren’t really thinking about what they’re doing and who, in their attempts to sound positive and upbeat, contort themselves in verbal knots that the grant writer must in turn untangle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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Reading Difficult RFPs and Links for 3-23-08

* We’ve talked before about how difficult reading RFPs can be. The Section 514, 515, and 516 Multi-Family Housing Revitalization Demonstration Program (MPR) gives a particularly good example of how an application can hide who might actually be eligible for the grant. The program is supposed to support rural multi-family housing (which seems like an oxymoron anyway—don’t rural areas, by definition, have enough space to build all the single-family housing they need?), and the application eligibility says:

(1) Eligibility under 7 CFR 3560.55; however, the requirements described in 7 CFR 3560.55(a)(5) pertaining to required borrower contributions and 7 CFR 3560.55(a)(6) pertaining to required contributions of initial operating capital are waived for all MPR proposals.

So we have to go find whatever 7 CFR 3560.55 is. Google brings up this .pdf file. And the very first thing this section tells us is:

Applicants for off-farm labor housing loans and grants should also refer to § 3560.555, and applicants for on-farm
labor housing loans should refer to § 3560.605.

So we should go look somewhere else for eligibility! Does anyone at the USDA actually read these notices and think about what it’s like for whoever is on the other end? I’m just trying to figure out if organizations other than public agencies or nonprofits are eligible to apply, and I think “”§ 3560.55 Applicant eligibility requirements (5)” tells me: “With the exception of applicants who are a nonprofit organization, housing cooperative or public body, be able to provide the borrower contribution from their own resources.” If nonprofits and public organization are excepted, it would appear that private organizations are eligible. If only the initial funding announcement had just said so.

It’s also difficult to gauge what this program actually does, and if I were a reporter, I might start sniffing around for past winners and looking for Tony Soprano-style connections. Sure, this sounds paranoid, but then you read about what goes on at HUD and think maybe it’s not.

* In a Giving Carnival post, we discussed why people give and firmly answered, “I don’t know”. Now the New York Times expends thousands of words in an entire issue devoted to giving and basically answers “we don’t know either.” An article on measuring outcomes is also worth reading, although the writer appeared not to have read our post on the inherent problems in evaluations.

* Perpetual government programs of the sort we describe in Zombie Funding – Six Tana Leaves for Life, Nine for Motion, Déjà vu All Over Again—Vacant Houses and What Not to Do About Them, and Phoenix Programs also occur in other countries. An example comes by way of Megan McArdle:

THANKS TO Alain Destexhe, a Belgian senator (and that rarest/loneliest of beings, a Belgian free market liberal), for today’s fact of the day. Mr Destexhe reports on his blog that the Belgian central bank still employs more than 2,000 people, even though it has not had a currency to oversee since 1999, when Belgium joined the euro.

* What is up with the guys at the Grant Institute? We’ve written three posts (here, here, and here) about how useless grant training seminars are. But Anthony Jones works for them and sent me a form e-mail announcing that “The Grant Institute: Certificate in Professional Program Development and Grant Communication will be held in Houston, Texas, April 21 – 25, 2008.” The cost: a mere thousand dollars. Your grand buys courses like one “centered around expert communication principles, this class will change the way students conceptualize grant proposals and other fundraising tools.” Whatever that means. Clearly they have at least one grant writer working for them.

Furthermore, Anthony’s e-mail states that “You have received this invitation due to specific educational affiliation.” I’d love to know who that affiliate is.

* NPR learns about vacant housing problems without reading Déjà vu All Over Again—Vacant Houses and What Not to Do About Them. C’mon guys: this isn’t the first time housing problems like the present ones have existed.

* Freakonomics wants to know what can be done to close the achievement gap between white and Asian students versus Black and Hispanic students. Actually, Freakonomics ignored Asians and Hispanics of any race, who between them represent 19.2% of the population, or about 57,000,000 people. But people interested in this problem should still read it.

* Dropout rate numbers are notoriously unreliable, and the New York Times tells us why. For academic research that observes the same thing, see The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels. For example:

(a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics; (b) it has been declining over the past 40 years; (c) majority/minority graduation rate differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years […]