Whitepaper - Grants for Education Funding

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White Paper

Technology-Friendly Grant Seeking

Introduction: Fundable Technology-Rich Projects

From the simple wheel to the super computer, technological advancement has enriched our lives, enhanced our

abilities, and transformed our work. In fact, for most of us, electronic technology is as integral a part of our day-to-

day work as a trowel is to a bricklayer, and the trend is toward even further expanded use of technology in the

coming years.

The motivation to leverage technology to drive results even further is evident in state and local government

agencies, schools, higher educational institutions, and healthcare organizations. As a result, most grant applications

include at least some technology, and many of them rely heavily on technology of one type or another. Of course,

technology- based projects are not that different from other grant-funded projects, with one important exception.

Whereas projects to develop American history curricula or establish scenic hiking trails along waterways either

have a grant program that is geared toward that activity or they don’t, technology provides a platform that is so

flexible that it can adapt to fit the context of an incredibly wide variety of grant programs.

Video conferencing technology is being used to teach Arabic, to provide cardiac care in rural health clinics, and to

prepare unemployed men and women to find jobs. IP-based communications are enabling schools to track student

progress in real time and allowing first responders to redefine their emergency communications from a single radio

channel to a dynamic interoperable platform that can accommodate a range of new devices from anywhere with a

few keystrokes.

And even though they may not fully understand the technical nuts and bolts, grantmakers also recognize the

promise of technology and fund projects that use technology to achieve results in student achievement, patient

outcomes, improved law enforcement, and a host of other areas in communities across the country and around the

world. Ultimately, grantmakers are looking to fund these outcomes, and they also see technology as an effective

means to achieve those ends.

There are many reasons why an organization would want to implement a technology-rich project, just as there are

many approaches to how to fund it. Grants development involves three major components: developing a project,

identifying funding prospects, and applying for funding. These happen in a different order depending on the

circumstances of the project and whether the impetus for the project is an identified need in the community

(therefore identifying funders first), an internal desire to improve operations within the organization (therefore


developing the project first), or the appeal of a specific funding opportunity (therefore starting the application

first).

Because of this variation, we could discuss each of these activities in any order at all. We happen to begin with the

development of the project, moving to identifying appropriate funding prospects, and lastly to developing

competitive proposals to those prospects. You might notice that scattered throughout this consciously ordered

process, though, are reminders that for any given grant seeking enterprise, you might find it more expedient to

begin with what in this layout is actually step two or three. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact some of the most

successful grants start with the application because they are able to precisely align their projects with the priorities

of the funder.

What follows here is an approach to maximizing grant funding for technology-rich projects that I have refined over

the past 20 years as a grants professional, working with every conceivable type of applicant on a wide range of

projects, some of which needed tens of millions of dollars to get started and others that needed only a few

thousand.

The size of the project is actually less important that the case that you are able to make to the right funder in soliciting

support for your project. That starts with knowing what your project is - and what it isn’t.

What Your Technology Project Isn’t

Especially when projects are developed with intensive support from the technology office, grantseekers have a

tendency to see their technology-rich projects as all about the tech. They draw out elaborate architectural schemas

and network diagrams, discuss the pros and cons of fiber vs. Ethernet, and lay out each step toward

implementation on a GANTT chart. They treat it as an engineering problem, which, of course, it is. Failure to plan

the entire project to the last node would lead to cost overruns and delays at best, and may jeopardize the

functionality of the entire project.

These steps are important, but they are not that important to a grantmaker.

How Grantmakers View Technology

To a grantmaker, a technology-based project is actually just another project that proposes to address a particular

need or objective within your organization or community. Grantmakers see the technology you’ve chosen as the

means by which you will accomplish that, rather than as an end in itself. They’re most interested in:

● What change you are trying to achieve

● Why the change is needed

● How the technology-based project you are proposing will be implemented in such as way as to achieve that

change

This is an important distinction, because if you get too caught up in discussing the technical details of your project in

your grant application, the reviewer is likely to glaze over and then reject your proposal.

Instead, start by conceptualizing the project from the point of view of a funder. You say you need new IP phones?

First ask what is prompting you to get new phones. What is it that you hope the new phones will do that your

current phones won’t? Are there any features that the new phones will have that you could leverage for some

grant-fundable purpose like improved record keeping or emergency response?

In the eyes of funders, your technology project isn’t just a technology project. If you look carefully, you may begin to

see all the clamoring for new technology as a powerful indicator of an unmet (if not specifically documented) need

in your organization and a solution to meet that need.


From that point of view, the technology you want to find funding for is as good a place as any to start in defining

your project, although it probably won’t be where you finish. Most grant applications involve lengthy project

narratives, so plan to spend some time with demographic data, research and demonstration program findings, and

your own collected insights in order to get to the level of detail you’ll need to turn your project idea into a

competitive grant proposal.

Part 1: Develop the Project

Start With What You Want

Most grant applications will ask you to start your project description with the need your project will address, but in

the real world, project ideas don’t always come out of an identified data-supported need or a carefully crafted,

consensus-derived organizational objective. They may also come from the management team, board members,

organizational stakeholders, cases studies, conference presentations, and salespeople. Not uncommonly, your project

might even have been inspired in response to a published grant opportunity - a phenomenon known in grant circles

by its technical term, following the money.

However your project was conceived, the approach for defining a project that I am discussing here assumes that

you are starting with a general idea of what you want to do and ostensibly that it involves some amount of

technology. That’s really all you need to know to get started.

You don’t even need to know specifically what technology you want. For example, you may be looking to use a

video conferencing application to extend the reach of your network administration course to multiple schools in the

area, but you may not yet have decided whether to go for an all-out, high-definition telepresence system, a video

conferencing service like Cisco WebEx, or an online learning platform. That’s Ok. You’ve got a starting point. Just

be prepared to stay flexible throughout the process of developing your idea.

Define the Need

Once you know what you want to do, think about what that will accomplish and for whom. As with the project

concept, the intellectual basis of your project, generally defined in grantseeking circles as the need the project will

fulfill, may arise from anywhere on the continuum from an anecdotal observation of one person to the published

findings of an official report, study, or assessment.

A well-defined needs statement includes an assertion of the need and data that substantiate the assertion. Data is

most important at this stage in developing your project. A needs statement that is rich in numbers helps to make your

project more compelling in the eyes of the funder, but the metrics that you use to define the need for your project will

ultimately influence every aspect of your proposal, from the goals and objectives all the way to the project activities

and tasks. As we’ll see later on, the need you articulate provides both a foundation and a framework for the rest of

your project. Because of its importance to the rest of your project plan, it’s worth spending the time to really make

your needs statements impactful, meaningful, and authoritative.

Incidentally, for those grant programs in which proposals are scored by reviewers and funding decisions made

based on those scores, grantmakers reveal their funding priorities through their scoring frameworks. It’s worth

noting here that the need for the project is almost always the highest weighted review criterion for any grant

program. Funders want to direct their resources to the projects that have a demonstrated need. Moreover, they want

to fund projects that clearly focus on the specific need that they, through their grantmaking initiative, are trying to

effect.


Your project plan will likely include several needs statements. They need not be long-winded. In fact, the best needs

statements are clear, concise assertions that are backed up by data from verifiable sources, often requiring only a

sentence or two each.

Each needs statement should extend beyond who will benefit (whose need is being addressed), to also include

what their specific need is and how you know they have this need.

