Grantopedia

Federal Agency Support for System-to-System (S2S)

By David Frackelton

There appears to be some confusion in the grant applicant community concerning how prepared the Federal Agencies are for S2S applications through Grants.gov. Since I’ve spent the last year working with a wide variety of federal agencies to make S2S work, I’ve got a few comments that should clear this up conclusively.

Common assumption #1: There are 26 Federal Agencies using Grants.gov
I’ve lost count, but it feels a lot more like 40+ Agencies. With the conspicuous exceptions of agencies like NSF and NASA, the operational activities of the Federal agencies in receiving applications are at the sub-agency or program level (such as CDMRP). In practice this means a lot of conversations with sub-agencies or agencies that operate in a distributed fashion, such as USDA or Energy. This makes for some interesting conversations. It is much more realistic to think of this group as Entities that Make Grants (EMG). I’ll use that acronym for the rest of this blog.

Common assumption #2: You have to know a lot about the EMG back office processing
This is mostly not true. The big question with any S2S submissions is asking the question, “What processing does the EMG do after they receive the proposal package from Grants.gov?” While NSF and NIH have well-developed and documented agency-specific validations, all of the other major agencies describe what they want in the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) or instructions. You already know that EMGs are quite scattered, variable, non-uniform, contradictory when it comes to the details of what they want. But they still accept the application from Grants.gov. The trick is to get the proposal technically correct, not for Grants.gov filtering but for the review committee.

Common assumption #3: The EMGs know what your talking about when you say S2S
EMGs do know what your talking about, but they are talking about their Agency S2S connection to Grants.gov, not your Applicant S2S. Many of my initial conversations with the EMGs started off with the equivalent of “oh I’ve heard about the Applicant System-to-System side but don’t know much about it.” For them, Grants.gov is like a filter separating them from the applicant side. Like anyone, they know best what immediately impacts them and my conversations with them have universally been the first technical ones about the applicant side.

Common Assumption #4: The Federal Agencies are not prepared for S2S
This is, of course, untrue and the easiest to debunk. In my interactions with many EMGs in the Federal grants eco-system I’ve found that they are all ready. Keep in mind that they already receive data from Grants.gov created in PureEdge, the S2S submissions are, from the perspective of the EMG, exactly the same data when it appears on the Agency S2S interface (see #3 above).

Sadly, this is my last blog entry for Grantopedia. I’m moving on to other ventures not related to research administration. I wish all of the great people I worked with both at Cayuse and at many institutions a joyous and productive life.

FDP/CWG Update

Part II: System-to-System (S2S)

My last post was about the status of the program to convert the PureEdge forms over to Adobe and I wrapped up by saying the NIH people made it clear that no one should plan on using the Adobe-based forms until at least June or July. You can imagine how thrilled people were to hear that. 

Those who have a S2S solution in place are largely insulated from these changes but everyone else will be using PureEdge for at least the next four big NIH deadlines (Oct, Nov, Feb and Mar), not to mention all their smaller deadlines and those at the rest of the agencies. That being true, here are some of the words and numbers people used when talking about S2S.

Between 10/01/06 – 09/02/07, Grants.gov processed around 180,000 submissions. NIH is the biggest customer with Defense being a distant second at ~9,000 submissions. Note that the number of proposals submitted is significantly lower than this because most of them have to be submitted more than once due to errors not caught by the software being used to submit them. I heard once again that people using PureEdge are needing to submit each proposal far more times than those using an S2S approach. 

This fits perfectly with what we’ve heard from a number of institutions. While they can get the job done with PureEdge, it just takes so much time. Some pre-award people said the time their staff spend reviewing, submitting, and re-submitting with PureEdge is averaging two hours per proposal at their institutions. This is one the biggest hidden costs of the clunky free-ware and it is causing major heartburn and straining budgets around the country. Two words I heard several times in this context were “unfunded mandate”.

The multiple submissions with PureEdge cause problems for Grants.gov as well as for the applicants and there are only five Grants.gov employees! All of which is just part of why Grants.gov would be very happy if everyone were to start using an S2S solution. S2S proposals are approved more quickly and have far fewer support calls. Hearing that reminded me of what I’d heard at these meetings before: the free solutions were not designed for research institutions. The investment in a S2S solution can bring big savings, “especially for those submitting applications regularly to Grants.gov”, to quote Jen Flach.