Grantopedia

Positive News for Grants.gov

Some encouraging news today on Grants.gov. The House Labor Health & Human Services subcommittee tasked the GAO to continue with its studies and recommendation on Grants.gov. As reported today on the RESADM-L listserv:

The Committee directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the Grants. gov system and report to the Office of Management and Budget, HHS, and the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate its recommendations for improved system management. Specifically, GAO should recommend a business model that provides an adequate, reliable funding stream and the appointment of a unified administrative body that is delegated both control and resources.

(Thanks to Randy Legeai at Tulane for posting.) The fact that the legislative branch is getting more actively involved bodes well. This reinforces what we've heard from sources at the OMB and Grants.gov, as well as the university community: there is strong support for a single grants portal.

With proper funding and a management structure that is more responsive to the applicant community, perhaps we can look forward to continuing improvements in service and reliability. While Grants.gov is unfortunately stuck with the Adobe forms infrastructure for the foreseeable future, at least the technology landscape has stabilized.

I know the S2S community is looking for ways to continue to improve on the success we've had in web-based access to Grants.gov.  I'm sure we'll see more on this topic soon.

S2S compared to Adobe forms for Grants.gov submissions

Cayuse analyzed submission data from Grants.gov. It's clear that S2S is more reliable and more accurate for preparation and submission of federal grant proposals. Cayuse customers are already accustomed to the benefits of validating the proposal before submission. The Cayuse rejection rate is very low because Cayuse424 performs over 1,300 validations, including all the Grants.gov validations, prior to submission.

 

The rejection rate of Adobe forms is high: nearly one in ten of all grant applications on Adobe forms are rejected for errors at Grants.gov. This does not include additional rejections by the sponsoring agencies, downstream from Grants.gov.

Clearly, Grants.gov should be moving in the direction of S2S and a web-based front end.

Federal Stimulus Proposals Still Require Accuracy

The past few weeks have been busy for the federal grants community, trying to determine how federal stimulus funding will be dispersed through the various agencies. Now that we have a more complete picture, it is time, as the Grant Writing Confidential blog states, for "fast and furious grant writing". But fast doesn't mean sloppy or incomplete:

For grant applicants, this means that agencies should apply for as many grants as they can, taking great care to make sure that the applications are technically correct. Since many applicants will believe the stimulus hype and assume that everything will be funded, the majority of applications are likely to be incomplete or incoherent. Because federal reviewers will be told to get the money out as fast as possible, the review is likely to be primarily checklist-oriented, with the Program Officers throwing the garbage proposals over their shoulders. Thus, this is not the time for amateur hour submissions.

Why risk your proposal being rejected for an administrative error or oversight? With Cayuse424,proposals are validated as you work, identifying errors or warnings in the application package. You can fix the issues easily and submit error-free proposals every time, so your proposal can be judged purely on content. Since the agencies are motivated to get this money out into the economy as soon as they can, this is not time to fiddle with the submission process - let Cayuse handle that for you.

Cayuse Supports the "20% Wind Energy" Grant Application

DOE's Wind Program has issued a competitive Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to solicit projects that will help lay the groundwork for the United States to generate 20% of its electricity from wind energy by the year 2030. More info is here: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/financial.html

Cayuse customers can download these opportunities from Grants.gov, prepare their proposal in a web browser, and submit the application electronically. This is opportunity DE-PS36-09GO99009.

If you're not a Cayuse customer and are interested in a trial version that allows your organization to prepare and submit an application for this opportunity, contact us.

NIH K Awards on Grants.gov

Good news from the NIH for researchers . The NIH K Award opportunities are transitioning to electronic submission:

Career Development will transition as scheduled for the February 12, 2009 receipt date and will use the Adobe equivalent of the current PureEdge forms (“ADOBE-FORMS-A”).

That's excellent news for Cayuse customers. They'll be able to complete NIH Career Development Award applications in Cayuse424, and electronically submit fully validated, error-free applications directly to Grants.gov. The NIH K opportunities are supported in Cayuse424 version 3.6, being released in early January 2009.