Table 1. Needs Statements

Needs statements fall into three broad categories: societal, community, and personal. It’s a good idea to try to

develop at least one needs statement for each, thinking as you go through the process not only about establishing

the need for your project but also about telling a compelling story with your assertions and supporting data.

Tip: Of course, you can order these needs statements in any way that you feel makes the most sense, but I’ve

found that starting with the societal needs statement, moving through the community needs, and finally focusing on

the specific population you’re planning to serve provides a nice flow and structure to the narrative. It also helps the

reviewer better understand why it makes sense to support population that you have chosen to serve with your

project.

Societal Needs Statement

For a societal needs statement, consider the broader societal context in which members of your target population

find themselves. The societal needs statement should provide reviewers with a high-level understanding of the

factors that are driving your project and demonstrate how the project embraces national and global trends, working

toward outcomes that are going to have relevance into the future. Because this tends to be focused on the macro

level, the data you use to substantiate the need is most likely to come from an official source and be fairly general.

The societal needs statement does not tell the whole story. It just sets the stage. Here are a couple of examples of

societal needs statements:

● For an electronic health records project for a regional group of rural hospitals

The technology to comprehensively and securely collect, maintain, and transfer health information through

electronic health records (EHRs) has grown dramatically in recent years, but adoption at rural hospitals has

been slower than in the broader healthcare landscape. A recent analysis by the Department of Health and

Human Services found that while overall hospital adoption of basic EHR systems has more than doubled


from 13 percent in 2008 to 35 percent in 2011, EHR adoption in rural hospitals grew from 8 percent to 27

percent during that same period.1

● For a school-based distance learning project for teaching network administration

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts, computer and information technology occupations are

projected to grow by 22 percent, adding 758,800 new jobs from 2010 to 2020. Demand for workers in these

occupations will be driven by the continuing need for businesses, government agencies, and other

organizations to adopt and utilize the latest technologies. Workers in these occupations will be needed to

develop software, increase cybersecurity, and update existing network infrastructure.2

● Direct from the grant guidance

In many cases, you can find a starting point for the societal needs statements right in the introduction of the

official grant guidance document provided by the funder. Here’s one example in the introduction to the

Department of Labor ’s Training to Work-Adult Reentry Program:

◦ The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) has invested in five generations of Adult

Reintegration of Ex-Offenders (RExO) programs, which historically have been employment-centered

with a “Work First” component. However, lessons learned from these demonstration projects and input

from our stakeholders (employers and state and local government agencies participating in the Secretary

of Labor ’s Employment Reentry Summit held in July 2012) indicate that ex-offenders have a better chance

of attaining employment and achieving a higher degree of career growth if they acquire industry-

recognized credentials. Additionally, we have learned that reentry is more successful when supportive

services are begun prior to release. Work release programs allow an offender to work at paid employment

or participate in a training program in the community on a voluntary basis while continuing as an

inmate of the institution or facility to which he/she is committed. The purpose of these grants is to foster

pre-release services and the attainment of industry-recognized credentials to improve the long-term

workforce outcomes for previously incarcerated individuals.3

A version of this needs statement, adapted to reflect your own voice and ultimately your project, would

obviously resonate with the funder as well.

Community Needs Statement

The community needs statement brings the focus to the the level of your local area. It also provides an opportunity for

you to look around at the area and consider what entities outside your target audience will be affected by your

project.

As you get more local, of course, the available data to support your needs statements can become thinner. There

aren’t many national studies, for example that would establish a community need for more trained healthcare

workers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But locally established needs are going to be more relevant to your project, so

it’s worth digging for. Census data on population changes in the area, for example, or state and regional economic

development plans can provide plenty of support for your community needs statement, and most of these are also

online.

Here is one example of a community needs statement:

1 Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Electronic Health Record Adoption and Utilization, 2012

Highlights and Accomplishments, http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/ highlights_accomplishments_ehr_adoptionsummer2012_2.pdf, p. 4 2 Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/About/Projections- Overview.htm

3 US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Notice of Availability of Funds and Solicitation for Grant

Applications for Training to Work-Adult Reentry, http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/ SGA_DFA_PY_12_06.pdf, p.1

http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/About/Projections-

http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/


● For a healthcare worker training program

The national shortage in skilled healthcare workers has hit Alaska particularly hard. According to the 2009

Alaska Health Workforce Vacancy Study, conducted by the Alaska Center for Rural Health, Alaska ranked 40th

among the 50 states in the ratio of physicians to population, 50th for licensed practical nurses, 49th for

pharmacists, and 50th for pharmacy assistants.4 Moreover, a 2000 study by the Health Resources and

Services Administration's National Center for Health Workforce Analysis projected a shortage of over 58

percent for registered nurses in Alaska by 2020.5

Similar to a societal needs statement, the community needs statement situates the need closer to where your

project will be implemented.

Personal Needs Statement

A personal needs statement is focused on the target audience you are planning to serve through your project.

Depending on the nature of your project, that might mean students, patients, teachers, providers, firefighters,

paramedics, or a host of other potential beneficiaries of your initiative.

This is generally the easiest group to identify, since your project will ostensibly revolve around them. Supporting

data at this level is also frequently provided by the organization or another local source, though other data may be

combined with local analysis to create a combined needs statement, as in the example below.

Here are two examples of personal needs statements:

● For a technology-based instruction system

In 2011, nearly 60 percent of students in Allendale County Schools tested below state standards for reading,

making it the lowest performing district in the state, and close to double the 32 percent average for South

Carolina. Recent efforts to reduce teacher turnover and reduce class size have not improved these results in

the past two years, and student placement decisions are largely unsupported by data.

● For enhanced advanced life support dispatch

According to the Census Bureau, in the past two years alone, Wake County’s population has grown by nearly

6 percent.6 This rapid growth has resulted in a predictable increase in emergency response calls, which were

up 9,000 in the past year. In turn, this increase in call volume has put tremendous pressure on emergency

dispatch services to respond to life threatening emergencies, reducing average advanced life support

response time from the state standard of 8 minutes in 2008 to nearly 12 minutes in 2012.

Note that the unattributed numbers above would be generated by the organization and are fabricated for

illustrative purposes only.

Personal needs statements don’t describe internal budget shortfalls, nor do they leave room for internal politics. As

much as these institutional issues may actually be to blame for a lack of budget for your project, they are unlikely

to sway the reviewers of your grant proposal. This is in part because the supplement not supplant provision we will

discuss later would not allow you to use the funds for budget relief anyway. Instead, try to keep your needs

statements focused on the issues the funder is looking to address.

4 Alaska Center for Rural Health, 2009 Alaska health Workforce Vacancy Study, http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/ acrh-

ahec/projects/upload/2009workforce09.pdf , p. 2-3 5 Health resources and Services Administration, Bureau of Health Professions, Projected Supply, Demand, and Shortages of

Registered Nurses: 2000-2020, http://www.ahcancal.org/research_data/staffing/ Documents/Registered_Nurse_Supply_Demand.pdf , p.18 6 US Census Bureau, State & County QuickFacts, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/37/37183.html

http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/

http://www.ahcancal.org/research_data/staffing/

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/37/37183.html


Common Sources of Data for Needs Statements

Below are some of the most common sources of support for needs statements. Depending on the type of project you

are proposing, others may make sense as well, but these should provide a good starting point.

