The Fund Finder News
Public Safety Grants Consulting
The Fund Finder News
A Bi-Weekly Grants News and Information Update By Kurt Bradley
Issue 6, July 16, 2004
"Rejection of Your Grant"
You have been sitting on pins and needles for three months now, waiting to hear if your grant was funded or not. The letter has just arrived from the "funding source" and the news is bad – you have been declined funding. What are you going to do now?
Outside of the string of epithets being hurled across the station house, you need to take a breath and resign yourself to having lost a battle, but not the war. There are other methods, funding sources and alternatives. You can sit back and lament, cry in your beer or decide that grants are not worth all the hard work you just did or, you can suck it up and carry on.
Competition for grant money is fierce, and this is not a place for wimps or crybabies. Big deal, so you took one on the chin. You didn't get knocked out. Are you going to throw in the towel now? Cowboy up, buckaroo!
Learn From Your Mistakes
Government agencies and the private sector are notoriously famous for just sending a "blanket" letter of denial to you. They may or may not tell you in the letter what you did wrong or why they refused to fund your project.
Sometimes you have to read between the lines of what they send you, or pay attention to subtle details. You should look for clues such as "your program does not meet our current criteria". A message such as this means you have failed to address the funding source's "priorities". Go back over the original RFP or NOFA and critique yourself on addressing those priorities.
Sometimes you can tell by the date you received the letter. Last year, if you had received a rejection letter from FEMA regarding the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program before December, you could almost bet on the fact that your grant never made it through the initial computer scoring process. That means it was not considered to be "competitive". It also means a human being never even read it!
Examine the numbers you put into the questions at the beginning of that application process. Many of the departments I have talked to, that received rejection notices, had placed a "0" in the "number of firefighter injuries" column when the grants main stated priority was to " prevent firefighter injuries and increase firefighter safety". Too many Chiefs were worried that their Workman's Comp insurance would go up if they reported their actual injuries, no matter how minor they were. In this particular instance, failure to show that you had any injuries hurt your chances for funding from a source that had firefighter safety as a primary objective. The Workman's Comp issue was actually a non-issue – they were not the ones reading your grant application.
If you have a friend at the Federal or State level in one of the funding sources offices (remember what I've said before about making contacts), try to call them and get their feedback on what you did wrong. Honor their confidentiality with you and take what they tell you to heart. Remember, they have no reason to withhold grant money from you – it is their job to give it away.
Persistence
Just as a cowboy has to learn to climb back on the horse that just bucked him off, you too must be as persistent. There is always more than one funding source; there are always other grants to be applied for. Rejection of your grant by one funding source does not necessarily mean it will be rejected by another funding source. It may just be that the funding source ran out of money!
Let's face it, when you have 8,500 grants to give away and 22,500 agencies apply for them, someone has to win and someone has to lose. "No" does not mean never. It may simply mean, "Not this time. Try again!" I have seen grant applications rejected 2-3 times and then get funded on the fourth try, without a word of the grant application ever being changed.
You just can't give up. Try, and try again! Even a good professional grant writer will only average 33.3 % of their grants being funded – and we do it for a living! You should not feel bad that your first couple of tries at the grants game results in a rejection notice. Live and learn.
Critique The Application
Give a couple of copies of your rejected grant to a few others in your community. Don't give it to another officer in your department or your city manager. Give it to the local high school English teacher or that friend of yours who is a bank vice president. You can also send it to me, and I will look at it for you. Ask their opinions and listen to what they tell you. This is a process that I always recommend you do before you submit the grant. If you did not do this to start, now is a good time to start. What lessons you learn from this exercise can be eye-opening.
Keep an open mind about what they are telling you. Maybe you got too technical, and the average Joe could not understand the "jargon". Maybe you did not paint a clear enough picture of the department's financial need.
Rejection is a hard pill for anyone to swallow. Too many walk away after being rejected, and this is simply the wrong tactic to use. Get over it and get on with it! The effort you expend will eventually pay off.
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