Author: Isaac Seliger

Among the many oddities of writing proposals is that most RFPs require that the applicant demonstrate extensive collaborations or form partnerships. I don’t know why RFPs demand this, because it is unlikely that a collaboration between McDonald’s and Burger King would result in a better burger (McWhopper?). The feds specially preclude businesses from “collaborating” through a host of laws designed to protect competition. But in the world of nonprofits and public agencies, alleged collaborations and partnerships are demanded.

A case in point is the Department of Labor Community-Based Job Training Program, for which we are writing a proposal on behalf of a very large community college district. This SGA (“Solicitation of Grant Availability,” since DOL disdains the pedestrian term, “RFP”) has a long-winded section on required “partnerships and strategic planning” for a competitive proposal. What makes this funny is that the primary applicants for this program are community colleges, which are key local training providers and presumably have the capacity to simply operate yet another training effort all by themselves.

Our client, for example, has over 100,000 students in dozens of certificate and degree programs. Why would a community college district like this need to collaborate with any other entity, especially considered the administrative overhead necessary, unless it was in a mood to do so? All colleges and universities compete constantly with one another for students, endowments, star faculty, state and private operating funds, grants and, for that matter, high quality basketball players. In preparation for tonight’s NCAA Championship Game, I don’t think Duke’s crusty and cagey Coach K will have met with Butler’s young phenom coach Brad Stevens to discuss a collaborative game plan or share recruiting ideas for the incoming class.

In the proposal world where Seliger + Associates lives, collaborations are omnipresent in our drafts, and we spin elaborate tales of strategic planning and intensive involvement in development of project concepts, most of which are woven out of whole cloth to match the collaborative mythology that funders expect (remember: your grant story needs to get the money). In many ways, grant writers are myth makers, or maybe more appropriately myth tellers, sort of like West African “griot” who pass on ancestral knowledge, albeit in written rather than verbal form. At some point, I’ll write a long post on grant writer as myth teller, but in the context of collaboration, this particular myth only goes back about 20 years or so.

I don’t recall any interest among funders in having nonprofits collaborate with each other when I first started writing human services proposals in the early 1970s. The first whiff of collaboration I encountered was something called the “A-95 Review Process” when I was the Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood, CA in the late 70’s. This Carter-era gem required local governments to circulate their draft grant proposals to other government agencies for review and comment before submission, which made pre-computer grant writing deadlines really hard to meet. In LA, this function was handled by the wonderfully named SCAG (Southern California Association of Governments), which published a weekly compendium of proposed grant applications. A-95 was supposed to encourage cities to collaborate with each other. At Lynnwood, we reviewed the SCAG A-95 bulletin closely to see if we could screw up a competing city’s proposal by commenting and forcing them to respond in hopes of getting them to blow the deadline, while we got ours in on time. Competing cities responded in kind, so this attempt at intergovernmental cooperation quickly devolved into a farce.

In 1982, the profoundly dumb A-95 process was junked by the Reagan Administration in favor of Executive Order 12372, which let the states decide which proposals to review and how to do the review, while making both public agencies and nonprofits participate. I’m fairly confident that virtually all of the thousands of EO 12372 notifications we sent to states on behalf of clients since 1993 were simply thrown out. I can only recall one incident, about 12 years ago, in which our client actually received an inquiry from the EO 12372 notice we sent in. Over the years, all but 10 states have abandoned EO 12372, though you’ll still see it immortalized on every SF-424, which is the cover sheet for most federal proposals. So much for forced planning and collaboration at the federal and state level.

From 1978 to 1993, I worked for cities and, to the extent I wrote proposals, I wrote them mostly for economic development and affordable housing programs. When I started Seliger + Associates in 1993 and returned to writing human services proposals, about the only thing that surprised me was that government and foundation funders had discovered the wonders of collaboration during my 15-year hiatus. We’ve developed lots of ways of conforming to the mythology of collaboration through clever and obfuscating proposalese, because our clients typically compete tooth and nail with other providers for grants, donations, volunteers, and, in some cases, clients, particularly those with third-party payers (think substance abuse treatment and primary health care). The alleged “collaborations” we conjure up last just long enough to get the grant and are usually confirmed by “letters of commitment” attached to the proposal. I hate to break it to the funders, but agencies trade these letters with one another like the Magic: The Gathering cards that Jake collected when he was about 10.

The only folks who do not seem to be in on the collaboration joke are funders, who earnestly believe in the myth that nonprofits should collaborate, like kindergartners told to share. I even recently spotted a reference about “administrative collaboration” in The Grantsmanship Center’s “Centered” newsletter, quoting The Nonprofit Times, as follows: “As the recession saps their grantmaking capacity, many funders are directly or indirectly urging their grantees to cooperate or collaborate more.” I have news for The Grantsmanship Center and The Nonprofit Times: funders were just as in love with collaboration before the Great Recession and will likely remain so when good times return. Keep in mind that it is vastly easier to form new nonprofits than it is to find millionaires and corporations to set up foundations to fund the avalanche of new nonprofits. So why would an average nonprofit want to help the agency down the street?

Adding to the humorous aspect of the faux foundation concern for collaboration is that foundations actually compete one another for prestige, telegenic grantees and the like. Or have you ever wondered why it is necessary for a foundation like the MacArthur Foundation to “advertise” their support for PBS programming at the start and the end of the program?

Funders are just as interested in playing the status and competitions game as any other kind of organization. But if they want to pretend that nonprofit and public agencies collaborate, then nonprofit and public agencies will happily maintain the facade to get funded.

For KU basketball fans, the unthinkable happened yesterday. Our beloved Jayhawks, pre-season Number One and end-of-season Number One in the polls, winner of the Big 12 regular season and tournament and picked by the Bracketologist-in-Chief, President Obama, to win the NCAA championship, lost in the second round to the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). Despite all the predictions and prognostications over the past year, KU still had to win its tournament games but ran into a feisty foe in 9th seeded UNI and lost.