Survey results

Third party surveys are generally more highly regarded than internal surveys, because they are assumed (rightly or

wrongly) to have been conducted with a certain amount of scientific rigor. Nevertheless, survey results your have

on hand or can obtain from a reputable resource in your community will provide at least some objective evidence to

support your needs statement.

Tip: If you don’t have any data on hand, a survey is an easy way to get some quickly. Survey sites like

surveymonkey.com are often free and provide all the technology you need to whip up a survey, get responses, and

tabulate results in a day or two. It may not have the weight of a systematic, third party survey, but it will support

your needs statement better than anecdotes. Also, you’ll be able to tailor the survey to ascertain exactly the

information you need. If you’re going to do a survey, though, just be sure before you blast it out that you’ve thought

through all the questions you need answered for your project. You probably won’t get nearly as many willing

respondents to a second survey.

Official data sites

Data from official sites like the US Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and state agencies are easily verifiable

by the reviewer of your proposal. Therefore they tend to be more authoritative than unofficial estimates.

The federal government keeps a list of its “Data and Statistics” pages at the USA.gov portal, and you can even chat

or e-mail with a government information librarian for free.7 If you haven’t looked for statistical data in a while, you

might be pleasantly surprised at how far the country has come in providing this information electronically, as long

as you’re prepared to spend a little time digging.

Studies

Think tanks and national associations based in Washington DC and elsewhere are constantly producing studies and

reports. Reviewers tend to be less skeptical of these national studies than of, say, newspaper articles, partly because

most of the national organizations that produce them have their own internal controls for ensuring at least some

level of analytical rigor, and partly because reviewers can’t possibly verify every piece of data in every proposal

they review.

Community economic development plans are also often good starting points, particularly for community needs

statements, because while they have the air of authority, they also reflect the input of local government, businesses,

and community-based organizations. They include lots of local data, and they draw conclusions based on that data.

Statutes and Regulations

In some cases, new regulations can provide the basis for a needs statement. Failing to meet standards that have been

set by another body can also sometimes rise to the level of a fundable need as well. Take care when addressing

unfunded mandates and operational regulations though, as funders generally consider these the responsibility of the

organization and subject to the supplement not supplant guideline.

You don’t want to appear too disorganized or noncompliant in your ordinary operations either. In addition to

assessing your need for the funding, the reviewer of your grant proposal will also evaluate the likelihood that you

will be able to successfully administer the project if you are eventually funded. That requires a display of

organizational acumen at the same time you are describing an organizational need.

7 The reference page can be found at: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference-Shelf/Data.shtml

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference-Shelf/Data.shtml


Assessments

Most organizations are assessed from time to time by accreditation bodies, auditors, federal and state agencies, and

even themselves. If you decide to reference them, these documents provide three important features for your needs

statement. They have some official weight, and they also provide objective comparative data that establishes a

need. Moreover, by using an existing assessment as the basis for your needs statement, you’ve established a more

effective means of evaluating the future changes and improvements the project has yielded.

On a cautionary note, as long as the information in these assessments is available for public inspection, feel free to

include them as supporting documentation for your project needs statements. However, if you wouldn’t want to, or

legally couldn’t, share the source document with the funder in the unlikely event that they ask for it, you might

want to also leave it out of your proposal.

Speeches and articles

More anecdotal sources of data, such as public speeches by officials describing a need for a particular improvement

or newspaper exposés showing some deficiency should be a last resort, as they tend to resonate least with

reviewers. In some cases, though, particularly as you get more local with your needs statements, you may not be

able to find any other data to support your assertions. These types of references can also be a great starting point for

locating other, more official sources of data.

The Progressive Nature of Project Development

As you are hopefully beginning to see, the process of developing your project’s needs statements also provides an

opportunity to reflect on, expand, and further define the project as a whole. Every project develops during the

process of preparing a grant proposal to support it, and even though those stacks of finished proposals on a grant

manger ’s desk may look encyclopedic and intimidating, they almost certainly didn’t start out that way.

Just as you needn’t feel sheepish about not having started your project with a meeting of all the relevant

stakeholders to address a set of already defined societal, community, and personal needs, you should know that

every grant proposal that is started from scratch (not copied from another grant proposal) is a tapestry of ideas,

documentation, and conjecture that has been woven together over the course of its writing to look like a coherent,

well-reasoned, and intentional plan. If it isn’t, it was probably created out of whole cloth by the grantwriter.

Grant proposal development is a collaborative and an iterative process, meaning that not only will the proposal be

growing in length and in the number of participants as you develop it, changes that any of the stakeholders in

process make will cascade through the proposal. In some cases, these changes are small and may only affect a few

areas of the proposal. In others, they may completely refocus the project, like adding grades 9-12 to what was

shaping up to be a middle school technology project for example, and require you to reexamine the entire proposal.

It happens more often than not, despite everyone’s best efforts.

Set Performance Objectives

It would be an understatement to say that most grantmakers are focused on performance objectives. They’re

obsessed with them at every level of grantmaking, from the tiny foundation that gives away $10,000 a year to the

largest federal funding programs. They love objectives.

This is partly due to the fact that grantmakers are a kind of silent partner with their awardees in creating change of

one kind or another. They invest their money in the project you have proposed, and they hope their investment

pays off. Much like a traditional investor, they’re also going to be displeased if it doesn’t.

In reality, though, grantmakers don’t have a lot of control over how their money is spent once they’ve transferred it

to the recipient. They may set up progress payments and reporting schedules, to give them some visibility into how


funds are being used, but they don’t typically micromanage their grantseekers. If a grantee fails to get the results

they’ve promised, the grantmaker ’s recourse is to refuse their requests in the future.

Grantmakers then are left to monitor their investments as best they can, and the way they do that is with

performance objectives.

The performance objectives you create for your project, then, will serve two purposes. They will enable the

reviewers of your proposal to better understand the change you are seeking to create through your project. And

they establish the metrics the grantmaker can expect to use to monitor the progress and impact of the project after

it’s funded.

If you’ve done a through job developing your needs statements, the work of creating performance objectives is

already half done. Begin by reexamining the needs you identified in your needs statements and try to determine

which ones are readily measurable. Unless you’re planning to hire an outside evaluator to monitor your

performance, you’ll want to make sure that you are either able to leverage an existing data collection structure (such

as student reading scores or emergency department admissions) or easily create a new one using the technology

you’re proposing to acquire (such as response times calculated by your new dispatch console). Consistent needs and

objectives also keep the reviewer from getting confused about what you’re trying to accomplish with your project.

Tip: An outside evaluator can be a tremendous asset, especially for large projects that require a lot of data

collection. Also, funders are so enamored with the data professional evaluators provide that they will often allow

you to use grant funds to pay for the evaluator. If you’re planning to use outside evaluators, bring them in early so

they can help you define your performance objectives and evaluation strategy up front. If the evaluator helped set

up the process, (s)he should have no problem rolling it out once the funding comes through.

One important, and often overlooked, step in developing performance objectives is to establish a clear connection

between the performance objective and the activities that will ostensibly influence it. In grants parlance, you need to

make sure your objectives are evidence-based, meaning that you have some reason for believing that what you are

proposing to do will move the needle on the data you are measuring.

