© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 1 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 2 of 23
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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 3 of 23
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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 4 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 5 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 6 of 23
● 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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 7 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 8 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 9 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 10 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 11 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 12 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 13 of 23
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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 14 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 15 of 23
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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 16 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 17 of 23
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:
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 18 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 19 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 20 of 23
(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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 21 of 23
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.
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 22 of 23
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
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 23 of 23
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
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