The Fund Finder News
Public Safety Grants Consulting
The Fund Finder News
A Bi-Weekly Grants News and Information Update By Kurt Bradley
Issue 14, November 5, 2004
"What Was Wrong with My Grant Application?"
What separates a successful grant application from a rejected one? What did one department do right, or do better than another? What difference does a grant professional make?
During the 2004 AFGP application period I intentionally worked with some departments who had previously been unable to attain success with their grant applications. I did this for a few reasons:
- To demonstrate that using a grant professional ensures that your application is the strongest it can possibly be
- To show people that the system of federal grants is in fact understandable and not some big mystery
- To find out what mistakes the departments were making, so that my future advice to departments incorporated the lessons learned from those past mistakes
As of this writing we are now in AFGP Award Round 19 of a projected 50-60 rounds of funding. The efforts I have made for those departments are fast becoming evident. Out of the 18 departments that I worked with, 10 have already received their awards, and we are not even halfway through the funding rounds yet. Some of these departments had applied, and been rejected, for the same funding 3 times in a row. What was going wrong?
Fatal Flaws
So what were the "fatal flaws" that I saw while working on these applications?
- Failed to identify and address program priorities. The biggest mistake was a distinct failure to properly address the priorities of the grant program itself. A number of the departments did not recognize the stated priorities of the program guidelines. Reading and re-reading the grant guidelines document is a must, in order to identify exactly what the program was trying to accomplish.
- Focused only on their department needs and not on how their needs matched the grant program priorities. Many departments made the mistake of trying to match their needs instead of matching the program's priorities. For example, the primary focus of the AFGP was to increase or enhance firefighter safety, yet many of the departments were getting rejected in the preliminary computer scoring by failing to list any firefighter related injuries. If the primary focus was firefighter safety, and you list that you had "0" firefighter-related injuries, what can you expect the reviewer, or in this case the computer, to decide about your department, but that you must be a safe operation and not in need of funding.
- Misunderstood what the USFA considers an injury. Many departments mistakenly thought if a firefighter did not require medical treatment or did not miss any work, then this was not an injury. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. According to multiple sources from USFA, the following are just a couple of examples of what constitutes an injury:
- If it bleeds, it is an injury. It did not matter if you licked the scratch and put it back in your pocket or stuck a band-aid on it and went on with your duties. It was still an injury.
- Smoke inhalation. Many applications requesting SCBA equipment didn't list firefighter smoke inhalation injuries. Smoke inhalation is just that – inhaling smoke. How many times have you been fighting a structure fire and a wind shift pushed the smoke column into you? You got a good couple of breaths of it, and had to bail out for a few minutes. Maybe you just went to the clean air and breathed and returned to service; maybe you had to sit on the back of the rescue truck and suck in some oxygen, but in the USFA's view, you had just sustained an injury.
- Minor injuries count too. How many of you have tripped over a hose, or stepped off a ladder wrong and gotten a minor ankle sprain? You probably just limped around for a day or so, but whether or not you sought further treatment (such as went to the doctor or hospital) it was still a reportable injury.
- Did not document injuries. Further to the above, if any injury, no matter how small, was not recorded on the incident report, then you could not report it in your application. As we all know, the fire is not over till the paperwork is filed. Complete and accurate records are a must when researching and providing statistical data for these grant applications – including those minor cuts or a few breaths of smoke.
- Failed to fully profile/describe the community and the department's responsibilities. Many departments failed to adequately describe their communities and responsibilities. When you write a grant, you are painting a picture with words and statistics for the reviewer. You must create a clear mental picture to the reviewer who is reading your grant. They must see how various things in your community adversely affect your department so they can better understand your particular circumstances and needs.
A Perfect Example
Somerton, Ohio VFD was a prime example of unique needs in a unique community. Here was a very needy, small department in rural Ohio. They had tried for a number of years to get a truck to replace their aging equipment and were having no luck in doing so. When I first examined their grant application it was not all that bad. They had the required elements, but it lacked "eye appeal". There was no "make 'em bleed, make 'em cry" statement within the narrative.
I approached this problem by interviewing the Chief and asking about the community. I was trying to find that one thing that would make their application stand out. It took several minutes to find it, but when revealed it was the major thing that was missing from their applications. Suddenly they went from a mediocre application, to "OH MY GOD" status!
What had previously been missing from their application was that they served a population of Amish farming communities. Those of you who are unfamiliar with the Amish religion should know the Amish do not use modern conveniences such as electricity, phones, radio or TV. When a young Amish family buys a farm, one of the first things they typically do is strip out all of the electrical wiring in the farmhouse.
In addition, they heat their homes with wood-burning stoves and read by the light of kerosene lamps. Since there is no electricity they have no fire alarms or smoke detectors. Nor do they have a phone with which to summon the fire department when a fire breaks out – a frequent occurrence. They usually have to send a speedy youngster running to the closest modern farm to summon aid, delaying the call. By the time the fire department arrived, many of the farms were fully engulfed.
To make matters worse, many of these families have no electricity for running pumps from their water supplies, so the responding fire department must transport ample water to the scene. After the first delay of getting the fire call out, this added difficulty just meant further destruction to the farmhouse due to lost time.
The department's previous applications had failed to mention this crucial factor. They had presented an application which was for all purposes a B/W photo, when what they needed was an 8x10, 8-mega pixel, color, glossy photo for the reviewer. Once we re-worked their narrative to include these facts, well, the results speak for themselves: in Round 19 of the funding awards, Somerton VFD received approval for a new $195,000.00 tanker.
Know Your Community
Understanding and explaining your community and its circumstances is critical to imparting the right information to the reviewer. They cannot help you fix what they do not know is broken. You just simply have to tell them. It is important to discover everything about your community.
Conduct an inventory of your community when you begin researching grants for these types of funding streams. Some things you should always know about your community and primary response area include:
- Your population served
- Their median family income
- The square mileage of your primary response area and the mutual aid areas
- Major chemical manufacturing or usage in industrial factories
- Haz-Mat conditions
- Propane storage farm capacity
- Pipelines
- Major highways, traffic counts and accident rates
- Major electrical production facilities and hydroelectric dams
- Navigable waterways and bridges crossing them
Many of the items listed above are considered by DHS to be "critical infrastructure", a term frequently used throughout the AFGP guidelines document and one of the items that add "priority" or higher points when addressed within the grant application.
When researching a grant, take a good hard look at everything that affects your operations. Things like "mountainous terrain" or "numerous snow days" add "confirmation" to the reviewer's painted picture of your needs. Knowing that you have a problem and then effectively visualizing this for the reviewer, through proper and sufficient detail, is critical to funding success.
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