Objectives are often described as short-term or long-term, although those terms are used rather loosely and may be

defined differently by different funders. More importantly, your objectives should be easy to understand and easy

to follow up on. Here’s an example of measurable outcomes from an electronic health records project courtesy of the

Department of Health and Human Services8:

● Dr. Jennifer Brull of Kansas realized the benefits of using her EHR system when she proactively identified

patients in need of colon cancer screenings. She increased her screening rate from 37% to 81%. While she

considered that impressive, she found the real benefit of EHRs came to light when she was able to detect

colon cancer early in three patients. The detection was so early the patients did not require chemotherapy or

radiation. For them, it made a huge difference between early colon cancer detection and invasive colon

cancer.

This example includes both long-term and short-term metrics that probably made for some nice, clear objectives in

Dr. Brull’s plan. If you were going to apply for a grant for an EHR system for your physician’s office, and you

wanted to follow Dr. Brull’s lead, you might write the objectives as follows:

8 Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Electronic Health Record Adoption and Utilization, 2012

Highlights and Accomplishments, http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/ highlights_accomplishments_ehr_adoptionsummer2012_2.pdf, p. 2

http://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/


Table 2. Objectives

Objective Measure

Increase number of patients identified as in need of colon cancer screenings

Number of patients identified

Increase colon cancer screening rate Number of screenings divided by number of patients, expressed as a percentage

Detect colon cancer at earlier stage Average stage at first detection of colon cancer

Reduce rate of colon cancer patients requiring chemotherapy or radiation

Number of diagnosed patients requiring chemotherapy or radiation divided by the number of diagnosed patients, expressed as a percentage

Objectives are ultimately an assessment of change over time. As such, the change you are effecting with your project

will be revealed as you track and report on the objectives during the course of administering your grant.

Grant programs themselves also sometimes provide objectives in the guidance document, so be sure to assimilate

those into your project objectives as well. If they’re too far afield from the objectives you had intended for your

project, either call the funder and talk it over with them or re-examine your project in the context of the funder ’s

requirements and try to close the gap.

If you have specific targets you feel you can meet, or if the funder requires specific targets, you can include those

targets (usually broken out into time frames) with your objectives. If not, it’s usually best to leave out any

unsubstantiated speculation about what numbers you expect to achieve. Particularly with longer-term outcomes,

these can be difficult to predict and difficult to reach if anything comes along to disrupt or delay your plan.

Create a Work Plan

The real character of your grant-funded initiative will be found in the nuts and bolts of what you will do to roll out

the project. There are a lot of similarities among grant projects. They have a defined time frame, usually one to five

years, and a defined budget. They address an identified need and have clear objectives. And they are predominantly

carried out using someone else’s money.

But the greatest variation from grant-funded project to grant-funded project is in their implementation plans. It is in

these plans that all the variables, such as project location, collaborating organizations, innovative approaches, and

the capabilities of the technologies they’ve chosen, are manifested to produce a work plan that is as unique as

George Washington’s thumbprint.

Table 3. Work Plan


Start with a list of all the high level things that need to be accomplished during the course of your project, such as

announcing the project to the community, installing the technology, training users, and developing content. Each of

these can then be expanded into many specific tasks associated with each activity.

Realizing that as you develop your project, you’ll probably be adding frequently to the list of tasks you’ve created

and that at some point those tasks will need to be ordered chronologically, it’s a good idea to move the work plan

into a spreadsheet at this point. Be sure to include columns for the activity the task is associated with, the task, the

person or group responsible for the task, and when the task will need to be completed.

Of course, no one knows exactly when a grant-funded project will start. Fortunately, most spreadsheet programs

can work with dates. So, if you start with any random date, then add days from the start date for each task you add,

you can not only make changes easily as the project plan develops, but you’ll be able to use the spreadsheet to

manage the project once it’s funded just by changing the start date.

Some grantmakers may also ask you to associate each task in your work plan with the performance objective it

supports, and that can be challenging since many of your activities will support more than one related objective. In

these cases, go back to the list of high level activities that you developed before you refined them into specific

tasks. It may be easier to see how these activities support a particular objective. Then, by extension, each task

would also support that objective. Alternatively, you may either list all the objectives the activity supports (if that’s

allowed) or just choose the one that fits best, making sure at least all your objectives are represented.

You can derive the narrative components of your work plan largely from your task list, and working from a (more

or less) complete task list will require you to do a lot less guesswork in writing your narrative. However, as with

any writing project, articulating your narrative work plan will require some dedication of time, determined by the

narrative requirements of the grant you’re applying for.

As you get close to submitting your proposal, you can move the spreadsheet back to the word processing application

you’re using and integrate it as needed into your proposal documents.

Engage Collaborators

Often it makes sense to involve other organizations in order to optimize the impact of your project. In fact, many

initiatives, like distance learning, telehealth, regional information sharing, and interoperable communications

projects are collaborative by their very nature. Beyond these, technology-rich projects in general also lend

themselves to cooperative activities.

A number of grant programs require coordination with one or more partners as a basic criterion for applying, and

even more programs give preferential treatment, in the form of bonus points, to proposals that demonstrate some

form of collaboration.

For whichever reason you have chosen to reach beyond the walls of your own institution, the dance of collaboration

can be a delicate one. At the end of the process, you should expect to have a concrete, written agreement that

everyone signs off on, but getting there can be thorny.

For one thing, especially if you’re working with senior executives from the various participating agencies, you will

be dealing with egos and competing organizational interests. These can be difficult to separate and lead to

continuous jockeying as representatives work to get the most cash and credit for themselves and their organizations.

Furthermore, you will be confronted with different organizational cultures. The nonprofits are typically willing to

make do with whatever they can get, while universities are accustomed to adding 60 percent to every grant

request for overhead. Their relative frugality isn’t the only difference. They make organizational decisions

differently and they may have multiple layers of bureaucracy that impede their ability to commit to a feature of the


collaboration without first going through channels. That would be fine if you didn’t also have the time pressure of

a grant deadline bearing down on the whole enterprise.

That leads to the first rule of building collaboratives: start early, but not too early. If you don’t start early enough,

you may find yourself sitting in your office at ten minutes to five on the deadline day, waiting for the last, and

typically most important, signed memorandum of understanding from the big partner that’s going to make your

proposal work, passing the time neurotically hitting send/receive on your e-mail like a lab rat trying to get a pellet of

food in a social science experiment. Yes, grant deadlines can drive you to that.

But you also don’t want to bring these folks in too early either, because the whole process will run a lot more

smoothly if you can clearly communicate the needs and objectives of your project to potential collaborators up

front. The momentum and written work you bring to the first meeting of collaborators sets the stage to allow you

to work out the finer details of the arrangement, rather than spending endless hours listening to everyone share

ideas for the project that they just made up on the spot. Some of that, of course, is essential to any collaborative

effort, but too much of it can derail the work you need the group to conclude in order to get it into your proposal.

This process of building a collaborative is most likely also going to overlap with the development of your grant

proposal. The same holds true there. It’s easier for everyone to build on an existing foundation than to start from

scratch, but starting the conversation with a completely developed project may leave your partners feeling

disconnected and noncommittal.

The agreement of all the participants in the project should eventually result in a written commitment that you can

include (if the proposal parameters allow for it) or reference in your grant application. This commitment generally

comes in two flavors: a collective agreement or an individual letter of commitment.

