Category Archives: Veronica Robbins

Rantings of an Opinionated Grant Writer

I try to keep the posts of this blog positive and informative, and I do my best to keep my whining to a minimum, but today I have a few rants to put out there in the world.  Maybe someone will be able to learn from them.

Every now and then someone tells me, “Veronica, maybe you shouldn’t be so outspoken about your opinions.  Won’t you risk losing business?”  Maybe, but I like to remember what Bill Cosby said — “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.”

So, here are the rants running through my mind today:

  1. Why do the people doing the best work in the community seem to have the hardest time to getting money to fund their work?  I see it over and over again. Small non-profits that are really doing amazing work who struggle to stay afloat while large organizations with tremendous waste seem to have more cash than they can use. Of course, I know the answer to the question.  There is much more to the funding equation than just doing good work. And never forget the other explanation:  Life isn’t fair.
  2. Speaking of tremendous waste.  I have a client (a public agency) that is giving $700,000 back to the federal government at the end of a four year grant period because they have a lousy fiscal accounting system and they didn’t spend all of the $6 million grant they were awarded.  It’s not that they couldn’t use it or that there isn’t plenty of need in their community, but the combination of poor accounting, poor communication among administrators, and incompetence has essentially stolen almost three quarters of a million dollars from folks who desperately need the support.  As the grant writer and evaluator for that program, I’m disgusted.
  3. Speaking of being disgusted, I’m currently working with a school district that seems to be doing everything it can to keep the public away.  One day they say they want parents more involved, and the next day they take actions to make it harder (sometimes nearly impossible) for parents to be involved. Then we loop back full circle to their finger pointing at parents for not being involved.  Enough already!
  4. I was at a meeting yesterday discussing some pretty significant changes to a local school for students who have been expelled from their regular public schools.  We were discussing incentives for students and I had the wild and crazy idea to ask the students what incentives would inspire them. I got that condescending, “awwww, the poor woman doesn’t understand the real world” look from one of the school administrators present.

OK, I’d better stop now.  I think I’ve been reading Cranky Blog too much.

Now I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled positive and uplifting posts……

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Four Grant Writing Ethical No-No’s

There are actually many ethical issues involved in grant writing, many more than I expected when I first began my journey as a professional grant writer. Here are four of the most common ethical issues you need to avoid if you are a professional grant writer:

  1. Lying in a proposal.  I have to admit that I have always assumed that everyone would know that lying in a grant proposal is ethically wrong, but you’d be surprised how many times I have heard people try to justify it. Don’t try to exaggerate your need for the grant or include program activities that you don’t intend on implementing. Just tell the truth.
  2. Reusing narrative written for another client. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re overworked and tired, to just lift some narrative that you wrote for another client for the same grant last year to put in someone else’s narrative this year. Don’t do it.  If you get caught (especially by a reader scoring the grant), you risk not being funded, but it’s just plain wrong anyway. If you are being paid for original narrative, write original narrative.  If you can’t think of another way to say what you need to say, don’t take the job.
  3. Poaching funding sources.  I heard this horror story when I met with a local non-profit administrator last week. A private funding source had invited the non-profit to submit a proposal.  This particular funding source does not accept unsolicited proposals.  The non-profit asked its grant writer (an outside consultant) to write a proposal to this funding source.  The grant writer wrote a proposal and submitted it. A couple of weeks later, the non-profit administrator got a phone call from the funding source saying that the grant writer had actually submitted several proposals – the one the funding source had requested as well as proposals on behalf of several other organizations the grant writer worked with.  None of these other proposals were part of the solicitation.  The grant writer had just taken it on herself to try to squeeze in some of her other clients in competition with the client making the original request.  I’m sure she assumed they would not know or find out.  To make matters worse, the representative from the funding source told the non-profit administrator that of the several proposals submitted by that grant writer, the weakest one from from the original agency requesting the work. The non-profit organization that originally asked the grant writer to submit the proposal was ultimately not funded.
  4. Telling a client that they can pay for grant writing services out of the grant when they can’t. There is some debate in the field about whether charging a contingency fee for grant writing services is ethical or not.  Some people insist that contingency fees are unethical, but then call it a “bonus” for getting funded and call that ethical. The real issue, though, is not whether or not it’s a contingency fee, but where that fee comes from. If you tell someone they can pay the fee out of the grant when they can’t, you have essentially lied to them. Very few funding sources allow you to pay for grant writing services out of a grant itself (there are, however, some that do). 