Faithful readers will remember that I drew lessons for grant writers from KU’s spectacular championship win two years ago in Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU! — Lessons from Basketball for Grant Writers. There is also a significant lesson to be learned from KU’s improbable flop this year. Although KU has been the favorite all year, the would-be NCAA champion must win six games in a row, sometimes against teams like UNI that haven’t gotten the memo saying they can’t win. The same phenomenon often happens in grant writing. Two cases on point:

* Our new-old friend, Investing in Innovation Fund (i3): We’ve blogged about i3 several times. This is an enormous program with huge grants that has been tantalizing LEAs and youth services nonprofits since the Stimulus Bill passed last year. I’ve had lots of recent calls along the lines of, “Will our organization have any chance of funding, since there’ll be so many applicants?” My usual response is more or less the following:

Sure, at this moment, 5,000 organizations probably think they will apply. By the time the May 11 deadline arrives, 2,000 of these will have given up, so maybe 3,000 applications will go in. Since the RFP is fantastically complex, about half of the submitted applications will be thrown out as technically incorrect. The Department of Education says 220 grants will be made. Instead of an individual applicant’s odds of being funded being 4.4%, the odds are probably three times higher, or 14.6%.

But this assumes that all scored applicants have the chance of being funded, which is of course not true, as funding decisions involve lots of factors other than raw scores, such as geography, politics, service to racial and ethnic groups, past funding history and on and on. Nonetheless, many applicants will be scared away because of the assumed competition. About two weeks ago, I received a call from the development director of a large ethnic-specific advocacy organization headquartered in D.C., with affiliates around the country. He told me the organization planned to submit three i3 proposals and I gave him the fee quotes.

This week, he called me back to let me know that for internal reasons, they’ve decided to not submit any i3 proposals, even though the Department of Education has informally encouraged them to apply. This is an example of three of the 5,000 possible applications melting away before the deadline. The same pattern is unfolding across the country and who know how many other organizations will give up before May 11.

* Our old-old friend, the Administration for Native Americans Social and Economic Development Strategies (ANA SEDS) Program: This program has been around for decades and we’ve written lots of funded ANA SEDS grants over the years. For whatever reason, when the ANA SEDS FOA was issued a few weeks ago, there turned out to only be $6,500,000 available, which is substantially less in previous years. Right on schedule, I received a phone call from the executive director of a Native American organization who wanted a fee quote but was concerned about whether they should apply because “there is so little money available this year.” I asked her if she thought other possible applicants would also be discouraged by the small amount of money up for grabs. She said yes and I said she had answered her own question: the small amount available probably means fewer applicants, improving her chances. She hired us.

Whether there is lot of money (i3) or little money (ANA SEDS) to be had in a given RFP process, don’t be discouraged if it is a program that your organization wants to run (and read our previous two posts on the subject). No matter what the imagined odds, apply anyway. Just as teams have to play the games to win the NCAA Tournament, your organization cannot get a grant unless a technically correct and compelling proposal is prepared and submitted on time.

Poor little UNI could have forfeited the game in the face of mighty KU, but they played well enough to win on that particular day, even though they probably will lose the next ten in a row. David only needed one well placed stone to take down Goliath, and your organization only needs one well prepared proposal to bag a big federal grant. Although I am a KU fan, if I was scoring yesterday’s game in the way a reviewer scores a federal proposal, I would have given the game to UNI, even if KU had caught them at the end, because they played a better game.

Usually I write posts about how to get grants. Today I thought I would give some surefire ways to not get a grant . . .

• Call/email/meet with a field deputy in the office of your senator, congressperson, governor, mayor, or city councilperson. Regardless of the project idea, the field deputy will be polite, encouraging, tell you how much the elected official would be willing to support your project, and give you vague generalities about grant programs. They will not, however, tell you to apply for program x, which is due on date y. Instead, they will spin Tales of Brave Ulysses, pat you on the head and send you off to make room for the next supplicant. In other words, you won’t get a grant, but you will have a new feeling of self-importance and, likely, an invitation to the politician’s next fund raiser.
• Apply to government programs for which your organization is not eligible because you think the funder will recognize the critical importance of your project concept. The funder will throw out your proposal, but you will have achieved the high moral ground by Speaking Truth to Power, or as the Firesign Theater put it, providing Shoes for Industry.
• Find the contact information for tons of foundations and send the same proposal to 100 foundations without looking at their guidelines. All of your proposals will be tossed without being read because you did not respond to what the funder wants, but you will have that same sense of satisfaction one gets from reorganizing one’s book/CD/shoe collection. You can also impress your board members by telling them how many proposals you submitted over the weekend and how bleary-eyed you are.
• Fail to include attachments required by the RFP/guidelines because you think the requirement is dumb or is too much work. Also, ignore signature pages and the frequent requirement for a “wet signature”. Instead, depend on the funder giving you the benefit of the doubt, which they won’t do.
• Include lots of unrequested stuff, like the ever-popular client testimonials, awards and newspaper clippings. And, don’t forget that DVD of your appearance on Oprah. This will demonstrate your inability to read guidelines, making it very easy for the initial reviewer to toss your proposal over their shoulder before it is read or scored.
• Propose that you will use the requested grant to make grants to others. This way, you’ll be telling the funder that you should decide how their money is used. After all, why would a foundation that gives scholarships not want your organization to stand between them and needy students?
• Submit a 40-page full proposal to a foundation that requests a two-page letter of inquiry because you couldn’t possibly summarize your brilliant project concept. You fail to remember that perhaps the greatest speech ever delivered is Lincoln’s 256 word Gettysburg Address. A foundation program officer who receives 50 proposals every week is certainly going to what to spend several hours savoring your profundities.
• Propose using virtually the entire grant as a subcontract to another organization or vendor. This will make the funder understand that the role of your organization is to do nothing but apply for the grant and hand over the money to someone else to run the program. This is exactly what funders want in a grantee—complete abdication of organizational responsibility.
• For electronic submissions, create fantastically complex files with embedded pictures, charts, etc., and make sure the file size exceeds 10 mb. Always wait until five minutes before the deadline before uploading. This way, you are virtually guaranteed to create corrupted files, which cannot be uploaded in time to meet the deadline. Then you can contact the funder and weep about the unfairness of the process, which they will ignore.
• For paper submissions, use fancy binders, lots of color, and spend an inordinate amount of time on the presentation package. This will ensure that the funder realizes you don’t need the money and that you can focus on all the wrong aspects of grant writing by concentrating on style over substance.