The collective agreement, which depending on your type of organization and the requirements of the grant may be

loose (such as a memorandum of understanding) or strict (such a mutual aid agreement), should include:

● Name and brief description of the project

● Names of each organization involved

● What each organization is committing to provide (resources) and do (activities) for the project

● How the participant’s participation in the project will be governed and managed

● Project’s time frame

● Signatures, names, and titles of all the signatories

Individual letters of commitment can be more customized and based on the level of engagement of each participant.

As a result, they can also be much more detailed. A good letter of commitment should be printed on the partner ’s

letterhead and should include:

● Name of the project

● High-level description of the organization’s role in the project and why it makes sense for them to

participate

● Detailed list of resources their organization will provide and activities they will undertake as part of their role

the project, including specific tasks and time frames

● Signature, name, and title of the sender

Tip: Letters of commitment are sometimes called “letters of support” or “support letters,” but that term can be

misleading. Support letters are generally easy to obtain and, while they may express endorsement of a project,

they often don’t articulate the role the writer is taking on in the project nor do they provide a firm commitment on the

part of their organization. A weak support letter can actually be interpreted by the grant reviewer as a lack of


commitment on the part of the sender and hurt your proposal. I prefer the term “letter of commitment,” because it

appraises everyone (including the writer) that they are going to be expected to perform some role as a member of

the collaborative. You may, however, see the term used interchangeable in grant documentation.

Getting letters of commitment from each participant also allows you to evaluate that participant's contribution to the

project. The combined tasks from each letter of commitment, along with your own organization’s tasks should

exactly match the tasks you have articulated in your proposal, and if any potential senders don’t have any tasks to

include in their letters, you might want to take a hard look at whether their participation really is essential to the

project.

Develop a Budget

Grant proposal budgets vary widely depending on the funder’s requirements, length of the project, and the number

of different costs that the budget will include. Nevertheless, there are a few steps that are common to developing a

budget for any grant program and that can help you structure your budget to make it suitable for inclusion in a grant

application.

First, take a look at your project and what you will need to implement it. Your work plan can provide a foundation

for your budget, although as you develop your budget, you may find that, as with the other components of your

proposal, the budget is both derived from your project narrative and can necessitate adjustments to your work plan

as well. Say for example you’re planning to develop a wireless network to provide educational and employment

opportunities in a low-income neighborhood in your community. You’ve identified and supported the need for the

project and developed the objectives and activities you need to make it happen. But when you start developing the

budget, you realize that you’re planning to implement all this technology without having planned for a service

contract. Not only do you need to add the service contract to your budget, but you’ll need to go back into the work

plan to include sourcing a service plan for your equipment and assign someone the task of scheduling regular

service intervals.

Things like these can be of little interest or importance when you’re developing an entire new project and writing a

lengthy grant proposal, but if the project is funded, you’ll need a service contract and your budget will already be

fixed. I can’t think of one funder that will allow you to increase your award because you forgot to add an important

component. The best you can hope for at that point will be some flexibility to move money around within the

budget, but that takes resources away from other areas of your project. It’s not a good solution. The best approach

is to account for it in your proposal. Then, even if the funder gives you a reduced award and you’re scrambling to

make cuts to the budget to meet their number and eventually cut the service contract budget, you and everyone

else in your project will know that that amount needs to be made up somewhere.

Next, do your best to estimate accurate costs. Some grantwriters like to inflate numbers to give themselves a

cushion to move around elsewhere in the budget later, but more often than not, the reviewer will see this as a

bloated proposal that is not cost-effective and the applicants won’t have to worry about whether their budget was

big enough (because their proposal will have been rejected).

Accurate budgeting is more art than science, but you should try to have some basis for as many of the budget

items as you can. Estimates from vendors, staff salary and benefit costs from your finance office, and even catalog

price lists can help you ensure that most of your numbers are realistic. Then, if you have to estimate the cost of

office supplies and postage, at least you’ll know that the rest of the numbers are solid.

Even if it’s not specifically required for your grant application, break down the budget items as small as you can.

You can always aggregate numbers, but the components of large budget numbers can be difficult to remember

between the time you apply for a grant and the time you receive an award. Smaller budget items will also come in

handy if the funder comes back with a smaller award offer and you have to make cuts to your original budget.


Lastly, funders also often publish limits on the amount you can receive from a grant. The award ceiling and award

floor are always concrete, so don’t even try to exceed them. How close you can make your request to the award

ceiling, on the other hand, is a bit of an art. Too large of a request risks a rejection, but too small of a request for a

compelling project risks leaving money on the table.

The official answer to that conundrum is to request the amount of funding that is necessary for the project you are

proposing, but if that answer seems unsatisfying and unhelpful to you, I agree. The best way to find out how much

a grant program is likely to award a single project is to look at past awards. Most funders publish lists of awardees

and award amounts, which you can then use to establish a practical award ceiling. If New York City was the only

grant recipient to get a maximum award, and if you’re not New York City, you might want to temper your request to

place it more in the range of projects like yours that have been funded.

Foundations may also include award information on their websites or in their 990-PF tax forms, which you can

obtain from a number of sources, including the foundations themselves. If the program is new or there is no award

information available, feel free to request any amount up to and including the award ceiling. Just make sure your

costs are reasonable in comparison to what you’re proposing to do.

Part 2: Identify Funders

Funders don’t always lead with their interest in funding technology, even if they fund a lot of it. This is one of the

things that makes funding technology projects more complex than, say, funding an environmental education

project. Finding a funder to support environmental education would be a simple as typing in a google search for

“environmental education grants.” It would take a fair amount of sifting to review a couple of thousand results, but

at the end of the process, you’d have a good idea of what funders support environmental education. They would

almost certainly use the words environmental and education in the title of the grant.

Try the same search for “video conferencing,” “network attached storage,”or “video security,” and you’ll find the

process a lot more frustrating. That’s because, as we discussed earlier, even though the technology may be the

primary focus of the project and make up 90 percent of the grant budget, most funders see the technology as the

means to achieving their objectives. To them, the project is about providing training to renewable energy installers,

storing images of biodiversity collections, and encouraging safe and healthy school settings, not about a particular

technological solution.

The problem of grants research is not that there are too few grant opportunities. It’s that there are thousands of

foundations and government grant programs making money available and the sheer number of these opportunities

may make it hard to find the best one or two to apply to. Fortunately, you can improve your success dramatically by

defining your project first. The more you know about what you want to do, the easier and more productive your

search for funding prospects will be.

If you started with developing your project, you probably have a pretty good idea of what your project is about and

how the technology you originally wanted to find funding for was just a starting point in developing your project

concept.

If you didn’t start by the developing the project plan, you’ll need to figure out some basic tenets of your project in

order to effectively identify funding prospects. At a minimum you’ll need to know the type of project, the potential

applicant organizations that could apply for funds, and the geographic location of the project.

The Type of Project

Because they can’t possibly fund every type of project, no matter how much they have to distribute, grantmakers

focus their grants on specific areas of interest. Small and medium foundations may focus on broad categories of

giving, such as K-12 education or healthcare. Larger foundations and government grantmakers will usually release


requests for proposals that specify exactly what types of projects they want to fund, such a literacy projects in school

libraries, projects to reduce domestic violence and improve enforcement of protection orders, or projects to repair

and rehabilitate park trails.