The bottom line is that integrity matters. Trying to cut ethical corners may seem like a profitable decision at the time, but in the end it is not the way to build a successful grant writing career.

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Four Grant Writing Ethical No-No’s

There are actually many ethical issues involved in grant writing, many more than I expected when I first began my journey as a professional grant writer. Here are four of the most common ethical issues you need to avoid if you are a professional grant writer:

  1. Lying in a proposal.  I have to admit that I have always assumed that everyone would know that lying in a grant proposal is ethically wrong, but you’d be surprised how many times I have heard people try to justify it. Don’t try to exaggerate your need for the grant or include program activities that you don’t intend on implementing. Just tell the truth.
  2. Reusing narrative written for another client. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re overworked and tired, to just lift some narrative that you wrote for another client for the same grant last year to put in someone else’s narrative this year. Don’t do it.  If you get caught (especially by a reader scoring the grant), you risk not being funded, but it’s just plain wrong anyway. If you are being paid for original narrative, write original narrative.  If you can’t think of another way to say what you need to say, don’t take the job.
  3. Poaching funding sources.  I heard this horror story when I met with a local non-profit administrator last week. A private funding source had invited the non-profit to submit a proposal.  This particular funding source does not accept unsolicited proposals.  The non-profit asked its grant writer (an outside consultant) to write a proposal to this funding source.  The grant writer wrote a proposal and submitted it. A couple of weeks later, the non-profit administrator got a phone call from the funding source saying that the grant writer had actually submitted several proposals – the one the funding source had requested as well as proposals on behalf of several other organizations the grant writer worked with.  None of these other proposals were part of the solicitation.  The grant writer had just taken it on herself to try to squeeze in some of her other clients in competition with the client making the original request.  I’m sure she assumed they would not know or find out.  To make matters worse, the representative from the funding source told the non-profit administrator that of the several proposals submitted by that grant writer, the weakest one from from the original agency requesting the work. The non-profit organization that originally asked the grant writer to submit the proposal was ultimately not funded.
  4. Telling a client that they can pay for grant writing services out of the grant when they can’t. There is some debate in the field about whether charging a contingency fee for grant writing services is ethical or not.  Some people insist that contingency fees are unethical, but then call it a “bonus” for getting funded and call that ethical. The real issue, though, is not whether or not it’s a contingency fee, but where that fee comes from. If you tell someone they can pay the fee out of the grant when they can’t, you have essentially lied to them. Very few funding sources allow you to pay for grant writing services out of a grant itself (there are, however, some that do). 

The bottom line is that integrity matters. Trying to cut ethical corners may seem like a profitable decision at the time, but in the end it is not the way to build a successful grant writing career.

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Do you really need a grant writer? Download this article to help you decide.

Free e-book – Using Social Media to Increase Your Business

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Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

A Real Life Parable about Data and Hearing What You Want to Hear Regardless of What Has Been Said

A school district contracted with a research firm to conduct a telephone survey of local residents to determine if there was enough support for a parcel tax measure to move forward with it. The research firm was paid over $18,000 to conduct the telephone survey over a five day period. A total of 400 surveys/interviews were conducted and factored into the results. Fifty-five percent (55%) of those surveyed said they would support the measure, which falls short of the two-thirds required for the measure to pass, so the school board chose to abandon the measure at this time.

The survey also revealed that “only 14 percent of those surveyed think the district is doing a good job of providing high quality education or preparing students for a job,” and 60% of those surveyed believe that overall management of the district is poor.  Sixty-four percent (64%) believe that the district is doing a poor to only fair job of managing public funds.

Ouch.

Now, there are many things about this whole process that I could discuss, from the fact that $18,000 is an exorbitant fee to pay for a telephone survey of 400 residents (yes, many reputable research firms, including my own, would do an excellent job for much less) to the fact that the district had other no-cost and low-cost ways of getting pretty close to the same information, but I’m going to focus on the response to the survey results.