I could go on with lots of other ways to ensure that your organization will not be funded, but you probably get the idea by now. If you actually want to get funded, read the technical posts we’re written and watch for future tips. Prepare the application according to the funder’s guidelines, no matter how obtuse. Learn how to write. Practice for years. Then you’ll know about the pitfalls listed above.

I just posted “Where Have All the RFPs Gone?,” in which I speculated that the lateness of federal RFPs this fiscal year is probably due to the fact that overworked program officers are still chewing through last year’s proposals. Imagine my surprise when I read “Staffing Woes Hinder Job-Boosting Program” by Michael Aneiro in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. He discovered a HUD program that is way behind in reviewing applications because of a lack of staff to do the reviews.

Even better, while HUD has more money than usual for this Federal Housing Administration (FHA) program, an appropriation for additional staff was not made, so the same number of program officers, fiscal officers and lawyers have to do vastly more work. Since federal employees do not work by the piece, the same number of reviewers have to review more applications, which means they get stuck in the system. All of this will eventually be digested, even as hundreds of new FY ‘10 RFPs are published in the coming months.

Subscribers to our Free Grant Alerts will probably have noticed relatively few large federal RFPs so far in this fiscal year, which began October 1. To paraphrase Peter, Paul & Mary, Where Have All The RFPs Gone?. I assume this dearth is because federal program officers are still churning through the tidal wave of Stimulus Bill proposals submitted in the last fiscal year. I predicted this problem in Stimulus Bill Passes: Time for Fast and Furious Grant Writing and said . . .

Unfortunately, we don’t have a National Guard of Program Officers who train one weekend a month shuffling papers to be ready to answer the call. That means Federal agencies will find themselves up to their eyeballs in spending authority with existing staff levels pegged at much smaller budgets.

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.

For example, just about every LEA and youth services nonprofit is waiting breathlessly for the Department of Education’s enormous and well-publicized Investing in Innovations (i3) Fund to be issued. The i3 program website still says, “The Department of Education anticipates accepting applications in early 2010, with all applications due in early spring of 2010. The department will obligate all i3 funding by September 30, 2010.” Hmmmm. Early 2010 has come and gone, so there is no chance that having proposals due in “early spring” is going to happen. But the Department of Education will still try to obligate i3 funds by the end of the fiscal year. This means that when the i3 RFP is finally issued, it will be during a fantastically busy time because the Department of Education has not issued most of their other programs either.

One indicator of the likely chaos at the Department of Education: the planned competitions for the Talent Search (TS) and Education Opportunity Centers (EOC), two of the very large “TRIO Programs”, “have been delayed. At this time, the Department expects to have a closing date for TS and EOC applications in fall 2010.” No sign yet of the annual RFP process for the Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) either. We’ve been hired to write several PEP proposals and have been told by clients that the RFP will be issued in early April. On the PEP website, the last “funding status” information is from 2006!

The Department of Education is not alone in being tardy this year. We have yet to see any of the 30 or so NOFAs that HUD issues every year, any SAMHSA RFAs, few Department of Labor SGAs and almost no Department of Energy FOAs. We are also waiting for the DHHS Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (OAPP) to issue the FY ‘10 RFP for their new teen pregnancy program. It was funded in the DHHS departmental budget authorization last fall but has yet to emerge. This program will be sex education/family planning-based, rather than abstinence-based, which has been the federal funding focus in teen pregnancy in recent years.

We know OAPP is coming because one of our clients, for whom we have written funded abstinence-based grants was contacted by their OAPP Program Officer to encourage them to switch approaches and apply for the new program. We’ve been hired to write the proposal when OAPP awakes from its slumber. As is said in Jamaica, “Soon come.” Just for fun, follow this link to the DHHS “FY ‘10 Grants Forecast Page” and see what you get. That’s right, a blank page! This is not unusual, as most federal agencies will not tell you in advance when RFPs will be issued.

While you’re waiting for FY ‘10 RFPs to blossom, figure out what funds will be available for your organization in the next several months and do everything you can to get ready to write the proposals. For most federal programs, the application period this year will be short.

One of the many interesting aspects of running a general-purpose grant writing firm is that we are often called upon to write complex proposals covering subjects about which we know little or nothing, as I discussed in No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal Is Not Hard For A Good Grant Writer. In the interest of “transparency,” perhaps the most overused and least realized word of the last few years, here’s how this is possible.

Start by reading the RFP very carefully. In many cases, the RFP will say exactly what the applicant is supposed to do, as I described tangentially regarding the Department of Labor’s YouthBuild program in True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales. State RFPs for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC), a federal pass-through program from the Department of Education, often do the same thing. In such “cookbook” RFPs, precise descriptions of how the program should run, including detailed activities and metrics, are presented in plain, albeit bureaucratic, English. In extreme cases, simply copy the listed activities and re-write in breathless proposalese and, voila, you have your program description.

Occasionally, however, even mature cookbook programs like YouthBuild get updated, requiring going deeper than just reading the RFP recipe. For example, the last YouthBuild RFP in FY 2009 required for the first time that YouthBuild trainees be trained for “green jobs” and that labor-market information (LMI) be provided to support the need for these green jobs. Two minor problems: the RFP failed to provide a definition of green jobs. And states do not track such data because nobody knows what a green job is.

Don’t believe me? Google the phrase, “federal green job definition” and see what you get. I just did and found this hilarious or depressing, depending on your point of view, Christian Science Monitor article, Obama to create 17,000 green jobs. What’s a green job?. The article discusses President Obama’s recent announcement of “17,000 green jobs” being created. Then the article states, “Which is great, except that no one can count green jobs because, fundamentally, no one knows what a green job is.” Since I didn’t know what a green job was and apparently neither did the Department of Labor, for purposes of writing the YouthBuild proposals we completed last year, we simply referred to a lot of green-sounding jobs that we dreamed up (e.g., Weatherization Specialist, Solar Panel Installer, Wind Turbine Mechanic, etc.) and cobbled together vague LMI data to support our imaginary green job career paths (think phantom data). We must have done something right, as four out of the five proposals were funded.

