Much has been written about researching and writing grants but not enough about the actual application process. Almost all grants are submitted online yet the process varies widely from the federal site grants.gov to various state sites (e.g. New Jersey’s SAGE) to the numerous private and corporate foundations that use private vendors like Zoom grants or Submittable or Benevity or dozens of others. Some are more intuitive and easier to use than others, and while none of them are great, some are truly terrible.
We recently submitted an application to a state agency. The portal had 19 steps/pages but there was no way to see what was on each page until you got there. Funders, for the love of all things holy, please ensure that you have a PDF of all of the questions available for applicants. I could not even count how many times we’d get to a page, click to answer, and have a new page pop up with additional questions. That same portal crashed every third page or so. An application that should have taken a day to upload took weeks since many of the surprise questions required attachments that needed to be either filled in or hunted down.
You may be thinking that perhaps the state agency was forced to choose whichever vendor was the lowest bidder and they got what they paid for; surely the process works better at the federal level. I assure you, it does not. Long ago each federal agency had their own rules and processes for how grants were submitted. Grants.gov emerged in 2022 as a central online portal for finding and applying for federal grants, aiming to streamline access to opportunities across agencies. This was a great idea as each agency had their own portal, which meant that we used Fastlane when applying for a grant from NSF and ERA Commons when applying to certain HHS grants and so on. A one-stop for researching and applying for grants was sure to make things easier. And it did! So naturally the agencies started moving away from it a few years ago and we are once again forced to contend with individual portals but worse. For example, for some agencies we now have to begin the application in grants.gov but it must be finished in JustGrants. The NEA has a similar bifurcated 2-system process and I cannot say enough about how cumbersome and awful these systems are. There was nothing wrong with grants.gov and yet here we are.
A final dishonorable mention goes out to any of the private foundations using a portal that does not allow a grant seeker to see the questions in advance or even save and go back. There are 0 reasons for requiring an application to be completed all at once with no chance to PDF out the document for review.
It’s hard enough applying for grants, there can be no justification for making it even harder.
Shore Points Grant Professionals 