Just about anyone I have discussed this with says something like, “Wow. It’s pretty clear that folks in that town think the school district is doing a lousy job. The public doesn’t trust them with their money.”

Interestingly, though, that’s not what the school superintendent got out of those results. Here’s what the local newspaper had to say about that: “She was interested to learn that, based on the survey, the community most valued tutoring for students, curriculum that uses science and technology, and more opportunities for students to take advanced classes.”  And then the superintendent was quoted, “We need to continue to help kids that need extra help, continue to challenge kids that need more (rigor), and we need to do that with current technology.”

Huh?

While all of that may be true, it seems to me that the real message to get is that the community doesn’t trust the school district and thinks it’s doing a lousy job.  That’s what needs to be addressed.

We could debate the value of spending a lot of money on data gathering efforts.  As an evaluator, I’m a believer in investing in data collection to help you demonstrate the value of your programs and evaluate their effectiveness so you can improve them. The questions that comes up is always, “How much money is too much to spend for evaluation and data collection?”

But even that is not the moral to this story. 

The moral to this story is this:  If you’re going to spend anything on conducting a survey, be willing to really listen and hear what people are saying.  If you’re not going to learn from what has been said, even a dime is too much to pay for the information.

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Click here for a free webinar on Tips for Conducting Focus Group Interviews.

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

A Real Life Parable about Data and Hearing What You Want to Hear Regardless of What Has Been Said

A school district contracted with a research firm to conduct a telephone survey of local residents to determine if there was enough support for a parcel tax measure to move forward with it. The research firm was paid over $18,000 to conduct the telephone survey over a five day period. A total of 400 surveys/interviews were conducted and factored into the results. Fifty-five percent (55%) of those surveyed said they would support the measure, which falls short of the two-thirds required for the measure to pass, so the school board chose to abandon the measure at this time.

The survey also revealed that “only 14 percent of those surveyed think the district is doing a good job of providing high quality education or preparing students for a job,” and 60% of those surveyed believe that overall management of the district is poor.  Sixty-four percent (64%) believe that the district is doing a poor to only fair job of managing public funds.

Ouch.

Now, there are many things about this whole process that I could discuss, from the fact that $18,000 is an exorbitant fee to pay for a telephone survey of 400 residents (yes, many reputable research firms, including my own, would do an excellent job for much less) to the fact that the district had other no-cost and low-cost ways of getting pretty close to the same information, but I’m going to focus on the response to the survey results.

Just about anyone I have discussed this with says something like, “Wow. It’s pretty clear that folks in that town think the school district is doing a lousy job. The public doesn’t trust them with their money.”

Interestingly, though, that’s not what the school superintendent got out of those results. Here’s what the local newspaper had to say about that: “She was interested to learn that, based on the survey, the community most valued tutoring for students, curriculum that uses science and technology, and more opportunities for students to take advanced classes.”  And then the superintendent was quoted, “We need to continue to help kids that need extra help, continue to challenge kids that need more (rigor), and we need to do that with current technology.”

Huh?

While all of that may be true, it seems to me that the real message to get is that the community doesn’t trust the school district and thinks it’s doing a lousy job.  That’s what needs to be addressed.

We could debate the value of spending a lot of money on data gathering efforts.  As an evaluator, I’m a believer in investing in data collection to help you demonstrate the value of your programs and evaluate their effectiveness so you can improve them. The questions that comes up is always, “How much money is too much to spend for evaluation and data collection?”

But even that is not the moral to this story. 

The moral to this story is this:  If you’re going to spend anything on conducting a survey, be willing to really listen and hear what people are saying.  If you’re not going to learn from what has been said, even a dime is too much to pay for the information.

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Click here for a free webinar on Tips for Conducting Focus Group Interviews.

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

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Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

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Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing Deadline Purgatory

I’m floating in grant writing deadline purgatory right now.  Actually, I’m not totally in grant writing purgatory. I am skating on the edges of it, but I’m close enough to see it, inhale the stale smell of it, and feel its panic.