Given the above, I was delighted when the Department of Energy recently released a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP). Last year’s Stimulus Bill brought this program to life. WAP will fund training to prepare low-income people for careers as Weatherization Specialists. We squared the circle by writing a WAP proposal, even though we knew nothing about weatherization. We accomplished this slight-of-hand by looking at a link the DOE thoughtfully buried in the FOA for suggested curriculum for the training. A general knowledge of job training for hard-to-train participants and a quick re-write of the curriculum later, and the program description was extruded from our solar-powered proposal writing machine (we used to use diesel, but switched to solar to create more green jobs).

Here’s another example. We just completed writing a proposal for the EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which funds fairly esoteric water quality research. Once again, we knew nothing about this topic. In an unusual circumstance, we actually received great technical content from the PI on the project, who is a biology professor at the public university which hired us. He was very skeptical about our ability as general purpose grant writers to write a scientific research proposal until I told him he just had to provide us with a bulleted list of the five W’s and the H. Then the light went on for him. I received a couple of pages of bullet points a few days later. We fired up the proposal machine and out popped the project description. After the PI read our second draft, he sent an e-mail that said, “I do think it [the proposal] is going together nicely.” Another convert to the Seliger method.

To summarize the above meandering, here is how one writes about an unfamiliar topic:

• Look for clues in the RFP and any provided links.
• Visualize how the project would work within the context of your individual life experiences. Even though I have no idea what a Weatherization Specialist does, I have plenty of experience in trying to keep the rain out of the several houses I owned in Seattle.
• Use your imagination. I have no idea of how stream sampling is actually performed, but I guessed correctly that undergrads would dip little bottles into the stream and take copious field notes. The only thing that surprised me is that the notes are not entered into a handheld computer, but carefully written long hand in notebooks, just like in Charles Darwin’s day. Apparently, the lilly pad is not ready for the iPad.
• Leave lots of blanks in your first draft for your client or whoever actually knows something about the project and is willing to read the draft, such as, “Stream sampling will be conducted on a _____ basis by ______________ at _________ locations by the light of the full moon.”*
• Ask for technical content. If not, write the first draft with even more blanks, as above, and hope the content appears in the comments on the first draft. Should you not receive any technical content, write everything in generalities or guess. Since many proposals are reviewed by people with limited or no understanding of the topic, your guesses may get the job done.

No matter what strategies you use to write about a completely unfamiliar topic, the grant writer’s task is to provide a complete and technically responsive proposal, not run the program after the grant is awarded. So be creative! To illustrate the point, here is an old joke about traffic engineering consultants who develop statistical models that will predict how many people will turn left at a given intersection on Wednesday afternoon in 2030:

Two traffic engineers are stranded on a desert island with several hundred cans of food and no can opener. One looks at the other and says, “what should we do?” The other smiles and says, “imagine a can opener.”

Start imagining can openers and you will be fine.

* No, I would not actually put in “by the light of the full moon.” But since there is a dreadful remake in the theaters now of one of my favorite horror movies, The Wolfman, I was reminded of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the afflicted Larry Talbot, who is told that “even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

President Obama highlighted his proposed partial “freeze” on discretionary federal spending during his State of the Union address last week, which set off a flurry of predictable wrangling among Democratic and Republican members of Congress (for a pretty good summary of what’s going on, see Democrats, Republicans Spar Over Cutting Deficit). While talk of budget freezes may make most grant applicants start to get the sniffles, there is little to worry about at the moment.

So far, President Obama is talking about freezing some domestic spending programs in FY ‘11, which doesn’t start until October 1. He also seems to love spending for things like education, stimulating jobs, green energy, etc. The proposed FY ‘11 budget, which debuted February 1, shows increases in a number of discretionary programs along with freezes in others. But remember that appropriations for most domestic discretionary programs in the current FY ‘10 budget are wildly higher than in the FY ‘09 budget. At the moment, there are unprecedented amounts of money available for all kinds of initiatives. As I wrote last September in “Graffiti, Windmills, CAP Agencies, and an Answer to the Question As to Whether This is 1975 or 1965,” “This really is the best of times for grant applicants, so let’s all party like its 1965.” Or, to paraphrase Max in Where the Wild Things Are,* “Let the wild grant writing rumpus continue.”

Despite the happy talk above, however, there is one not-so-minor thing to worry about—the dreaded “R” word. No, not the recession “R” word, which, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is actually good for grant writing. I’m talking about “rescission”. Rescission should strike fear into your hearts, as shown in the following Congressional definition:

“Rescission–The cancellation of budget authority previously provided by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may propose to Congress that funds be rescinded. If both Houses have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within 45 days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.”

Since the Democrats control both houses of Congress, and assuming that President Obama is good at herding cats, he could propose rescission of any authorized spending program anytime he wants to. As with so many aspects of grant writing, I actually experienced a budget rescission when I was a Community Organizer Intern in 1972 in North Minneapolis, as noted in my first post, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal.” When I started work, one of my first tasks was to explain to low-income homeowner applicants for home rehabilitation loans that they could not get their money because the funds had been rescinded by President Nixon. At that time, there was nothing Congress could do about a rescission, which led to the 1974 law that requires Congress to go along with a presidential rescission. Given the hysteria that is building over the huge budget deficits, compounded by the upcoming election, a successful rescission is quite possible, and much more worrisome that supposed spending freezes.

This means that if your organization—nonprofit, public agency or eligible business—is thinking about applying for a grant, stop thinking and start writing.

* I have fond memories of reading “Where the Wild Things Are” to Jake and my other kids when they were two or three. It’s one of the best children’s books ever.

Jake wrote recently about the perils of being too creative as a grant writer in Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity. This post elaborates on the invisible fence of “Convention Wisdom” (CW) that forces us grant writers to remain in the box.

