Finding out where the money is in your state or territory

To find grant opportunities at the state level:

• Visit your state government or territory website. If you search the state site and can’t find a listing of all the state’s grant opportunities, call the governor’s office and ask to be directed to the various agencies that give grants. Only track grantfunding opportunities from the agency that administers the federal programming for the type of funding that your organization is seeking. For example, a charter school will track state Department of Education grant alerts. A substance abuse prevention agency will track state Department of Health and/or Human Services grant alerts.
• Email or call each appropriate state agency. Contact the agencies responsible for carrying out legislative funding mandates relevant to your own funding needs and be sure to get on their mailing lists for grantfunding opportunity alerts.

When you receive an alert about a state or territory grantfunding opportunity you’re interested in applying for, look for the link that connects you to the grant application summary and download the complete grant application (including guidelines). Look for the following information:

• Type of application: Is it an electronic or a print application? For example, the majority of grant applications are submitted electronically via online e-grant portals; some state agencies can still only accept hard copies.
• Due date: Make sure the due date is manageable and gives you enough time to collect topic-related information and write the application. A reasonable amount of time is 30 days from the date the grantfunding announcement is published or issued via email and the actual due date of the application.
• Who’s eligible to apply: Every grant competition has a section listing the types of grant applicants eligible to apply for funds (Chapter 1 gives you a list of eligible grant applicants). If your organization’s forming structure (local education agency, nonprofit, and so forth) isn’t listed, consider partnering with an eligible applicant. (Head to Chapters 9, 10, and 11 for more on finding the right grantseeking partners.) You may also want to contact the funding agency to clarify any non-published eligible applicants because your organization may be eligible to apply after all.

• The number of grants to be awarded: You may have to call the funding agency’s contact person to find out the number of available grants; this information often isn’t included in state grant application guidelines.

  Unless you’re the only organization delivering highly specialized services/programs and have no competitors, don’t apply for competitive grant funds where fewer than three awards will be made statewide. The fewer the number of grant awards, the worse the odds are for winning an award.

All grant applicants have a fair chance of winning a state or territory agency grant award if a sufficient number of awards are available. I always ask how many grants will be awarded so I know how many ways the money will be divided. This information helps me develop a more competitive project budget — staying conservative and on the low end of the average grant range. (Browse Chapter 18 for pointers on putting together a winning budget section in your grant or cooperative agreement proposal.)

Looking for pass-through funding

At the local government level (county, town, village, township, hamlet, and city), look for public monies at the County Board of Commissioners, local Area Agencies on Aging, the Mayor’s Office on Neighborhoods (or a similar Federal Community Development Block Grant administrator), regional housing authorities (they subgrant for neighborhood-based services), your county-based department of social services, and more. All these agencies receive direct funding from state agencies and federal pass-through funding for re-granting purposes at the local level (more on pass-through funding in the following section).

Because not all funding opportunities are posted on websites that are easy to find, you want to develop connections with agency representatives to find out the inside scoop. Also, ask questions of local elected officials and track down these publicly available grant funds. Be aggressive in asking questions about what funds are available, who can apply, and who the contract person is for the agency re-granting the monies.

Discovering direct grants

The advantages to applying for a direct grant award or cooperative agreement, which comes straight from the federal government, include the following:

• Direct grants have no middlemen and none of the extra layers of red tape added by intermediary grantmaking agencies. You apply directly to the federal government for a grant in response to an announcement of the availability of funds.

• When you compete for a direct grant, you communicate directly with a program officer in a division of a federal agency. This interaction means one-on-one attention, so be sure to review the application guidelines thoroughly and then compile all your questions. You can email or call the grantmaking agency’s contact person for clarification and answers. Doing so upfront clears the way for the topic research and the grantwriting process.

  Avoid being a nuisance! Don’t call and make small talk. Have your questions ready before approaching the agency contact and ask if the individual prefers to have questions emailed. Be prepared to take copious notes. If you feel you still lack a clear answer about how to proceed, ask again.

  Some federal agencies have a deadline for submitting questions via email or by phone; read the grant application guidelines to make sure you can still make the call or email contact. If the window has passed, look at the agency’s website for a link to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Others have probably asked the same questions you have, and the agency may have posted the answer for the general public to review. Also, remember to check daily for modifications to the initially posted grant applications guidelines.

Once you identify funding opportunities that you want to track, you can sign up for Grants.gov grants and receive email notifications when the application cycle opens for forecasted funding. In order to subscribe to those notifications, you need to register for an individual account (login and password required). Then just click Subscribe in the upper-right corner of the funding opportunities Synopsis tab.

Many federal agencies host a technical assistance call or webcast in which potential applicants can participate. In this forum, program staff members responsible for the grant application typically provide an overview of the application notice, highlighting key points of information, and then open the call to questions from potential applicants. These discussions provide a great opportunity to hear from program officers, ask questions, and learn from the questions of other applicants. You can find the date, time, and access information for any webinar in the full Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) announcement, Request for Proposal (RFP), Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), or Request for Application (RFA), as well as on the funding agency’s program-specific website. It’s important to participate in these webinars to hear the full scope of what’s expected in a grant application recommended for funding.

Look for a link to the Full Announcement on the Related Documents tab in the View Grant Opportunity page (the same link you clicked to view the Synopsis). Figure 4-1 shows you what to expect when you’re on the Grants.gov site, perusing a NOFA, RFP, FOA, or RFA.