When you are fully engulfed in grant writing deadline purgatory, you have done most of what you can do to complete a grant proposal, but you are stopped from fully completing it due to some situation beyond your control.  Unfortunately, the situation gremlins that can keep you in purgatory are numerous.  You may be waiting for a client or some stakeholder to get you some last minute feedback on the narrative.  You might be waiting for some final letters of support or signatures on a Memorandum of Understanding. You may be waiting for someone to clarify some budget issues for you. Sometimes, you’re all ready to submit, but the online electronic portal for submittal is down and you are waiting for it to go live again.

When you’re in grant writing deadline purgatory, you hover.  You try to find something to do with yourself.  You watch the clock. You wonder why you ever got into this line of work. You speculate on what life would be like if you were a mail carrier or flight attendant, or you fantasize about what all the people on the outside (outside your office incarceration) are doing.  You wait.

Today, as I said, I am skating on the edges of grant writing deadline purgatory.  I have three grants due Monday that are in various stages of completion. Two are in some level of deadline purgatory, and I’m waiting for others.  The third won’t be in purgatory until tomorrow, so there’s still plenty I can do today.

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Click here to get your free copy of our e-book 12 Secrets of Successful Grant Writers.

Grant Writing Deadline Purgatory

I’m floating in grant writing deadline purgatory right now.  Actually, I’m not totally in grant writing purgatory. I am skating on the edges of it, but I’m close enough to see it, inhale the stale smell of it, and feel its panic.

When you are fully engulfed in grant writing deadline purgatory, you have done most of what you can do to complete a grant proposal, but you are stopped from fully completing it due to some situation beyond your control.  Unfortunately, the situation gremlins that can keep you in purgatory are numerous.  You may be waiting for a client or some stakeholder to get you some last minute feedback on the narrative.  You might be waiting for some final letters of support or signatures on a Memorandum of Understanding. You may be waiting for someone to clarify some budget issues for you. Sometimes, you’re all ready to submit, but the online electronic portal for submittal is down and you are waiting for it to go live again.

When you’re in grant writing deadline purgatory, you hover.  You try to find something to do with yourself.  You watch the clock. You wonder why you ever got into this line of work. You speculate on what life would be like if you were a mail carrier or flight attendant, or you fantasize about what all the people on the outside (outside your office incarceration) are doing.  You wait.

Today, as I said, I am skating on the edges of grant writing deadline purgatory.  I have three grants due Monday that are in various stages of completion. Two are in some level of deadline purgatory, and I’m waiting for others.  The third won’t be in purgatory until tomorrow, so there’s still plenty I can do today.

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Click here to get your free copy of our e-book 12 Secrets of Successful Grant Writers.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing – Don’t Chase the Money

You have seen this here before – Chase your dream (your vision, your mission), not the money.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive to you, especially if you are a non-profit executive or school administrator who is just trying to keep your programs alive, but it’s important.  Not only is a focus on the money rather than your mission the surest way to get pulled off-track with your work, but most savvy funders can see right through the ruse. You end up doing more work for less return.

It just makes more sense to stay focused on your mission than  to keep trying to fit the square peg of the funding source in front of you into the round hole that is your organization’s mission-driven need.

No matter how hard I try to educate my clients, I saw it again last week,  As I met with a client to discuss the details about a grant the said they wanted to pursue, it became obvious that this grant opportunity is not aligned with the organization’s current priorities.  Yes, they could go for it.  They might even get it, but then they’d have to implement a program that is not aligned with where they say they want to go…..and all this for a couple of million dollars that they wouldn’t be allowed to spend on what they really need anyway..

Let’s say you need $100 to get to New York next month for a family reunion and someone offered to give you $200, but only if you would go to Santa Cruz next month. Would you take it?  Only if you really wanted to go to Santa Cruz instead of New York anyway. If not, you’d probably be focused enough to know that spending next month in Santa Cruz would take you off track from your plan to get to New York for the family reunion and you wouldn’t take that deal.  You’d keep looking for someone who could help you get to New York.

You should keep the same level of focus with your grant research. Keep your mission and vision front and center, and look for the funding sources to help you get there.

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