CW is an amorphous blob of assumed correctness that ping pongs through the media, popular culture, academia and everything else in America, even though aspects of it may be proven wrong. Two examples from recent newspaper articles will demonstrate how hopelessly wrong CW can be:

1) Foster Care and Orphanages: The CW about foster care is that the system, although flawed, is a much better alternative than orphanages, which conjure up Dickensian images of underfed orphans cowering in dark rooms. Although a quick Google search confirms that no one seems to really know how may kids are in foster care in America, a good guess is about 600,000. Richard. B. McKenzie, a UC-Irvine professor who grew up in an orphanage in the 1950’s, tackles the foster care/orphanage CW in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Best Thing About Orphanages.” Professor McKenzie cites a 2009 Duke University study of 3,000 orphaned children in Africa and Asia and states:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that children raised in orphanages by nonfamily members were no worse in their health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth than those cared for in their communities by relatives. More important, the orphanage-reared children performed better than their counterparts cared for by community strangers, which is commonly the case in foster-care programs.

Professor McKenzie surveyed 2,500 alumni of American orphanages and found they generally did much better than their peers in the general population across a range of educational attainment, income, happiness and related indicators. In other words, orphanages, which have largely disappeared from America and been replaced by foster care, actually did a reasonably good job given the circumstances in nurturing orphans. Having written dozens of proposals addressing the needs of foster youth over the years, I know that outcomes are not good for kids in the system. In 17 years of being in business, however, no one has ever approached us to write a proposal for an orphanage.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is one of the largest private funders for child service programs. A search of their website for “orphanages” produces two hits, both in Romania, while a search for “foster care” produces 230 hits! I have a pretty good idea of how the CW thinkers at the Casey Foundation would react to a proposal to set up a new orphanage in Owatonna*: shock and horror! But they’d probably happily fund yet another “innovative” program to provide wrap around supportive services for foster kids.

2) Endangered Salmon: While living in Seattle for 15 years, I became accustomed to waking up pretty much every morning to another newspaper story about endangered salmon. Several years ago, there was even an attempt to OK killing sea lions because they were eating too many salmon, although I don’t believe a whisker on a single sea lion was actually ever harmed. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this piece in the January 21, 2010 Wall Street Journal: Fish Boom Makes Splash in Oregon. Despite the CW about the end of salmon runs on the West Coast, this year there are so many steelhead and their cousins that in some creeks, “you could literally walk across on the backs of Coho,” according to Grant McOmie, outdoors correspondent for a television news team in Portland. As the article states:

In 2007, one state office warned, “Populations of anadromous [or oceangoing] fish have declined dramatically all over the Pacific Northwest. Many populations of Chinook, Coho, chum and steelhead are at a tiny fraction of their historic levels.” The year before that, a naturalist in Seattle wrote: “It is hard to find the silver lining in a situation as dire as the collapse of wild salmon off the Oregon and California coasts.”

It turns out that the CW about salmon in Oregon is kind of fishy. This looks like a good opportunity for an enterprising homeless services provider in Portland to use the service delivery model I developed satirically in Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development. I’ll give you the acronym at no charge: Project FISH (Feed the Indigent/Salmon for Homeless). The grant writer for this proposal could make tidy use the old aphorism, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

It is almost never a good idea to go against your understanding of the presumed CW of the reviewers in writing a grant proposal. Not only do you have to stay inside in the box, as Jake wrote, you actually have to stay in a corner of the box. A case in point:

We’ve written lots of funded proposals for anti-tobacco/anti-smoking proposals over the years, particularly in California, which at one time had tons of money for such initiatives. About ten years ago, we were hired to write three proposals to prevent youth smoking in California by three different agencies for the same state RFP. While two of the clients were fairly typical youth service organizations, one was different. This nonprofit was interested in only working with white kids, which they deemed “Euro-Americans.” We almost never get good data sources from our clients, but this client provided peer-reviewed studies confirming that, with the exception of Native American youth, white teenagers in California were much more at risk for smoking than African American, Asian or Latino kids.

I told the client, however, that he would be going against CW about smoking and ethnicity and he would likely not be funded—especially if we wrote the proposal using the term “Euro-American” with a focus on white teenagers. He insisted, and we wrote it the way he wanted, using his terrific citations in one of the best needs assessments we’ve ever written. Not only was the proposal not funded, but it was also completely trashed in written reviewer comments our client later gave me. The reviewers were outraged that the agency would focus on white kids, instead of youth of color, and claimed a lack of data, despite the citations we included. In other words, their CW was so strong, they did not recognize the statistics provided right under their noses. The punch line is that the other two proposals we wrote for this competition focused on African American and Latino youth, respectively, used more or less the same service delivery approach as the first proposal and had entirely specious data that we cobbled together.

They were funded.

Now, about that discount. We’re willing to provide a 20% discount off our standard fee for a foundation appeal to the first qualified client who wants to fund an orphanage, salmon to feed the homeless or some other anti-CW project concept that we find intriguing. This means we’ll conduct basic research to identify a prospect list, complete detailed research to narrow down the list, write a foundation letter proposal (about five single spaced pages) and prepare 10 finished foundation proposals to the best identified sources for $5,600, a $1,400 discount from our standard fee of $7,000 for this type of assignment! If we get anyone to take us up on this offer, I’ll post updates on the outcome.**

* We were recently hired by a client in Owatonna, a small town about 40 miles south of Minneapolis. I have fond memories of Owatonna, since I used to go there frequently with my dad in the late 1950s to get live turkeys from a farm for our family kosher meat market. It was fun for a six-year-old to try to catch a turkey that was bigger than himself—with a poultry hook. Owatonna is also mentioned in one of Jake’s favorite childhood movies, Hot Shots. At the start of this hilarious parody, Charlie Sheen is Topper Harley, a troubled fighter pilot trying to recover his mojo in an Indian village, when a character speaks a series of faux Indian words that are actually town names in Minnesota, including Owatonna. The sequel, Hot Shots! Part Deux, is also lots of fun.

** The client must be a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Seliger + Associates will, at its sole discretion, determine if the client is qualified and the project concept is appropriate for this offer.

Faithful readers will note that we regularly discuss RFPs, NOFAs, FOAs, SGAs and other government acronyms denoting that grant funds are available. Jake in particular likes to fulminate about especially dumb RRPs, as he does in Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP and Adventures in The Broadband Initiatives Program. Despite marinating in a stew of RFPs, Seliger + Associates never responds to RFPs/RFQs (the latter being “Requests for Qualifications”) for grant writing services, and there are two basic reasons for our unabashedly stiff-necked position.

