Grants Gone Wrong: TGP’s Tips & Tricks
They’ve happened to the best of us. As hard as we work, as much as we try to prevent last-minute snafus or deal-breakers, as much communication as we have with our clients, they still crop up… Grant Emergencies.
Picture this. I’m sitting at ABQ Hair Studio getting my hair highlighted – this job has had me covering my greys since I was in my 20s – and my phone starts buzzing. The foils were already on. The conversation went something like this.
Aly: I’ve got Jamie on the line. They have a Grants.gov account, but the organization isn’t set up. We don’t have an AOR [authorized organizational representative] who can submit.
Jamie: I’ll do anything! Last year we submitted a paper application, so I didn’t know it was this hard! I have you on speaker phone so my colleague can hear you on my other phone; they’re on speaker phone too!
(Aside: This made it incredibly hard to hear the other person on the other speaker phone. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t at the time.)
Aly: We have it all ready to go, but can’t hit submit.
Me: When’s it due?
Aly: 4:30 Eastern.
(It’s 1:00 Mountain.)
Jamie: I’ll do anything!
Me: [to Katie, my stylist[1]] My hair isn’t going to burn off is it?
I’ll spare you the whole conversation.
Just another day in the life of a grant pro. Unfortunately, this is but one example of a grant project that ended in blood, sweat, and/or tears. I thought I’d share some quick go-to solutions that we’ve learned at TGP, each one a lesson in building a better process for next time. Don’t learn these the hard way!
TGP’s School of Grant Knocks
Get ready to cringe.
Problem: You can’t submit online and the deadline is 4:30 today.
Solution: Use FedEx same-day delivery. Here’s what we did in the above situation. We called the local D.C. FedEx and emailed them the entire file to print and deliver by 4:30. The delivery person even took a picture of himself delivering it so that we had it for a timestamp! This was pre-2015 (and probably pre-Workspace), and FedEx’s printing and delivery services have since gotten more sophisticated while the Grants.gov portal has also improved.
Now we start the Grants.gov submission process much earlier – at the initiation of a project. Although we had been requesting registration confirmation for weeks in this scenario, we now don’t proceed far if we are unable to make sure we can log in, have an AOR, that the organization is set up, and we note its SAM.gov expiration date in our workplan to ensure that we will be able to submit. Grants.gov Workspace is also more user-friendly than when this happened. When a Workspace is set up, you can see from the homepage if there is an approved AOR and the SAM.gov expiration date. We also now have a Wingperson role at TGP, wherein on the day of the deadline or the day of submission, the lead person has backup support to troubleshoot if needed (without burning their hair off!).
Problem: The funder didn’t get the proposal.
Solution: Call the UPS Store to correct the problem, then switch to FedEx and always get signature delivery receipts. No offense to UPS, especially since two of my immediate family members are employed there (on both the union and non-union side, which probably has nothing to do with the UPS Store anyway), but first the UPS Store didn’t send the proposal I had dropped off in order to arrive by the deadline – I can’t remember why not – and second, one time I had mailed a gift package for the holidays to Texas and my mother-in-law told me later, “There wasn’t anything in there for Joe.” In both cases, I called the UPS Store (“Oh! We were wondering which package the gift for Joe went in!”) and they fixed it, but in neither case were they proactive or leave me with confidence to give them a third chance. And, that funder – the Weyerhauser Foundation, I remember it still – funded the proposal it received after the deadline. Props to them for contacting my client to say they hadn’t received the proposal, who contacted me in a panic, which I paid forward to the UPS Store. It’s much less common now to have a paper proposal, but if we do, we have it tracked and signed for.
Solution for emailed proposals: Always BCC yourself and other team members, and many email servicers enable you to request a return receipt. This prevents or at least alerts you to either something getting stuck in your own email system or something getting IT/spam blocked for a corporate grant. Many times this also has to do with file size. Compress files as much as possible before sending.
Problem: You hit “Submit” and new questions appear.
