Voting-Style Grant Competitions Are Unfair By Design

A metal slide bolt fastened across the seam of two dark wooden door panel (Image Credits: Unsplash Images, Zoshua Colah

I ran into a spot of trouble with a grant competition some years ago. It took me a few more years to realize the justice issues in the broken system that I was participating in. 

Here’s what happened:

My non-profit client wanted to participate in a corporation sponsored grant contest offering grants of $25,000 to fund “neighborhood need projects.”

The application process looked easy enough:

·  It had four short narrative questions asking about community needs, and how we’d use the grant to meet unmet needs.

·   Applicants could include up to three pictures

·   The first 2,000 submissions would be accepted.

·   200 finalists would be chosen

·    A public vote would decide which 40 community causes would win $25,000 each

We decided to go for it;

 So while the application was straightforward, it still required time and effort to:

·    Strategize how we could use $25k to maximum benefit for a group of young people

·   Create a budget based on actual costs

·   For the communications team to look through the photo archive and pull together pictures to fit our pitch

·  To draft a tightly worded response that fit within the very limited character count

·  For the ED’s edits and feedback

Together, we easily spent 10+ hours of our time on a ‘simple’ application

  Here’s where I made my mistake.

The competition officially opened its portal at 1pm. Now, the grant guidelines had said “spots fill up fast” and “Be quick! We are only accepting 2,000 submissions!” That should have been enough of a red flag.

I had figured, I’d get it done on the first day the portal opened—just to be on the safe side.

My plan was to finish up another writing project that afternoon, and then incorporate the edits from the nonprofit ED before submitting.

At 5pm, I logged into the portal, ready to upload my narrative and pictures.  

“We are no longer accepting submissions.” The portal was closed.

We had not missed a deadline—there was none. But 2,000 others had just beaten us to the entrance, and we were locked out.

One of the worst feelings as a grant writer is to feel you have failed your client. There was nothing to do but accept responsibility—and then move forward.

Reflecting on this experience, I know I could have done better. I could have been poised and ready to go at 1pm. 

Still, this competition held by a large corporation with vast resources was no merit-based competition at all. It was a popularity contest where winning relied on how good your marketing was and how many supporters you can mobilize to vote for you.

Despite good intentions, this kind of ‘competition’ is inherently flawed; the structure of the competition is set up so that the majority of applicants will inevitably fail. It is also biased against smaller nonprofits with limited resources.

Consider:

·         2000+ applicants -> pre-determined that only 40 will be selected

·         No public review or scoring criteria -> a lack of transparency about finalist participant selection

·         More robust marketing and mobilization systems + larger supporter base to ‘vote’-> more likely to win.

 Philanthropy is riddled with structural inequity, and this is prime example of how funders, unwittingly (giving them the benefit of the doubt here) perpetuate bias, limit access, and frankly waste a whole lot of nonprofit staff time.

How many small non-profits are devoting 10+ hours only to find the gates and gatekeepers shut the door before they even get there?

Nonprofits, I encourage you not to participate in funding processes that perpetuate unfair and unjust practices. Don't be complicit. Know your worth, and persist in building partnerships with funders who show respect through their processes and practices.

Grant Writing—Action Movie Style

Street Traffic in Mirissa, Sri Lanka

Image Credits: Zoshua Colah

(A True Story of the Day Everything that Could Go Wrong…Did)

Unexpected plot twists and of course, action—are great in action movies. Trying to submit a grant proposal while suddenly finding yourself at the edge of a gravel cliff with a bus heading towards you at 60 miles an hour?—Not so great!

Of course I exaggerate. But listen to my true story about the day everything that could go wrong, did.

Spoiler Alert: Lesson about Time Management.

I swear I am not making this up; it was the last hour, of the last day, to submit a huge government grant proposal which we, a team of 5-7 people had worked on for the last two months.

It started with the budget getting approved late. And by getting approved late, I mean the CFO had only received it the same morning and had sent it ‘downstairs’ back to the grant team about 30 minutes before the submission deadline.

Now all of you federal grant folks know that elements of the budget cascade into the certificates and representations (also known as “certs and reps” for short).  For those less familiar, “certs and reps” are documented statements and assurances that organizations provide to affirm compliance with various federal requirements and regulations when submitting a grant or contract application.