A basic project definition should include the target population, what your project does, and what the most relevant

outcome will be. You can also include the technology solution in this description as well, in the event that your

project matches with a technology- focused grant program.

Potential Applicant Organization(s)

Grantmakers also focus their programs by limiting the eligibility of certain types of organizations to apply for and

receive funds from them. That means that there are already some limitations on the grants you can apply for, no

matter what your project promises to do.

However, you can dramatically expand the number of grants your project is eligible to receive funds from by

collaborating with other organizations. For example, say you’re planning a communications interoperability project

for public safety agencies in your county. That type of project might include police departments, fire departments,

EMS agencies, and municipal emergency management officials.

Each of these types of organizations has a pool of grants for which they alone are eligible to apply. If the fire

department were to go it alone, they might apply for an Assistance to Firefighters Grant or a Fire Prevention and

Safety Grant, but they’d be ineligible to apply for a Justice Assistance Grant, even though it would be a logical

funder of the county’s interoperable communications technology project. That’s because Justice Assistance Grants go

to municipal law enforcement, courts and corrections departments, not fire departments.

But with the addition of a police department to the project’s team of potential applicants, the project gains the

potential of funding from the Justice Assistance Grants, Community Oriented Policing Services grants, National

Institute of Justice grants, and any other grants police departments are eligible for.

By adding relevant collaborators to your project, you can expand the funding eligibility of your project before you

start writing grant proposals.

The Location of the Project

Small and medium foundations tend to focus their grantmaking geographically, and many other grant programs

target specific geographical and locational factors as well. Appalachian Regional Commission grants, for example,

only provide funding in the 13 states that meet the definition of being in the Appalachian Region. In another

example, many Department of Agriculture grants are directed at rural projects, and they penalize projects that are

situated too close to an urban area.

Therefore, where your project is going to be located also determines the grantmakers that may support it. In order to

improve the relevancy of your funding search, then, you need to define the geographic parameters of your project

as well.

The Technology Funding Landscape

The funding landscape includes a wide variety of grantmakers and recipient types, supporting projects as varied as

the needs they address. A Department of Defense grant might fund research into new ways to detect a human

heartbeat at 300 yards, while a Ford Foundation grant might expand access to heart surgery in rural Tibet. In reality,

a grant is just a legal mechanism for distributing money, usually for some educational, scientific, or charitable

purpose. By the strictest definition, a grant is just a type of contract. Despite their relatively quotidian function,

grants inspire and effectuate a great deal of energy, creativity, and goodwill, while simultaneously funding a

tremendous amount of technology in the process.


With a few qualifications, grantmakers can be easily divided into federal, state, and foundation funders. Federal and

state agencies are not the only government funders. Local governments and regional authorities do also make

grants, but we will not discuss them here on the basis that they generally only re-grant federal and state funds and

their grantmaking practices tend to be inconsistent from location to location.

Corporations also make grants, but most corporations give their grants through separate corporate foundations,

placing them functionally close enough to other private foundations that we can consider them together in the

broad category of foundations.

Federal Funding

The federal government is by far the largest source of grant funding in the country. It provides approximately $500

billion in grants each year, across 26 grant-making agencies.

Individual federal grants also tend to be large. While an average federal grant may be approximately $250,000 to

$500,000, many programs fund projects in the millions, tens of millions, or in some rare cases over a hundred million

dollars.

Federal grant programs also tend to be proscriptive, meaning that they define for applicants the priorities they are

seeking to address and often set parameters for how applicants should propose to address those priorities. They

can also be highly competitive.

State Funding

No one knows how much total state grant funding is available, because state funding is a mix of re-granted federal

funding and state-initiated programs. Funding that starts at the state level may come from a number of sources,

including the regular state tax rolls, bonds, and special assessments. Like federal grants, state grants are

administered by a range of individual agencies.

State grants are typically smaller than federal grants, with an average range of $60,000 to $100,000, but they may

also be less competitive and more flexible in relation to locally- identified priorities.

Foundations

According to the Foundation Center, a nonprofit organization that collects and disseminates information on

foundations in the US, there are some 81,000 grantmaking foundations in the country, making $49 billion in grants.9

These organizations vary widely in the number and amounts of grants they provide, but the average foundation

provides just over $600,000 per year in grants, most of it going to the local communities in which these foundations

reside.

Even though foundation grants tend to be smaller than government grants, $10,000 to $50,000 would be an average

foundation grant, foundations are an important feature of the funding landscape.

Their grants are much more responsive than federal or state agencies to local idiosyncrasies, and they generally

allow their grantees to identify community needs, develop projects, and implement them without too much

direction. Foundations do have specific interests, and their organizational by-laws usually restrict them from giving

to projects outside these functional areas. But beyond that, foundation funders are given broad discretion to support

promising and interesting projects in their communities.

Possibly because of that discretion, foundations are the most relationship-driven of all three funder types.

Foundation representatives give to the people and organizations they know from their own personal experience will

9 Foundation Center, FC Stats - Grantmaker, http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/statistics/ gm_growth.html

http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/statistics/


execute their projects successfully. Conversely, they will remember failures in administration of past grants and

respond to future requests accordingly.

Tools for Researching Funders

There are a number of helpful resources for researching funders. Unfortunately, none of them are entirely

comprehensive across all three funding types. Federal grant information is like a river, constantly flowing with new

opportunities. State grantmakers typically manage fewer grant opportunities, but they are very sporadic in how

they publicize them, or if they publicize them at all beyond a small group of insiders. Foundation grant making is

not conducted through discrete grant programs as government grantmaking tends to be. Instead each foundation is

considered a funding prospect in itself. The list of foundations is constantly growing, but the foundations

themselves don’t change their giving priorities much from year to year. That leaves little to report on foundations,

and the best research resources just try to keep as many foundations in their databases as possible.

Some of the resources are specific to a particular functional area, some are free, and some require a subscription. I’ve

attempted to indicate as much of this as possible in the list below.

Comprehensive

Grants Office UPstream (subscription) - www.grantsoffice.com

Grant Select (subscription) - www.grantselect.com

Grant Station (subscription) - www.grantstation.com

GrantsAlert (free) (K-12 education) - www.grantsalert.com

SPIN (subscription) (university research) - http://infoedglobal.com/solutions/spin- global-suite/

Federal-Only

Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (free) - www.cfda.gov

Federal Agency Websites (free) - www.grants.gov/aboutgrants/agencies_that_provide_grants.jsp

Grants.gov (free) - www.grants.gov

State-Only

State agency Websites (free) - www.usa.gov/Agencies/State-and-Territories.shtml

Foundation-Only

Foundation Directory Online (subscription) - www.fconline.foundationcenter.org

Using these tools and other strategies, such as talking with colleagues and looking at how similar projects were

funded at other organizations, you’ll no doubt compile quite a large list of funders. The next step is to shorten the

list to those programs that have the most potential for supporting your project.

Evaluating Funding Opportunities

There are several criteria that can help you sort out which programs are a good fit with your project. They include

award amount, competitiveness of the grant, functional alignment with your project, the effort required to apply,

matching requirements, lead time ahead of the deadline, and your relationship with the funder. Your goal should

be to shorten your list to less than 10 funding opportunities, with smaller projects typically requiring a smaller pool

of prospects.