The first reason is the most important: I know from over 15 years of working for various California cities, mostly in management capacities, that RFQs/RFPs for professional services are easily wired, “wired” meaning that one firm is going to get the contract regardless of who submits a response. Now, I am 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. Instead, the public official is usually just more comfortable with a certain consultant or has a personal relationship. 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 competition takes place. Many public agencies have a requirement to run a bid process before selecting a consultant, 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 a RFQ from a city. I looked quickly at the document and saw that 25% of the available point total was for “knowledge of the local community,” while 25% was for “grant writing experience.” This is obviously wired for a local grant writer, as we would have received zero points under the local knowledge category. 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. There are other similar techniques, including having a ringer on the selection committee. We receive up to a dozen RFP/RFQ notices per year. I assume this is because we are such a well-qualified and well-known firm that we would provide exceptional cover for a wired bidding process, if we were dumb enough to respond. Not being stupid or naive, we always send more or less the following response: We will not respond to this RFP, but would be happy to provide a fee quote if your process fails to turn up a qualified consultant. Over the years, exactly one public agency eventually hired us after running a RFP/RFQ process. Years ago, when we first started, we would sometimes submit real bids but never got the job, and about 12 years ago stopped wasting our time by responding.

The second reason is also significant: having been in business for almost 17 years, we simply don’t have to respond to RFPs/RFQs for grant writing services. We think we’re the best grant writing outfit there is. We are like Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s response to a reporter’s question concerning who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: ““You’re looking at him!”* For better or worse, we’re as good as it gets with respect to** grant writing. Responding to RFPs/RFQs wastes our time with no reliable prospect of reward. 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? Try a Google search for grant writers and see what you get.

Despite the above, 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 the process. Additionally, all public agency purchasing rules have an exception for what is known in the trade as a “sole source contract.” This is because public agencies occasionally face unexpected emergencies and can’t wait for a bid process or will eventually have a unique need—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, and signed the contract. This is a lot less work than orchestrating a phony RFP/RFQ process. Since I know the sole source approach is always available, and our services and fees are cleverly hidden in plain sight on our website, I assume that any public official who wants to go through an RFP/RFQ process is probably trying to wire it and, thus, is not worth our time to respond.

* 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.

** Free Grant Writing Tip: when responding to disjointed RFPs and searching for phases to connect disparate thoughts, alternate between “With respect to . . .” and “Regarding . . .” See, it was worth reading this post for this transition tip alone.

Faithful readers will know that I’m very fond of what used to be called “B movies,” so it should be no surprise that I also love movie trailers. The otherwise forgettable 1998 remake of Godzilla featured one of the best theatrical trailers I’ve ever seen: old guys are fishing off a East River pier in Manhattan, one hooks something big, his pole bends, the camera moves to the water where a huge wake is forming, and Godzilla’s head emerges. Fade to black with this in gigantic type across the screen: “SIZE DOES MATTER.” The theater audience went wild. Too bad the actual movie was awful, but I still remember the trailer!

The question of size in grant writing was posed by one of our readers in a comment on Health Care Reform Means Green Grass & High Tides for Grant Writers. Michael Leza wrote:

I’ve seen you say before that a good way to get into grant writing is to volunteer to write grants for small local non-profits. Do these kind of non profits have a realistic chance of getting funded or is this more of an exercise in going through the motions and learning the process? Would some of these big health care reform/stimulus bills be a more likely source of grants for these kinds of organizations, or would it be easier to try and apply for a more established grant (be it federal or otherwise)?

Michael is wondering if it is worth volunteering to write proposals for a small nonprofit in hopes of becoming a paid grant writer. Since only small nonprofits are likely to take him up on his offer, he probably doesn’t have any choice. But his question suggests the larger issue of whether the size of the applicant organization, and by extension the age and experience of the applicant, matters in applying for grants. While, like most questions regarding grant writing, quantum effects cloud the answer, in most cases size doesn’t matter, and it often helps if the applicant for a grant program is new and/or has no track record, as long as the applicant meets basic eligibility criteria. How is this possible?

Let’s take a real world example of a tiny faith-based nonprofit organization in Watts that came to us about 10 years ago for help in writing a LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) proposal to provide services for students at Jordan High School, which more or less is the definition of a high-risk high school. What made this interesting is that DCSF was re-bidding a contract it had had for years with an extremely well-known and very large nonprofit in Watts that has been scooping up city, county, federal and foundation grants since the Watts Rebellion in 1965 (those readers who know South Central will know which agency I’m writing about).

Our prospective client, a minister, asked if I thought he could compete for this grant against the local heavyweight champ of nonprofits. I told him that he was man of faith, and if he had faith in his organization, so did we, and we could write a competitive application that would put him in the ring, a nonprofit Rocky against a nonprofit Apollo Creed. Like Rocky, our client won the grant. While we wrote a great proposal (shameless plug here), the most likely reason it was funded was that the incumbent large organization probably thought they had the grant in the bag and threw together a lame proposal. Also, DCFS may have been tired of funding the same organization. Over the years, grantees that get repeated grants often end up becoming lazy, don’t file reports on time and/or start fighting with the funding source. In other words, they act like a typical teenager. This opens up opportunities for new and frisky applicants to successfully compete for grants. The punch line is that once this small nonprofit got their DCFS grant, they used our grant writing skills to develop into a large, multi-program agency with lots of grant funds.

The same principle that size doesn’t usually matter in applying for grants is also true regarding small public agencies. Two examples will demonstrate this. I’ve already mentioned one before in Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later, which involved us writing a funded $250,000 Department of Education Goals 2000 proposal for a tiny school district with just over 100 students in rural Oklahoma. We were able to make the client competitive against giant applicants like Chicago Public Schools by emphasizing the oddity of their situation: the District wanted to implement bilingual education because of an avalanche of immigrant workers arriving in the community for jobs at an about to open industrial-sized hog farm.

This year, we wrote a funded $1,500,000 HUD Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) program grant for a small, rural city in California that caters to thousands of seasonal tourists. We usually write LBPHC proposals for much larger cities like Boston, but HUD apparently bought our argument that this city, although small in comparison to most LBPHC grantees, has a big lead problem and could implement a believable abatement program. We amped up the proposal by tying the lead problem to the current foreclosure mess (it never hurts to play up any related media-inspired hysteria you can find in a proposal). It also helped that our client had never before had a direct HUD grant, since all of their previous HUD awards were passed through the California Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Small Cities Program. I think HUD is always looking to fund new applicants for LBPHC and other long-in-the tooth grant programs and was pleasantly startled to get a credible proposal from an unlikely applicant.