While I opened up the certs and reps and started typing in final budget numbers feverishly, the document formatting started swimming around in ways that increased my anxiety.  I could feel the beads of sweat forming on my palms.  I remember my internal dialogue as my urge to hurry up and print the document clashed with my stubborn refusal to submit an unprofessional looking document with gaping spaces.

Five minutes later my brain deemed the document presentable. Back then, the document still needed to be manually printed, then scanned, emailed back, renamed, and finally uploaded.

I hit print. Nothing happened. I hit print again. Nothing. The internet had cut out. Yup.

Have you had moments in your life which are so visceral and yet surreal at the same time? My heart was pounding and making me short of breath, while at the same time I felt like I was in a bad dream. I have a vivid image of the pale white face of my grant team lead, who had stayed quiet and collected under the circumstances, and was now visibly shaking. His ears a bright red. 

A few minutes later someone did something and the internet came back. I physically raced down a hallway to the printer and scanner—racing back to my seat to email the final certs and reps to the staffer doing the final upload.

It was seven mins past the deadline of 5pm.  A massive rush of collective adrenaline pumped through the hallway while furious shaky fingers hit the magic button “send…”

The most beautiful sight displayed – the grant acceptance confirmation page! We had done it!

Hurray! Months of writing, coordination and Skype calls (this was before Zoom) later, all was well – or so I thought. I could actually eat my lunch now.

The next day, as a post-submission formality I logged into grants.gov and tracked the submission.  I found our application and application status – REJECTED!  The system which had accepted it kicked it back.

Well, the only thing that could be done now was to plead our case. A senior director got on the phone with a big wig at a US government agency who apparently tut-tutted but agreed to accept the excuse that the grants.gov system had slowed down while multiple organizations attempted to submit at the same time, causing our upload to be accepted seven mins late. A few finger wags over the phone later, the big wig agreed to accept the proposal.

Here’s the kicker..what if he didn’t?

Hundreds of hours of collective work by budget analysts, HR, program officers, head honchos, and foreign consultants would have resulted in an immediate denial.

That was the moment I decided there MUST be a better way. And that was the moment I decided that when I was a team lead, I would NOT allow this to happen.

I am self-aware enough to realize that while a certain amount of pressure is helpful to keep the momentum going in preparation for a deadline, I do not need the bungee-jumping level of excitement while submitting a proposal.

If you ever work with me and wonder why I insist on building in a buffer of time – well this is why.

I am a big advocate for creating project plans and sticking to deadlines, communicating when we get behind and building in buffers of time. Because, as we all know, life happens.

So maybe next time you have a big grant coming up, think of my cautionary tale and give yourself plenty of time.

Do you have a grant writing ‘adventure’ you’d like to share? Add your story below!

My Grant Writing Journey

A motorized rickshaw known as a “Tuk Tuk” winding down a curvy road in Sri Lanka

Photo Credits: Javier Saint Jean

No one I’ve ever met started their career saying ‘I want to be a grant consultant.’ Those who end up here are usually mid-career and senior professionals whose careers have zigzagged through some interesting places first. If you want to know my story, here it is.

Part 1: The Floppy Disk Era

It was 1999, and my newly minted high-school graduate self had just been handed a document on a floppy disk and been asked to, “edit this grant proposal.” Let’s hit rewind for a moment.

Until the summer of 1998, my all-girls school in Sri Lanka was my whole world. The equivalent of a K-12 school, I graduated with nearly all of the same classmates I started with back in kindergarten. There’s something truly special about spending 14 years growing up with the same friends you first met dressed in little sundresses, with handkerchiefs pinned in the top left corner. (Kleenex in classrooms wasn’t a thing back then, but I digress).

Now, at 19, the world was my oyster.

While many of my friends soon launched into careers in law, banking, advertising, and other ‘respectable’ professions by Sri Lankan society standards, I decided to take a year off while applying for college in the USA. Through a contact, I found a ‘job’ where I would volunteer two or three days a week with a local nonprofit that served children who had experienced abuse.

With no official job description or title other than ‘volunteer,’ my tasks varied from day to day; from being an English-Sinhala translator, to creating a prototype of a board game about decision-making for kids (it never made it past my pencil sketches), and assisting with a film shoot for children about safe touch and speaking up.

