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Additional Resources for Grants and Proposals

The internet has been a mixed blessing insofar as prospecting for and responding to grant and contract opportunities.  On the one hand, the information is all there (if you know where to look).  On the other hand, unless you’ve been in this business for a long time, the information can be overwhelming. 

The hunt for opportunities - A changing landscape

A decade ago, large agencies had to plan ahead and publicize a regular schedule of limited solicitations via annual mailings and word-of-mouth. The internet enabled sponsors to become more agile in their offerings and deadlines. Investigators and contractors soon found they had more choices. But the burden of discovery passed to those seeking the grants and contracts. 

 

Unfortunately, with so many federal and state agencies offering up extramural grants and contracts, one could spend weeks online trying to keep up with the latest and best-fit opportunities. It wasn’t until 2002 that a centralized federal online resource, Grants.Gov, was established as a searchable clearing house to help the public. That same year, use of the business counterpart website, FBO.Gov (FedBizOpps), was declared mandatory for all federal business opportunities exceeding $25K.

 

Today, the systems are still not perfect, but they have come far. Grants.Gov boasts information on over 1,000 grant programs worth over $400B. FBO.Gov does not quote hard numbers, but if you read our primer on Federal Spending on Grants and Contracts, you will see that funds openly competed on the contracts side far outweigh those available on the grants side. A few agencies have been slow to complete their migration over to the super-websites and continue to use other announcement vehicles such as their own websites, the Federal Register, and the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA).

 

Although the Grants.Gov and FBO.Gov websites were created to also centrally process proposal submittals – a desperately needed function – you are often well-advised to get to know the websites of the agencies being serviced. Information including financial and progress reports often needs to be routed directly to the administrative website of your sponsor so it can keep tabs on your activities.

 

For the most part, states have not kept up with the feds insofar as centralizing information, but often their grant and contract infrastructure is not quite as tortuous. The internet has been a boon to foundations, companies, and individuals seeking proposals worthy of their specific missions. Indexing the diversity of opportunities and keeping these lists current is a huge task, but there are several excellent online resources including the Foundation Center, Fundsnet Services, NOZA, and, Development Director.

 

 

Help in Cyberspace

Consultants in the proposal business have done their best to keep pace with this changing landscape. You will find riches in many of their websites, but you may need to bookmark several sites to cover your range of needs. The best treasure trove we have encountered is that of Deborah Kluge (www.proposalwriter.com). Deborah has done an inspirational job of pulling together a wide variety of resources to assist inexperienced and experienced grant and contract seekers, alike.  The folks at Capture Planning (www.captureplanning.com) also maintain an excellent library of free and for-members-only articles on proposal writing and business development.

 

Rather than repeat what we have seen, Proposal Exponent will provide relevant resources that are harder to find or challenging to distill down from existing websites (see left panel of this page). 

 

Have you ever wondered exactly how many dollars the federal government awards each year in the form of contracts and grants?  How your favorite agency ranks?  Whether awards in your domain have been competed truly openly?  Who your competitors are? Click on Federal Spending on Grants and Contracts - A Big Picture Primer. We think reading this essay this will be well worth 15 minutes of your time.  

 

Do you compete for Research and Development funding from federal agencies?  Click on Federal R&D Funding – Quick Agency Profiles for an overview and up-to-date, informative capsules on how a dozen US agencies will spend over $145 billion annually on research and development. 

 

Or try the link to Hard-to-Find Resources for brief explanations of uncommon resources we have created or discovered and subjects that just always seem hard to understand. 

 

We will do our best to keep our Resource pages dynamic, with regular uploadings of new, useful information.  Please bookmark us and remember to come back and visit.

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