Knowing what the barriers to successful applications are in order to navigate around them and gain crucial funding allows communities to meet the needs of their priority populations.
Dr. Susan M. Bowler has 20+ years experience as a state administrator, a grant writer with a high rate of completion, and as a grant reviewer.
Few experts are able to map the changes in the grant application process the way Dr. Bowler can, and we are delighted to welcome her as a featured expert in the Dec 8, 2022 Provider Learning Collaborative: Grant Readiness: Are You Ready for the 2023 Federal Grant Writing Season?
EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH DR. BOWLER
Federal grants and state grants tend to be what each level of government uses to stimulate new and sometimes different ideas, specifically tailored to a particular constituency. To the extent that you as an organization want to implement these ideas and processes, grants are the principle way to create the space and overhead to do so.
If a provider were to go for a cost/benefit analysis on a decently sized federal grant at half a million or a million dollars a year for a five-year period, while it will certainly take effort for an organization and is a huge process at the state and federal levels, it can also be much more accessible than running a professionally based private fundraising campaign.
Honestly, I feel the playing field is more level now thanks to the way things have evolved over the last 20 years. There is now an enormous pressure on state, federal, and city governments to be transparent and to have predictable and fair ways of scoring applications to really make it clear that decisions are made on a professional and measurable basis, therefore increasing the likelihood of potential applicants’ success as a result of clearly defined expectations and requirements. If you put together a wonderful program and write a really wonderful grant, you now have a better chance of actually getting the funding, and at a substantial amount.
Expectations are never foolproof, however. Every one of us has had the experience over the years of getting back scores and thinking “Were these people Martians that read them?” It happens.
I would say overall that what is becoming more and more clear is that when you turn in a high quality grant that is responsive to the funding opportunity from the narrative all the way down to the required activities, you are much more likely to access that funding.
What generally happens is that a wonderful organization with very little grant writing experience will make a simple mistake, which can cost you when you don’t know that the reviewers will not read something embedded in the wrong section or you’ve put the meat of your proposal where it will not be scored.
Given the updates in the way reviewers are being trained, a small mistake matters when being in the fundable range or not being in the fundable range is often decided by a point. As competition for these funds increase and average fundable scores have risen into the 90’s, extra attention to detail is needed to make sure the application is specific and responsive to each point of the funding opportunity announcement.
The good news is this: grant application processes are now much more transparent, much more fair and therefore, I believe, more predictable, which is good for the federal funders and for providers both, as these changes are a response to a need for fairness and equity throughout the field.
Knowing what the barriers to successful applications are allows one to navigate around them and gain the crucial funding that allows communities to meet the needs of their priority populations.