As long as your organization meets basic eligibility for a given grant competition and avoids the “silly factor” that Jake wrote about last week in So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?, get busy and write. As with many things in life, it doesn’t much matter how big the applicant is, as long as the grant writer knows how to use his skills to craft a compelling argument. With luck, the funder will see the application as an opportunity to fund someone new, while using grant funds to meet a real local need.

One of the great ’70s arena anthem songs was the Outlaws’ Green Grass & High Tides, or as it was often misheard, “Green Grass & High Times Forever.” It seems that whichever health care reform bill staggers across the Congressional finish line will make it Green Grass & High Tides for grant writers, since all versions contain lots of hidden grant nuggets. I’m too busy writing proposals for such fun-filled RFPs as HRSA’s Nurse Education, Practice and Retention (NEPR) Program and SAMHSA’s Offender Reentry Program to flyspeck a couple of 2,000 page health care bills looking for prospective grant programs. Fortunately, I came across “Numerous Grant Programs Fatten Cost of Health Care Reform,” which does the heavy lifting for me. Here are some of the new grant programs that may burst forth in 2010:

• Demonstration Program to Promote Access for Medicare Beneficiaries With Limited English Proficiency (LEP): Section 1222 of the House bill would create three-year grants for nonprofits to offer interpreter services to help LEP residents communicate with medical providers. This is clearly aimed at Section 330 community and rural health centers that provide Medicaid services, often for LEP populations. We work for lots of Section 330 providers, so we love this program concept.
• Early Childhood Home Visitation Program: Section 2951 of the Senate bill would authorize grants to nonprofits for early childhood visitation programs. The programs would be aimed at improving maternal and newborn health, preventing child injuries and abuse,improving school performance, reducing domestic violence, and improving family economic self-sufficiency. There is $1.5 billion for this gem over five years. We’ve written tons of proposals over the years for similar programs, which are usually called “demonstration homemaker” services. I’ve never seen any data that suggests that such programs work, but they are great ways of employing lots of low-skill workers, usually low-income women, to go into the homes of other low-income women and tell them how to fold their laundry. This ever popular family support service already exists in most American communities. Since Senators must know this, I can only assume that the program will be “walkin’ around money” for the thousands of nonprofits that provide family supportive services through contracts with city, county and state agencies.
• Grants to Promote Positive Health Behaviors and Outcomes: Section 2530 in the House bill authorizes the award of grants to promote healthy behaviors in medically underserved areas, including education about the risks associated with poor nutrition, tobacco use, lack of exercise and other health problems. I could list about 25 existing federal program that already do this, but the nice part about the federal trough is that there is always room for one more program.
• Healthy Teen Initiative Program to Reduce Teen Pregnancy: Section 2526 of the House bill establishes a new program to provide $150 million in grants for schools, non-profits and other groups for educational programs to reduce teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The feds have been funding various teen pregnancy and STD prevention programs for the past 35 years, vacillating between sex education and abstinence approaches, depending on which party controls Congress. We write teen pregnancy prevention programs regularly, so I am very familiar with the data and have yet to see any evidence that such programs do anything except keep armies of earnest, newly minted college grads employed as health educators.

I could go on, but I think readers will get the idea that there are dozens of new grant horses being saddled up in the health reform effort, as well as other emerging federal legislation. I recently wrote about a huge new education program named i3, in Same As It Ever Was: Investing in Innovation Fund (i3), Student Support Services (SSS), TRIO, and More to Come and am tickled to learn that new health related programs are not far behind. If your organization does job training, not education or health services, and you’re feeling left out of the party, not to worry, Congress feels your pain. The LA Times reports that Democrats Work On Multibillion-dollar Jobs Package, so your time is nigh.

I’m hoping for a resurrection of the Nixon-era Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which was perhaps the all time best grant program for nonprofit and public agencies, since all it did was provide money to hire people. I wrote many funded CETA proposals in the ’70s and knew lots of unemployed liberal arts grads who entered the government/nonprofit world through CETA slots and clawed their way into permanent jobs, including the holy grail of civil service status. Unlike the Stimulus Bill, it was easy to count jobs created by CETA, as grantees just had to count new noses around the conference table.

For the past year or so, I’ve written many posts on how this is the best time ever to go after grants and the hits keep on coming. Seliger + Associates stands ready to shoulder the burden of writing proposals for the newest crop of federal grants, which indeed seem to be the same as they ever were.

Hey you!! That’s right, you! The nonprofit Executive Director lurking in the back. Confused about how to write foundation proposals? I shouldn’t really do this, but, just between me and you, and if you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll let you in on some of the secrets of writing foundation proposals.

Many nonprofit folks, and particularly the “True Believers” I wrote about in True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales, are hopelessly confused about getting foundation funds and writing foundation proposals. There are basically two ways to get access to foundation funds: the fairy tale way and the hard work way. In the fairy tale world, the nonprofit person (e.g., Executive Director, President, Founder, what have you) cozies up to the foundation representative (ideally, Bill Gates) and breathlessly describes how their new organization will bring instant water to thirsty parts of the world (just add liquid!) or a similar idea. Mr. Gates will be so impressed that he will reach into his Tom Bihn Manpurse**, pull out a checkbook, wad of cash or debit card (depending on the age of the dreamer), and the funding is accomplished.

We call this kind of approach to getting foundation grants “relationship funding” because it depends on the nonprofit developing a relationship with the funder. While this can work, it takes a lot of time and luck. Also, very few folks actually know foundation reps. Any of you nonprofit folks out there play Bunco with Oprah? I didn’t think so. Being serious, most foundations either hide behind an accountant/lawyer/flak catcher type, who you can’t develop a relationship with because there is no one to develop it with, or have a staff, whose job is partially to make potential applicants feel like they’re special (similar to the role of the field deputy in your congressperson’s district office) without actually making any commitments.

