Grant Seeking Goes Paperless

As grant makers move applications to the Internet, charities find the process time-consuming and frustrating

By Eric Frazier

In the seven years that Nigel Savage had been running Hazon, a small environmental group in New York, he had never seen a grant application take so long to complete.

Mr. Savage was working with several other nonprofit groups last year to obtain a $225,000 federal grant that would help support organic farmers. But the federal government, like a growing number of private grant makers nationwide, now urges grant seekers to submit their applications online rather than through the mail.

With a complex registration process and sometimes-confusing instructions to decipher, it took the charities an estimated 100 hours — instead of up to 20 hours on paper, Mr. Savage says — to finish the online application. Shortly thereafter, the application was denied — via e-mail.

"It's incredibly frustrating to spend that much time putting information together," Mr. Savage says. "But at the same time, ultimately when it's government money being given away, we do understand that there needs to be checks and balances."

Rough Introduction

Mr. Savage's experience proved to be a rough introduction to what some experts are calling the future of grant making. About one in four grant makers now have online applications, and more grant makers appear to be slowly moving in that direction.

The approach is appealing to grant makers because it eliminates mountains of paper, saves them time, and improves their ability to track and manage grant proposals.

"I can't imagine doing it any other way," says Katherine Wilson, assistant vice president for grants at the American Legacy Foundation, which now receives more than 90 percent of its applications through its Web site.

But some grant seekers say the electronic application systems are a pain. Instead of just allowing the grant seeker to send a document crafted in word-processing software by e-mail, the systems restrict the length of proposals, allow little or no interaction with staff members of a foundation, and present frustrating technical challenges.

"We really see this as being the future," said Rebecca Joseph, director of institutional grants at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York. "Those who can adapt are going to be very successful. And those who can't are going to struggle."

'Appetite Is There'

Many of the largest foundations have pushed their applications onto the Internet, but smaller ones are struggling to catch up, says Lisa Dill Pool, who oversaw a survey of grant makers released last fall by the Council on Foundations and the Technology Affinity Group, which represents grant makers concerned about technology issues. "This has been the No. 1 technology issue for the past several years," says Ms. Pool. "The appetite is there, but foundations have been slow to adopt."

The 2007 survey showed that 28 percent of 300 foundations examined offer an online grant-application system or service, up from 22 percent when the same survey was conducted in 2005. Nearly half of those responding to the survey said enabling online grant making and providing donors with online information were their biggest technological challenges.

Diane Gedeon-Martin, a proposal-writing consultant in Gastonbury, Conn., said the move to online grant making is changing the way foundations do business.

A decade ago, she said, grant makers were trying to get to know potential grantees before accepting their grant proposals. They would invite grant seekers to meetings or perhaps have them meet with board members.

"That's been shifting," says Ms. Gedeon-Martin, who is also a faculty member at Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy. Now, "there's no discussion, no interaction, not necessarily even a phone call."

Concise Phrases

As more grant makers put their applications online, she says, fund raisers must learn to write leaner sentences and stay away from extraneous characters like bullets, which count against the preset character maximums the systems impose. The online systems give grant seekers specific fields to fill in; often, they must describe their needs or how they will evaluate their project in 2,000 characters or less. That is roughly one double-spaced page of type.

"Each one of those sections could be 10 pages on paper," Ms. Gedeon-Martin says. Online grant-application systems "are growing by leaps and bounds because grant makers realize it really helps them streamline the review process."

It can be a headache for grant seekers, though, especially those who don't know the electronic terrain. Some sites don't let the grant seeker save their information, for instance, and return to it later.

To help avoid problems, Ms. Gedeon-Martin says, she always advises grant seekers to write their proposals in a word-processing document and save it, then cut and paste sections into the fields of the electronic form.

But even those precautions sometimes fail to ensure a smooth application process.

Ms. Gedeon-Martin recalls one client she helped fill out a grant application through the federal government's Grants.gov Web site about a year ago. Hours before the deadline, they began hitting the "send" button, but their proposal would not go through.

The Web page timed them out minutes after the submission deadline passed. Ms. Gedeon-Martin found out the next day that the government's servers were acting up; her client was allowed to resubmit the application.

Many grant seekers have complained about Grants.gov, the site through which the federal government channels an increasing number of its grant applicants. The system, which went live in October 2003, has a lengthy registration process that federal officials estimate should take three to five business days to complete.

