Folly #40: Portals
How grant making staff can champion an easy process.
Portals can take us places. Some are magical. Some are scary.
In these last two weeks, I’ve traveled the full gamut of proposal portals: from a process-couldn’t-be-more-difficult small government grant to a really lovely LOI that transitioned to an easy proposal for a big amount.
Government funding can be a great source of big grants – to build affordable housing or fund public health clinics – and they are a specialty of some grantwriters. But this past month I seem to have manifested my fear of them.
The Worst of All Worlds
I work with a wonderful organization that is, itself, a portal to LGBTQ+ elders’ stories. A colleague at a federal agency encouraged them to apply for a small grant that might turn into larger grants. The application wasn’t too bad: a 5-page proposal narrative + CVs for staff + a project timeline + (you guessed it) a specific federal form.
For two days we tried to upload these documents into the online grants portal. Every time we clicked the apply link, we got an error message. After hours of looping through grants.gov, sam.gov, and login.gov to make access easier (lol) we finally reached out to their email help. They sent us a link to online instructions showing that we appear in their system, but cannot apply until we “register.” Hmmm. Anywhere else but the federal government, being in their system means that you’ve registered. So we did. And now we wait 12 days for approval, which means we miss the deadline.
This one was a $10,000 opportunity, and nearly 10 hours of work (at least half just trying to submit). One of us is really dumb, and I’m wondering if it’s the process or I.
The Best of All Worlds
Another funder asked our client for a Letter of Inquiry. Aside from organizational contact information, their grants portal LOI requested this:
In approximately 300 words or less (1,800 characters), please enter a summary of your proposed project or work.
That’s it! It may surprise you to learn that it still took a bit over 5 hours (short descriptions are an art), but they responded the next month with an invitation to apply – at a higher amount than we requested. The full proposal was also very straightforward, and encouraged us to repurpose some of the language from the LOI. It provided drop-down menus to align our mission with their funding priorities, and a not-to-exceed-two-pages proposal narrative.
Their grants program staff contacted us to offer feedback. They provided multiple names and emails in case we had questions with the online portal or process. They asked us to submit early so we’d have time to hear suggestions on our proposal before the deadline.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
That one was for nearly $400,000. (If I’m lucky, I’ll get their permission to tell you who they are, and maybe even an interview to share how they created such a simple process to make 6-figure grants.)
The LOI and the proposal each took about 5 hours. So you tell me: 10 hours for $10,000 or 10 hours for nearly half a million?
No doubt you have a few stories of portals. (No funder names, please). Please share!
My biggest fan! Thank you Richard.
Another valuable insight into grant writing priorities! Thank you!