Folly #3: Painful Grant Applications
How many words does it take to make your work compelling?
In the age of online applications, grant proposals seem easier than ever. You just cut and paste, and edit the word count to that funder’s specific priorities, right?
It depends on the questions.
I’m thinking of the foundation that asked 25 narrative questions in their online proposal. Each question had a limit ranging from 1,500 to 24,000 characters. (Thousand. That is not a typo.) I get that we don’t need to complete every field to capacity, but you can’t help but feel like you’re missing something when your perfectly clear and descriptive mission statement only takes 500 characters of a 2,500 character field.
Ironically, one of their yes/no questions was the oddest: “Will you name [our foundation] as an additional insured in your liability policy?” Talk about a loaded question! Not to mention a strange, backwards spirit of giving back. So we said “no” and won’t be too surprised if we don’t get the grant.
This grant was for restricted program support, not general operations. The Herculean effort that we (and dozens or, maybe, hundreds of nonprofit applicants) put into writing the proposal was considered unworthy administrative overhead.
So write a 10,000-word application we did. (Along with the required bibliography of references and data cited.) It was a lot of work. And the agony continues – this funder says they need nearly six months to review applications. Any ideas out there on how they might shorten their review time?
Then you run across a foundation that gets it.
In my grantwriting classes I share lots of examples of funders and proposals. One of my favorites is a foundation that supports small, BIPOC-led, movement-building, grassroots nonprofits. I love how clear they are about the kind of nonprofit that is the right fit for them, and their application has four – 4! Is that not awesome?? – questions in a simple online form. That’s it. If you prefer to submit by video or email they say, bring it! Their application is simple and accessible: they really walk their talk.
Next week… Folly Take 4: Against All Odds.
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Can I just state for the record that I totally dislike online grant applications. They are usually set up in such a way that I can't easily save my work and I have to answer questions sequentially. I work so much better when I write proposals by looking at all the questions first and diving into them one by one. I tend to give better narrative answers when I answer the questions in the order I want to answer them.