People ask us all the time if we have “special relationships” with funders, which always makes me laugh. Let’s say I regularly play bridge with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Why would I use my influence on your project, as opposed to the dozens of other projects we work on in a given year or for a project dear to my stone-like heart? In other words, even if we had influence, which we don’t, why would we rent it? So, if any would-be grant writer tells you they have special influence, walk away quickly, as they are likely an amateur. Putting it in Entourage terms, if you want to get into the hottest club in LA, it helps to know Vince, not Drama. When callers ask about developing relationships with funders, I always suggest that they criss-cross the US flying first class in hopes of sitting next to Bill or Oprah. They probably actually probably fly in private jets, but you get the idea.

If developing relationships with foundations is pretty much a fairy tale exercise, how do nonprofits get foundation grants? Here’s the really bad news: through hard work. The task starts with deciding what you’re trying to fund. In the foundation world, there are essentially the following four funding types:

• Start-Up Grant: This one is for new organizations. The challenge is that you have to convince the foundation that your organization can actually do something, because presumably nothing has yet been done so far other than to identify a problem. But all organizations have to start somewhere, so if you need start-up funds, go for it.
• Capital Grant: Favored by Boys & Girls Clubs, religious organizations, etc., this means you want to build a building, buy a van fleet or the like. Lots of foundations love capital grants because they can put their name on the project, and they’re easy to evaluate. Either the building is built or it isn’t. In the case of the largest foundation in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they decided to give themselves an enormous capital grant to build a 12-acre “campus”—or maybe Taj Mahal is more appropriate—in downtown Seattle. Personally, I think it would be better if they simply bought a couple of the hundreds of vacant and abandoned office buildings in Detroit or Flint, but where’s the fun in that?
• Operating Funds: This means you’re seeking funds for everything done by the nonprofit—the organization is already doing lots of great things but needs more money to do them. From the foundation’s perspective, this is a bit like feeding a stray cat, as they know you will be back for more. But many foundations like operations projects because they recognize that established organizations have to have enough money to keep the lights on.
• Special Project/Program Development: Let’s say your organization provides supportive services to Cyclopes. A special project could be to conduct outreach to work with left-handed Cyclopes. Foundations often like funding the development of special projects, particularly if you can link the project to some emerging crisis. If you were going to fund Project NUTRIA, as we described it in an earlier post, you would pitch it as a special project.

Keep in mind that not every foundation will fund all of these four project types—a foundation that funds capital grants may love your charitable purpose but not be interested in supporting operations. While we think it is best to settle on a project type before doing research to find funders, it can be done the other way around by finding the funders first and bending your concept to meet the type of projects they will fund.

Once you’ve crystallized your concept, it’s time to do the research into what foundations might fund you. More or less, foundations use the following filters—the details of which are usually specified somewhere in their guidelines—to funnel applications:

• Geography: While some foundations fund nationally, most foundations fund in a specific place or region (e.g., Owatonna, MN, Southern California, etc.), or my personal favorite, “areas of company operations.” Let’s see, where does Wal-Mart not operate? Chicago, Boston, and one or two other places. Keep in mind that a foundation that funds in Poughkeepsie is unlikely to fund a project in Ashtabula, no matter how much they care about your cause.
• Charitable Purpose: Some foundations want to help at-risk youth, some are interested in health issues and a very few just want to do something good, whatever that means. It is critical that you find funders who care about what you care about. True Believers often stumble on this filter because they cannot believe that anybody fails to share their passion. Also, try to avoid embarrassing mistakes: if your organization approaches at-risk youth services from an evangelical Christian perspective, a foundation that talks about Jewish philanthropic giving on their website is not likely to fund you, so save the postage.
• How The Grant Will be Used: See the project concept discussion above. If you’ve managed to find a foundation that wants to fund Cyclops services in Owatonna and you want to build transitional housing for homeless Cyclops, make sure the foundation will fund a capital campaign before you send in the proposal.

Now, it’s time for letting you in on the really big foundation grant writing secret, or as is said in the TV biz The Reveal: How to organize an initial foundation proposal. Unless directed otherwise by the guidelines, we format them as five-page, single spaced letters. Why five pages? Because foundations almost never want a longer proposal and often want a one to three page letter of inquiry. We call the initial submission narratives “foundation letter proposals” and here’s how to organize them:

• Date, address block and salutation.
• Introduction paragraph, that includes the ever popular “five w’s and the h.”
• Goal and objectives. See this post for help in writing these: The Goal of Writing Objectives is to Achieve Positive Outcomes (Say What?).
• Background on the problem or a needs assessment. Don’t use too many citations, since, unlike government proposals, in foundation proposals you’re aiming for the heart, not the head.
• Program description. Make this count, because this is where you tell the funder what you plan to do and how the money will be spent.
• Timeline. We usually do these as a simple double column table.
• Evaluation plan (a paragraph will do).
• Staffing plan and budget request. A few sentences, along with a simple attached line item budget/budget justification in Excel will get the job done.
• Background on the organization. Who are you, and why are you qualified?
• Acknowledgment. A short paragraph on how you will acknowledge the grant: press releases, name on the building, larger than life statues of Bill and Melinda astride white chargers in front of the building, etc.
• Summary paragraph.

I know this is pretty much the same as learning how to write a five-paragraph theme, as Miss Cruikshank taught me in eighth grade English at Sandburg Junior High, now Middle School when dinosaurs walked the earth, but writing foundation proposals is really not that complicated—like golf, all you have to do is hit that little ball 400 yards into the tin cup 18 times in less than five strokes a hole. No problem. Of course, it helps to be Tiger Woods, and in writing foundation proposals, it’s a lot easier to simply hire Seliger + Associates. But now you know the secrets, so get busy and write.

* This is a steal from the lyrics of charming, but somewhat forgotten Beatles tune, Do You Want To Know a Secret that I liked about the time I was in Miss Cruikshank’s class.

** This reference is designed to poke fun at Jake, who carries his Tom Bihn Messenger Bag everywhere, stuffed with a laptop, books, tupperware containers with fried tofu remains and assorted other items he can’t be without. While I am way too old for a manpurse, Jake did get me to buy this Tom Bihn Laptop Bag in a particularly annoying shade of avocado green.