The one major disadvantage to applying for a direct grant award is that they’re tough to win. You compete with other grant applicants from the 50 states and all the U.S. territories. If the feds are only planning to award money to ten grant applicants, your chances are slim — even with a stellar funding request. You may even be competing with state agencies, which further narrows your chances. Urban and rural poverty pockets receive first priority for most social-services-related program funding (such as housing, education, and health and human services) and other grantmaking areas earmarked for social-issue hot spots. If you aren’t proposing services in one of these high-needs geographic funding areas, your chances of winning a federal grant from a competition that gives 5 to 25 extra review points to high-needs, census-data-supported geographic areas are reduced to almost nothing. Not all funding programs have these types of service priorities.

Using the eligible applicant criteria to track the funding stream

Pass-through grants have two advantages:

• When you apply for pass-through grant funds at the state level, you compete against other grant applicants in your state only. As a result, you encounter considerably less competition than at the federal, direct grantseeking level.

• When you’re making an appearance before the state agency program staff, you can get info on previously funded grants. Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), all government agencies must provide requested public information to the requestor (you, the public), so don’t feel like you’re being a bother. Make sure the list contains the grant recipients and award amounts. And ask for a copy of a successful grant application from a previous competition. Knowing how winners write can boost your chances.

  You can use the FOIA to obtain information about all types of grants funded by any government agency.

The only disadvantage to applying for pass-through grants is that the grant awards are often smaller than those for a direct grant. The legislation determines the award allocation. So, it’s a trade-off: Pass-through awards are smaller, but they’re also easier to win.

Pass-through grant awards can be significantly smaller than direct grant awards because the state takes money off the top of each federal grant to cover administrative costs. Then the amount that’s left must be divided geographically and politically. For example, grants may go to certain areas of a state or territory because those areas haven’t won many grant awards recently. The money may go to other areas because that district’s state senator or representative has a lot of power and influence with a state agency. Like it or not, politics can have a major influence over grantmaking.

Knowing the difference between competitive and formula grants

To win a competitive grant or cooperative agreement, you must compete with other grant applicants for a limited amount of money. A team of peer reviewers (experts and laypeople who apply to read and score grant applications) looks at your application and decides how many points you receive for each narrative section in the body of the grant request. The applications with the highest scores are recommended for funding. (See Chapter 11 for details on the peer review process for grant applications.)

A formula grant (a fill-in-the-blanks, no-brainer form), on the other hand, is money disbursed by a state agency or municipality to a grant applicant based on a preset standard or formula.

A great example of formula monies is a grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program (not to be confused with the military’s Judge Advocate General Program) is the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions. The program provides monies to states, territories, tribes, and local governments, which they in turn use to support program areas including law enforcement, prosecution and courts, prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, planning, evaluation, technology improvement, and crime victim and witness programs. All JAG allocations are calculated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) based on the statutory JAG formula and displayed on the JAG website each fiscal year.

Learning your way around Grants.gov

Every day you can receive a free email alert from Grants.gov announcing grantfunding opportunities from any of the federal grantmaking agencies. Just log on and subscribe. Simply choose one or more agencies and wait 24 hours to start cruising through the daily list of federal grant announcements.

Here’s how Grants.gov can help you find federal grant monies for your organization:

• You can search for current and past grantfunding opportunities. Log on daily and check for postings in your area of interest. A subject search (for example, “housing,” “legal services,” or “after-school programs”) is the easiest way to narrow down specific grant competitions in your project or program area. I like to use the Newest Opportunities tab on the homepage. It allows you to double-check for federal funding availability alerts you may have missed.
• You can register for notification of grant opportunities. Subscribe to a daily email alert. Look for the Manage Subscriptions link at the upper right of the homepage.
• You can browse through the Applicants tab (at the top of the homepage) to look at all sorts of materials. For example, you can learn about the Grants.gov workspace, apply for grants, track your application, or click one of the resource links for grant eligibility, individual and organization registrations, applicant tools and tips, applicant FAQs, submitting UTF-8 special characters in your upload filenames, Adobe software compatibility, and encountering error messages.

You can also apply for grants directly through Grants.gov after you’ve reviewed the Apply for Grants link under the Applicants tab and completed the registration process.

You must be registered in order to upload your grant application documents to Grants.gov.

After registering, you can do the following:

• Prepare to apply for grants. Click the link provided for a grant and read the full announcement. If it fits your organization, you can download the grant application package.
• Access active grant application packages. In addition to the required forms, you can also access lists of FAQs regarding each grant. Usually, these questions originate at the funding agency’s technical assistance call or webcast (see the earlier section “Discovering direct grants” for more on these discussions).
• Download, complete, and submit grant application packages online through the e-grant system portal. Grants.gov gives you links to download the grant application forms or complete the forms online. You can also submit your entire grant application online, including uploading your narrative and attachments in the requested formats.
• Check the status of an application submitted via Grants.gov. After you submit your grant application package, you can check back frequently to see whether your request has been accepted or rejected.

For more on federal grant application packages, turn to Chapter 5.

Understanding forecasted funding announcements

When you’re searching for grantfunding opportunities on Grants.gov, you will see that there are four types of Opportunity Status listings:

• Forecasted: A forecasted grantfunding opportunity is a planned or projected funding opportunity from a federal agency. The agency is giving you advance notice that a funding opportunity is on the way. There is not a guarantee that the forecasted funding opportunity will materialize into a posted funding opportunity. You can track forecasted opportunities by subscribing to any changes made to a specific opportunity. Figure 4-2 shows what a grant search screen looks like for forecasted funding opportunities.
• Posted: A published funding opportunity seeking eligible grant applicants to apply for federal funding.
• Closed: A published funding opportunity that has ended. No more grant applications will be accepted until the opportunity opens again (typically, annually around the same time).
• Archived: Once a funding opportunity is closed or deleted, the Grants.gov workspace continues to be available to allow applicants to reuse their form data to populate forms in other workspaces.