This is the worst! We have long created templates from online applications, carefully testing character count limits and responsive questions (selecting “yes” and a sub-question appears, for example). There was one year that we had a local foundation that several of our clients were applying to, and when we hit Submit, a new page appeared that said “On what date did your board of directors approve this proposal?” with a required calendar select list. Egads! Not all of our clients have boards that need to approve proposals, so many of them did not have a date of approval.[2]
Solution: In the cases where we could, we contacted clients to see if they had a date to include. But because this threw a whole bunch of organizations a monkey wrench – not just our clients – the funder ended up telling people just to select the application date once they started getting calls from everyone applying in a panic about the surprise question.
Problem: You missed a required attachment for a third party commitment because it wasn’t in the RFP’s checklist.
Solution: Never rely on an RFP’s checklist! Cross-reference it with the workplan you create at the initiation of the project. Do a Command+F (or Ctrl+F) in the RFP and search for these words: attach, append, require, submit, must, and provide to make sure you don’t miss an attachment. Also, third party commitment letters are an example of what we call out-aheads–things you put into process without delay or waiting till the narrative is written. For example, some grants to the Department of Justice require profiles and log-ins from officials such as the mayor and chief of police, post-application completion but pre-submission. Make sure they’re ready when you’ve got your piece done! Other out-aheads are MOUs, letters of support, updated resumes, any system registrations for submitting, approval from the business office, matching funds documentation, any subrecipient attachments (c3 letters, NICRA letters), board approval, and calls for stakeholder input. (In our scenario, we had to scramble to get a higher education partner on board. It worked out, but the lesson was learned for next time.)
Problem: You drafted the proposal offline and are copy/pasting into the online form and keep getting errors or over-counts on characters.
Solution: Strip all formatting from the document you’re copying from. Ideally you would catch this when you’re making your template from the online application, but oftentimes when drafting offline, people tend to use bullet points or special characters that in an online system count for multiple characters – and look like gibberish once the page reloads. Always test your online system before you start writing. Not only will you catch whether the backend won’t allow special characters or formatting, but you will also find dependent and unfolding online forms, like pop-up budget details, new questions, etc. And always cross-check any mention of deadlines. The RFP might say “Submit by 5:00pm” but oftentimes when you log into the system, you can see it has a different timestamp. You don’t want your proposal rejected – or not even be able to submit – because you’re in a different timezone (or because there’s conflicting information in the guidance documents, something we’ve also seen).
Problem: You can only upload one file.
Solution: Zip the file.
It’s not hard – Command+Select all the files, right click, and “compress.” Easy peasy. Unless they won’t accept zipped files, in which case, use Acrobat Pro to create one PDF from multiple files.
Problem: You have to attach files in a certain order and there are five gazillion of them.
Solution: Name them in a way that when you build the PDF in Acrobat, they automatically go in the right order.
A.1.a.title, A.1.b.title, A.1.c.title, A.2.a.title, A.2.b.title, A.2.c.title for example. This works great for nested files when you need the same attachment from multiple organizations – for example, the 21st Century CCLC grant when the applicant provides services at a dozen schools and you need documentation from all of them in the same order but in different sections. Save all the files in one folder on your hard drive, and when you “combine files” in Acrobat Pro, they will automatically be in alpha order. If you’ve named them strategically, you won’t need to move pages around.
Problem: And they need to be sequentially numbered.
Solution: Don’t number them until you build the PDF. Then add a footer with page numbers. Keep a running tally of page numbers going in your workplan to make sure you don’t exceed the limit.
Problem: The PDF form needs a signature, but the author hasn’t enabled signing, or only “certain fields” are allowable.
Solution: Export the PDF to an image, re-build it to a PDF, and sign wherever the heck you want!
Problem: You had a typo in the DUNS (now UEI) number.
We found that it actually allowed submission, but instead of getting the four email confirmations that we normally would when submitting a federal grant, we only got the first one or two, because it got caught in the system and rejected with an error. (Luckily we had time to correct the error and resubmit.)
Solution: Use only copy/paste for agency identifiers. Even though Workspace functions differently now, there is a lot of room for error when typing long strings of digits in any grant portal. Try to use only copy/paste or be sure to have someone double check any manual entry.