But Ms. Joseph, the Jewish Theological Seminary official, says her organization needed several weeks. Still, she adds that, as a former National Park Service official, she understands why the government and foundations have taken their application processes online.

"I can't begrudge them, because they do work hard," she says. "I think in the next three to five years it's going to be pretty much universal."

Saving Time

The American Legacy Foundation has been accepting applications online since its founding in 1999.

The foundation, which supports anti-smoking projects, often needs to churn out reports about its grant making, says Ms. Wilson, and its online system helps.

When an applicant is awarded a grant, the information from the grant seeker's application gets uploaded to the foundation's grant-management database. If the foundation needs to produce a report on the percentage of grants going to Latino groups, for example, that information is a few mouse clicks away.

"If I only had paper applications, I can't imagine being able to turn that information around in a timely manner," says Ms. Wilson.

"It just saves you a lot of time and effort when it comes to statistical questions."

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation also began taking applications online in 1999. It now encourages, but does not require, online submissions from its grant seekers, and it handles about 65 percent to 70 percent of all grant proposals online.

When grant seekers do not fit Kellogg's basic grant-making criteria — people seeking money for a personal hardship, for instance, are ineligible — the online system does not allow them to advance through the application process.

"We've found that it cuts down on our mail time and costs," says Kathy Reincke, a spokeswoman for Kellogg.

Its Web site gives applicants 3,200 characters each to explain the project's overview, its goals, and why it is important. Applicants get another 200 characters to describe the beneficiaries of the projects. Spaces and tabs count toward the limits.

Kellogg officials say that a grant seeker should be able to submit a proposal in the online system in about an hour. If the applicant uses the maximum number of characters for each field and printed the resulting document, it would be 10 pages long, Ms. Reincke says.

Easy System

When it created a new online application process last year, the John Templeton Foundation tried to devise a system that would be easy for its grant seekers to understand and complete, says Meridian Napoli, the fund's director of grants.

The foundation has a two-step process: Grant seekers complete a short application that enables the foundation to judge whether a project meets its criteria. If it does, the foundation invites the nonprofit organization to complete a full proposal. Both steps are now done through electronic forms.

Before adopting the new system, Templeton officials recruited a small group of grant seekers who had already completed applications and proposals submitted to the foundation by regular mail. Those grant seekers agreed to serve as a test group, using their pending application materials to complete the new electronic forms.

As a result, Templeton made several changes in the questions in the online documents that the test group found confusing. "We were using a lot of internal speak, and grant seekers didn't know what we meant," explains Ms. Napoli.

In another consideration to grant seekers, Ms. Napoli says, the foundation decided to let them attach a "narrative" of any length to their proposal. That way, she says, if they feel they need to say more about their project than the limited space allowed online, they can.

New Efforts

With the increasing use of online grant proposals among foundations, new efforts are under way to improve the process for both grant seekers and grant makers.

In Santa Monica, Calif., Jeff Lawrence started the Lawrence Foundation in 2000, the same year the computing giant Intel bought the communications-software firm he had co-founded more than a decade earlier.

The foundation, which has assets of about $5-million, soon found itself swamped with packages sent by overnight mail as its grant-submission deadlines approached. Its executive director — the only staff member — found herself buried in paperwork.

To help her, Mr. Lawrence developed an online grant-application system for his foundation. Then, as his son prepared for college, he created what he calls the Common Grant Application, modeled after the common admissions application used by colleges around the country.

His system, an Internet-based database, enables grant makers to receive applications online. It also allows grant seekers to review the background and interests of grant makers, who can upload details about their programs and objectives. The system also allows grant applicants to see real-time information about what projects have been approved.

About 3,000 grant-seeker accounts have been set up so far, and grant makers' information will be added to the system this month.

Grant seekers will be charged a sliding-scale fee, up to $10 per application, while foundations will pay a monthly subscription fee, ranging from $20 to $1,000, depending on the grant maker's size.

Ms. Pool, the author of the technology survey, says that grant seekers shouldn't fear the rise of online applications. She notes that banks and other corporations have been forced by competitive pressures to put basic services online.

Why, she asks, shouldn't grant makers do the same?

"We've all had to adapt to electronic ways of working," she says. "It's just a normal progression of efficiency."