A more complete description of each of these selection criteria follows:

http://www.grantsoffice.com/

http://www.grantselect.com/

http://www.grantstation.com/

http://www.grantsalert.com/

http://infoedglobal.com/solutions/spin-%20global-suite/

http://www.cfda.gov/

http://www.grants.gov/aboutgrants/

http://www.grants.gov/

http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/State-and-Territories.shtml

http://www.fconline.foundationcenter.org/


Award amounts

The awards provided by the grant should be on the same scale as your project. It may not be worth

submitting applications to 100 grant programs that only award $1,000 each to get your $100,000 project

funded. On the other hand, a $5 million grant for the same project would probably put you on the hook to

do a lot more than you had planned.

If the funder doesn’t define in the application guidance the range of award amounts they expect to make,

you should be able to get a sense of the range of awards by reviewing past years’ grantees.

Competitiveness

It may be stating the obvious to say that less competitive grants are easier to win, but many people

sometimes overlook this important fact. Start with the total available funding. A $100 million program is

likely to be less competitive than a $4 million program.

Rarely, funders will publish their applicant statistics. If those are available, they can give you a more

precise competitiveness figure.

Alignment with the project

Look for the grants whose priorities align most closely with those of your project. You may have to dig into

the application guidance to find the program’s priorities, but nearly every program clearly spells out its

priorities within the first few pages.

Tip: The application guidance can also provide insight into how technology-friendly the program is. Grants

Office UPstream subscription service, for example, uses the guidance to rate each grant on how much

technology it supports and assigns it a letter grade. “A grants” are specifically created to fund technology. “B

grants” can fund technology if the applicant chooses to use the grant for that purpose. “C grants” can include

only a small amount of technology and only as part of a larger project.

Application burden

Some grants are extraordinarily complex, while others require only a simple 5-page project description.

Moreover, there isn’t necessarily a connection between how difficult a grant will be to write and how much

funding it will ultimately provide. With limited resources to pursue grant opportunities, the lower

application burden is preferred, all other things being equal.

Matching requirements

Cost sharing is another feature of grants that doesn’t seem to correspond to more funding. Requiring a

match is a time-honored practice among grantmakers to multiply the impact of their grantmaking and to

ensure that applicants are serious about their projects.

To evaluate your tolerance for matching requirements in the grants you’re evaluating, try to determine

early in the process what resources you will be able to commit to the project. Generally, an in-kind match is

easier to produce than a cash match, and no match is even easier.

Lead time

Three weeks lead time should be the minimum you allow for either yourself, your internal staff, or an

outside grantwriter to produce a quality grant proposal. Most grantwriters can, and often do, complete a

proposal in less time, but less time for coordination, input, feedback, and planning can result in a poorer

quality proposal.

About 80 precent of grants are repeated from one year to the next, so if the deadline has passed for one of

the programs you’re seriously considering, there’s a good chance that the program will open again in


approximately a year. That gives you plenty of lead time to develop a competitive proposal. Just be sure to

check the new guidance for changes and updates when it comes out, to make sure you don’t miss anything

that has changed since the previous year ’s competition.

Relationship with the funder

Particularly for foundation applications, your past funding experience with the grantmaker can influence

the disposition of your application. This tends to be less relevant with state and federal grants; in part

because their application review process is more decentralized and formally structured, leaving less room

for personal bias.

Ready For Action

Your short list of prospects will provide the starting point for your grants development action plan. The number of

grants you ultimately submit will be based on two primary factors, the resources you are able to commit to proposal

development and the level of effort that is required to apply for the grants you ultimately decide to pursue.

Developing grant proposals takes resources, quantified either in your staff time or the expense of an outside

grantwriter. After reviewing your budget, your project plan, and the funding prospects you have selected, you

should have a general sense of what resources you’re going to need. If you decide to write the grants yourself,

prepare to spend most of your time in the three weeks before each deadline working on your proposal. If you

decide to outsource the grantwriting to a professional grantwriter, it will probably cost between $2,500 and $7,500

per proposal, and you should still expect to spend most of your time leading up to the deadlines working with the

grantwriter on the proposal.

With that in mind, you may decide that you can’t pursue as many opportunities as you thought. That’s not

uncommon, and a realistic assessment of your capacity now can save you significant frustration later.

Continue to pare down your list of prospects until you are confident that you can commit the time and resources

that will be necessary to customize each proposal to the specific requirements of each funder and produce high

quality work.

Submitting better proposals to a shorter list of prospects puts you in the strongest possible position to get funded

and it optimizes the energy that you and others have devoted to getting your technology-rich project funded.

Part 3: Apply For Funding

There’s a reason experienced grantwriters win more grants than inexperienced ones, and it’s not because they know

some special grant lingo that the general public doesn’t. In fact, grant guidance documents are usually written so

that anyone reading them can learn everything they need to know to apply.

Journeyman grantwriters are more successful because they have learned what to look for in the guidance document

and other public sources and how to use that information to make their proposals more competitive.

Developing Competitive Proposals

What follows are a few of the things experienced grant writers know. If you are an experienced grantwriter, I hope

these will provide validation of what you already do routinely. If you’re new to grantwriting, I hope these guidelines

help you develop stronger proposals earlier in your grants development experience.

The Guidance Document

The proposal guidance provided by funders goes by many names, including guidance document, request for

proposals (RFP), request for applications (RFA), funding opportunity notice (FON), program opportunity notice


(PON), and notice of funding availability (NOFA), all of which refer to the information that a funder has published

for potential applicants and that includes the background and priorities of the program and guidance on how to

develop and submit a complete, compliant, and competitive application for funding.

Be sure to read and re-read the guidance document carefully before you begin writing a proposal. Understanding

the full scope of what’s required can help you avoid time- consuming missteps throughout the process. It will also

give you a clearer understanding of how your application will be reviewed, which is critical to producing a high

scoring proposal.

Most funders will provide additional information about their programs on their websites, in webinars, at

conferences, and elsewhere. Most of what they present in these forums will mirror the proposal guidance, but

occasionally they will discuss some element of the program’s priorities, selection process, or personal preferences

that can help you distinguish your proposal from those of other applicants. Therefore, it’s helpful to use these

resources to learn as much as you can about each program before you apply.

Reviewing a winning application from a previous round of funding can also help you better visualize what a

successful application should look like. Of course, your application will be different in many ways, but projects that

are funded by a particular grant program often share common characteristics. Future round winning proposals are

also likely to share these attributes.

Lastly, avoid including materials in your proposal that are not specifically requested in the grant guidance. In the

best case, extraneous materials will just be ignored by the reviewers. They won’t count for or against you, and you

won’t get them back. In the worst case, these extra photos, brochures, videos, or 50 yard line tickets (how did those

get in there?) may actually result in your proposal being rejected without review.

Being rejected without review is the worst thing that can happen to a grant proposal. This is true not only because in

spite of all the effort you put into developing the proposal, you aren’t funded, but also because it precludes you from

obtaining the comments from the reviewer and using them to improve your proposal for the next round of funding.

Budget Detail

Grant budgets can be tedious, and if you have the disposition to write two dozen pages of compelling narrative

about your project, you probably don’t also have the disposition to love crunching numbers. But grant budgets

help funders understand what exactly you’re planning to do with the funding you’re requesting. Moreover, in many

cases, the budgets are scored for cost-effectiveness in the same way that the narrative sections are evaluated using

other criteria, each contributing to the overall score of the proposal.