Problem: Grant portals. Just in general.
Solution: Create a repository of troubleshooting tips as you experience them. These are the ones we recommend:
- AMIS and mycdfi (Department of Treasury)
- ASSIST and eRA (National Institutes of Health)
- eGrants (Corporation for National and Community Service)
- E-snaps (Housing and Urban Development)
- FastLane and Research.gov (National Science Foundation)
- FEMA GO and DisasterAssistance.gov (Federal Emergency Management Agency)
- G5 (US Department of Education)
- Grants.gov (multiple agencies, 99% of federal grants can go through this portal)
- JustGrants (US Department of Justice)
- Login.gov (overarching login portal for all US Federal portals)
- GrantSolutions (various departments)
- RDApply (US Department of Agriculture)
- SAM.gov (System for Award Management – entity registration required for all grant transactions)
Whomp Whomp
We can’t always save the day. Here are some grant emergencies we couldn’t solve.
We uploaded the wrong attachment and the grant got kicked out for not being compliant.
Somehow during the process, we saved over the budget narrative file with the RFP file and didn’t catch it after uploading (the file was named correctly, but the content was wrong). Normally, we would have had someone QC the application before it went in, but a Wingperson hadn’t been assigned and no one was available. Ouch, that lesson hurt! We ended up refunding the client’s payment for the project and resubmitting for no fee the following round.
The client was registered in one federal grant system, but not both federal grant systems.
If memory serves, this was Grants.gov and Research.gov. I don’t think it was for lack of trying; instead, the federal registration was taking longer than the time we had available due to a backlog. It ended up being submitted in one portal but the applicant wasn’t recognized in the other portal. The client was able to take the materials and repurpose them, and we comped grant research services for places to shop it around to. Before that full tragedy befell us, though, we reached out to partner agencies for them to be the applicant (which would have taken a major feat of reworking had we found one, but we were willing to do that after all the hard work that had been put forth by the team working on it).
The wrong state agency was the applicant.
It should have been the Public Education Department, but instead the Higher Education Department was the agency on record as the applicant (both were heavily involved in the partnership of the work, we all just missed that one sentence in the eligibility paragraph). We ended up repurposing the non-compliant application for a later RFP release and were able to use many of the materials, but it was a real bummer – for us, the state agencies, and even for the funder (“We would have loved to fund New Mexico,” the program officer told me). This lesson led to us creating a specific eligibility gate before proceeding past initiating the project.
Oof.
I was actually at Katie’s today dealing with my stubborn grey streak(s… now plural), and I laugh, and sigh, thinking of how she’s seen me through various frantic phone calls, TMI convos, and mid-foil troubleshooting.*
It’s been quite a trip down memory lane revisiting these painful moments… though some of them are funny now. It’s also been a good reminder of how we are people, and people make mistakes, and we need to give each other grace. And I know there’s a reason these moments stick – they taught us something. Every late-night, every misstep, and even every full-on flop has helped us sharpen our systems, strengthen our teamwork, and build smoother, saner processes for the next time around. Hang in there, fellow grant pros!
[1] I’ve been with Katie since probably 2010. She is now the owner of Conjure Salon. Give her a call if you’re looking for a true artist.
[2] Incidentally, this was also the year that Erin and I had unknowingly planned our annual girls trip during the deadline. There were seven applications that needed to be submitted by the 4:00pm deadline. When we boarded our three-hour flight at 2:00pm, none of them had been submitted yet. We landed and they were all in!
Contact
Tara Gohr, President/CEO, [email protected]
* If you’ve ever found yourself in similar scrambles (or you want to avoid them), you’re in good company. And better yet, you’re invited. Join us for our upcoming webinar, Top 10 Grant Survival Tips—we’ll walk you through over 20 years of hard-earned lessons. From facepalmers to close calls to full-on fails, we’ve seen what works, and what really doesn’t. Join us to learn how to manage your grants office with calm confidence.
🗓️ June 26, 11:00 am MST
And remember, our trainings are FREE when you register and are approved through Job Training Albuquerque!
This post was filed under: Federal Grants, Grant Writing, Training