If you're a researcher and your organization is not on the Cayuse platform and you'd like to try Cayuse424 for submission of the NIH Career Development (K) Award opportunities, contact us. Cayuse is offering Cayuse424 free of charge to a limited number of institutions for preparing and submitting K Award applications. This limited-availability promotion will support institutional web-based submission of NIH K grants through the Feb. 12 and June 12 deadlines.

System-to-System Advantages

Grants.gov's system-to-system (S2S) web services protocol is one of the most powerful and least used technologies available from the federal government. Unfortunately for Grants.gov, less than 10% of submissions are done via S2S. Something over 90% of submissions to Grants.gov are done via the downloadable forms in the PureEdge and Adobe formats.

Grants.gov themselves would like to see more subsmissions via S2S, presumably because they are cleaner, faster, and require less support. From the recent NCURA Magazine: 

"Grants.gov encourages the use of a system-to-system (S2S) interface for organizations and institutions with a large volume of application submissions."

Why don't more organizations use S2S? For one thing, designing and building an effective proposal development and grant application submission tool is difficult work. Just because the S2S web services specification is public, does not mean it is easy. Software in general is difficult. But when you include the hundreds of forms, thousands of fields, the validations and rules of government grant applications, the cumulative environment is enormously complex.

It can take years to build an S2S system and it frequently mystifies us why anyone would even try. Especially when our solution, humbly speaking, delivers so much value at such a reasonable price point.

Closing in on 95%

Each quarter, we evaluate Cayuse424 support for the federal funding opportunities posted on Grants.gov. The results are in from the current review.

The good news: the current version (3.4) supports 86% of the posted opportunities. In other words, customers who use Cayuse424 can prepare and submit electronically to all but 14% of what's on Grants.gov. That includes 100% of opportunities from 8 major agencies (NIH, NSF, AHRQ, CDMRP, USDA, etc.), and most of several other agencies.

The better news: version 3.5 of Cayuse424, shipping in late August, will support around 95% of the posted opportunities.

Two questions for those evaluating proposal development systems:
1. Why wait months or years for a vendor's "promised" proposal development solution, when you can have Cayuse424 in about 3 weeks?
2. You're still using PureEdge and Adobe forms?

Moving toward a National Web-based Grants System

In late March, NIH issued a Sources Sought Notice (SSN) looking for info on a Web-based solution capable of handling electronic submission proposals for the complex mechanisms.  These are funding mechanisms such as Program Projects which have not been converted to PureEdge or Adobe and are still submitted on paper using the PHS398 forms.

Cayuse responded enthusiastically to the SSN this week because it is aligned perfectly with what we do: eliminate paper and downloadable forms from the grants process. 

My humble personal opinion is that the PDF-based approach is an interim solution.  People collaborate and do business on the Web, and the Web is the way Grants.gov has to go. It's also how Cayuse424 works today, by the way. I'm happy to see NIH taking a serious look at leveraging this technology more fully.

Forms? How about a Web app?

We did a little survey of participants in the RESADM-L listserv, an email discussion list that serves the community of research administrators (RAs) at universities and colleges in the US. (The listserv archives are here.)

Grants.gov will soon be releasing a new set of downloadable forms based on Adobe technology. We wanted to gauge the impact on the RAs who are responsible for preparing and submitting proposals. This is a non-scientific survey, but it supports what we hear anecdotally all the time: that downloadable forms are inherently difficult to work with. The results of the survey are available here in PDF format.

As I've said before, Cayuse customers don't have to worry about downloadable forms nearly as much as institutions that insist on using them exclusively. There is definitely a better way.

PureEdge NOT required

The Dept. of Energy is one of many agencies that offer funding opportunities that can be completed and submitted with Cayuse424. Some of their opportunities are listed on this page along with some not quite entirely accurate information.

In fact:
- Though Grants.gov "utilizes PureEdge software", it also accepts proposals from other tools.
- Grants.gov does NOT require you to download the PureEdge Viewer to submit grant proposals.

You can use, for example, a 100% Web-based, hosted proposal development platform.

We make this point repeatedly with the agencies and prospective customers.