Professionally, I was about as green as it gets, and I wouldn’t have known a grant proposal if it had flown in and hit me in the face! However, having taken advanced English writing classes in high school, I was able to write for a professional audience. So when the nonprofit’s therapist who was my informal supervisor asked me to edit a funding proposal, I took up the task. And apparently, I did a good job.

Part 2: Learning by Doing – Grad School and International Work

Fast forward through three years of college in Pennsylvania, I returned to Sri Lanka with an English Writing B.A. in hand. My new job as a program assistant at a large international development organization in Colombo (the capital city) put me on the execution side of grant writing. The proposal had been written, and now my team was tasked with implementing and reporting on the project that had been fully funded.

We found ourselves faced with a different type of challenge as we read and re-read the proposal goals and activities and puzzled over how to implement the grant proposal. The proposal had been written by foreign consultants who had literally “flown in and flown out.” None of the present team members had been around during the program design or proposal development process.  This experience raised a serious question in my mind: who should write the proposal for a new initiative?

Returning to the US once more, I took my first formal, intensive grant proposal writing class as part of my graduate studies in International Development in 2004. We spent time analyzing elements of international development proposals and writing a mock proposal of our own. This class was a solid introduction to professional grant writing. However, I attribute my development management class with helping me develop what I credit as the most important grant development skill of all time—the ability to sift through large volumes of information and distill and glean key data, and present it succinctly within the parameters of a writing assignment. In “grantspeak,” this is about cutting out all the irrelevant information and figuring out what’s most important to your pitch, and weaving it into your narrative to strengthen your argument—all while staying within the strict confines of a word count.

By the time I graduated with my M.A. in International Development, I had built a solid understanding of nonprofit grant writing and reporting, which prepared me for my next adventure: managing and reporting on USDA and USAID food security grants for a large international nonprofit in Washington, DC. Ensuring quality reporting while liaising between an implementing team in Asia and our US Government funding partners taught me a ton about the importance of communicating expectations and realities to team members. For example “team, we need to start the reporting process four weeks ahead of the deadline as I’m delivering six reports at the same time, and we need to build in time to address any issues.” Learning to build in enough time to pivot when the unexpected happens was another valuable lesson learned—like the time a team member’s plane caught on fire, and while he and everyone on board escaped safely, his laptop with report data was destroyed.

The next year, when a situation outside my control upended this job—the job that I thought was the launching point for my long-term career as an international development professional, it felt like the end of the world. By the time I was applying for jobs again, the 2007 recession was in full swing. Hundreds of hours of applications and interviews later, the discouragement was real. On a side-note, this career break gave me the gift of time where I was able to volunteer with an organization serving people without homes. This was one of those pivotal experiences that gave me new perspective and insight.

Part 3: Starting My Own Grant Consulting Business

Being unemployed and having lots of time to reflect, I asked myself what skills I’d gained over the years. I had certainly learned a lot about grants. With the support of my ever-supportive husband, I decided to go out on my own. I landed my very first nonprofit grant writing client, who had advertised on Craigslist (back then this was a legitimate platform for finding work). It was a small start-up nonprofit combining coastal livelihood development and environmental protection, and they needed help developing a master proposal to pitch to various prospects. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my client, learning their work, and showcasing it as a wonderful opportunity for investing in a coastal community in Indonesia.

Since then, I’ve developed a passion for working with smaller nonprofits that are often early in the grant development journey. I met thoughtful, kind, smart, nonprofit leaders who are doing amazing work with limited resources; addressing critical needs like access to healthcare and housing and reincarceration in their communities— while challenging the deep-rooted systemic injustices that keep multiple generations facing the same struggles. These partners have taught me so much, not just about their missions and programs, but also through the humanity and humility and respect with which they serve their communities.

My grant journey, which began in 1999, has been a process of building brick by brick, with each experience paving the way for the next. I’ve met clients online and through in-person connections—Craigslist, Idealist, LinkedIn, casual neighborhood conversations and recommendations from past clients. The hustle of running a small business has been real and keeps me on my toes.  Here's to hoping that One Community Grant Consulting continues to create opportunities for learning and growth for all who are part of this journey!

I’m curious to know, what’s your story? What brought you here today? Please share below.