Most funders have generous allowances for the lengths of application budgets, because they want to know exactly

how applicants are planning to spend their awards.

As important as it is to provide a detailed budget in your application, it’s equally important that your budget and

project description are consistent. You shouldn’t include anything in your budget that isn’t called for in your

project narrative. Conversely, don’t propose any project-related activities or purchases that you haven’t clearly

accounted for in your budget.

Your Audience – Proposal Reviewers

After they are reviewed and scored, applications are ranked based on the scores they’ve received from the reviewers.

In most cases, the grant manager then recommends projects for approval, beginning at the top of this rank-ordered

list and continuing down the list until all the potential awards equal the total funding the program has available to

distribute.


Given that award decisions are so dependent on reviewers’ scores, it’s clear that the most important function your

proposal can fulfill is to receive high scores from the reviewers. That requires both a keen awareness of how the

proposal will be scored and a willingness to modify the proposal, and if necessary even the project, to better

accommodate the scoring criteria the reviewers will be using to evaluate the proposal.

Generally, funders make the scoring criteria available as part of the application guidance document in the form of a

brief table that describes each scoring criterion and the maximum number of possible points a reviewer may award

to a proposal for that element.

After reviewing the scoring criteria for a particular grant program, you may actually find it expedient to modify your

project to obtain a higher score. If, for example, a program rates the rurality of your telehealth sites and provides

fewer points for including sites that are not truly rural, you may want to consider removing those sites from your

project plan for that proposal in order to increase your score and, by extension, the likelihood that your proposal will

be funded.

Matching requirements are another example of where you might adjust your project in response to an assessment

of the program’s scoring criteria. A statutory minimum match may be a basic eligibility requirement for a particular

grant, but if the program awards additional points for higher levels of cost sharing than are strictly required, it may

be worth revisiting the funds you have available to commit to cost-sharing and worth finding some creative ways

to increase your organization’s match.

Despite your best attempts to maximize your score for each proposal you submit, if you submit enough grant

applications, one of your proposals will eventually get rejected, or as grant writers like to say, “not approved.” In

fact, any grant application can be rejected, in some cases for reasons that have nothing to do with a weakness in

your proposal.

A study I conducted in 1998 with the New York State Goals 2000 program results revealed that even though all the

proposals I studied were rated highly by at least one reviewer, scores varied greatly amongst reviewers. The

eventual winning proposals just happened to have high scores form all three reviewers, rather than just one or two

of them.

If you do find yourself in the unhappy group of “not approved” applicants, you should immediately request the

reviewers’ comments from your proposal. Government grantmakers will customarily provide the reviewer ’s scores

and comments to you if you request them. Reviewer ’s comments are more than just a report card. They are an

objective, authentic assessment of your proposal in the context of the specific scoring criteria the program uses.

Reviewer comments document the strengths and weaknesses of your application, making it clear why your

proposal was not approved and where it could be strengthened. Integrating this feedback into a future proposal to

the same program can greatly improve your chances of joining the group of “approved” applicants in subsequent

rounds of funding.

Outside Review

After you submit it, your proposal will be read by a number of people who in all likelihood know little to nothing

about your project, your organization, or your community. So, in order to better understand how your description

of your project will be received, it’s generally a good practice to ask someone outside the project and outside your

industry to review your proposal before you submit it, in the context of any program priorities and scoring criteria

that were included in the guidance.

If your friends and family aren’t able to fulfill this role, grantwriting consultants can also review substantially

completed drafts of your proposal for a fee. If you decide to hire an outside reviewer, however, make sure it’s not the

same person who wrote the grant initially.


Because they are not part of the project, independent readers will be more likely to detect potentially confusing

wording as well as elements that could be off-putting to a reviewer, such as unexplained acronyms or industry

jargon.

Further Considerations

Additional Support

Every application guidance document includes either individual contact information for the program’s grant

managers or a way to access the program’s helpdesk. These points of contact are usually happy to answer program

and application-related questions from grantseekers, as long as the answers aren’t already available in the

guidance. Grant managers are notoriously swamped, especially during the application period of a grant program,

so be aware that it may take them a few days to respond to an inquiry.

Also, recognizing that grants are often used to purchase technology, vendors like Cisco are increasingly committing

personnel and resources to helping customers better understand the funding landscape and to promoting the

development of informed, fundable technology projects. You might find that just by asking your Cisco

representative about grants support, you open the door to a promising resource that can provide free information

and consultation, and even do the work of identifying good funding prospects and evaluating those funders for a

fit with your project.

Ongoing Funding

Grants are an excellent vehicle for financing technology-rich projects, but they are not particularly well-suited to

funding ongoing technology expenses or ongoing expenses of any kind.

Most grants go to new or expanded initiatives, and very little money is available to fund ongoing operations. There

are a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious is that grant funding, even at more than $500 billion per year,

is limited. Therefore, funders typically provide grant dollars to start or expand worthwhile projects, and they rely

on the recipients of the funds and their communities to keep the projects going. That’s why grants professionals use

words like project, initiative, model, and demonstration to describe their proposals.

Since many technology projects are in fact non-repeating capital expenditures, they fit well within this context, and

most grant programs will support the operation of a funded project for a limited period of time (usually 1-5 years)

while it gets started. But after the grant period ends, the initiative must become self-sustainable, close down, or find

new grants to expand or improve on the work that’s been done up to that point.

The federal government has even codified the concept that grants should be used to supplement the budgets of

awardees rather than to fill operational budget gaps. It’s known as the “supplement not supplant” provision, and it

underlies almost all federal grantmaking.10

And even though it’s technically a federal guideline, it appears in many grant guidance documents outside

Washington DC as well. Being the largest grantmaker in the world, the federal government set the standards in the

field of grantmaking, but as we discussed earlier, the federal government is also the original source of many others’

grants. State and local programs around the country that provide funds further down the line must therefore also

comply with the federal provisions for how those funds may be used, including enforcing the “supplement not

supplant” provision.

10

Office of Management and Budget, OMB Circular A-133 Compliance Supplement 2012, http:// www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a133_compliance_supplement_2012, p.3-G-1

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a133_compliance_supplement_2012


It’s worth noting that non-governmental foundation grantmakers support this concept in one form or other as

well rewarding innovation and generally ignoring ongoing operations. Under the weight of so much consensus

among grantmakers, it’s useful to think of grants as catalysts of change, rather than just as sources of free money.

You can, however create a reliable source of future funding for your organization by making grantseeking part of

your agency’s ongoing operations. Beyond simply attracting grant funds to the organization, a robust grants

development office can be a wellspring for innovation and progress that empowers your organization and fosters

meaningful connections with other leaders in your community.

Grants inspire action because they provide resources that would otherwise not be available to take risks, test new

approaches to solving longstanding problems, and improve the way we live, work, and learn. In the 21st century,

technologies of all sorts play a role in these approaches, and provide the platform on which may of them are built.

As you move forward with your own technology-enabled grantseeking project, remember that by stepping outside

the day-to-day activities of your organization to look for new ways to do things more efficiently, more effectively,

and more transparently, you are also helping to make your community and your world a better place.

This whitepaper was prepared for Cisco and written by Michael Paddock, CEO, Grants Office LLC.

Printed in USA CXX-XXXXXX-XX 07/13

Whitepaper - Grants for Education Funding

Technology

Transcript of Whitepaper - Grants for Education Funding