Grants.gov in a Nutshell: Pros and Cons

We made it. Grants.gov. For those of you who have been following this podcast series on How to Find Grants, you are probably ready to dive in and start finding grants. We ain’t quite ready, yet, though. Believe you, me, it’s all about getting SET up and understanding the layout of the grant world before you dive in and get overwhelmed.

You may have been using Grants.gov for years, but have only ever used it to search or apply for grants. Or you may be new to Grants.gov and have never visited the website. Either way, you are in for a real treat.

Next week we are going to go over what to look for specifically in the grants search on Grants.gov (oh, yeah, we will nerd out), but today I am going to explain the functions offered on the website and give you my favorite tools.

This is great information for you grant writers or for those who aspire to be grant writers. The reason I am breaking down Grants.gov is that it is a mammoth website for federal grants, and being such, it is very busy. As of May 2018, the website is in need of an update. It has that very busy mid-2000s website feel, with an overload of information outlined in different ways, which can lead to paralysis. Like, seriously. I have been going there for years but tend to stick to looking for grants and applying for grants. So I decided to dive in and find out the full capacity of the website, so all of us grant writers might actually use it.

The main menu has nine headers or tabs. These headers/tabs include:

• Home
• Learn Grants
• Search Grants
• Applicants
• Grantors
• System-to-System
• Forms
• Connect
• Support

The drop-downs under any of these headers contain a bunch of info. So let’s break it down in layman’s terms.

Tab #1 Home

Okay, it just brings you back to the Home Page. That’s it. Easy. But what you might find useful on the Grants.gov Homepage is that they now have a free app.  This is good for any alerts on upcoming grants or those that you started to apply to.

For those of you who prefer using your smartphone rather than a desktop, this app is very useful and user-friendly. The app itemizes searches a little bit more where there is a separate tab for eligibility at the bottom of the search rather than integrating it into the page like the desktop version. Pretty cool. You can just go to your app store on your phone and search for Grants.gov, and it will pop up.

Tab #2: Learn Grants

Grants.gov has a ‘grants learning center’ on its website and includes a community blog, articles, and a Twitter account (@grantsdotgov). The community blog offers ongoing updated information about – you guessed it – grants. The article sidebar tab is where it gets a little confusing. Once you are on the community learning page, you can click on the side to access different topics, which will then bring you to a slew of articles that may include links to PDFs, hyperlinks to relevant blogs, and so forth. The topics include the following:

• Grants 101
• Grant Policies
• Grant Eligibility
• Grant Terminology
• Grant Agencies
• Grant Systems
• Grant Programs
• Grant Reporting
• Grant Fraud
• Grant Events

There is a slew of information available, but I wouldn’t recommend sitting down in one day and reading through it all. It’s a lot of information. But there are some great resources located here that might give you the answers you need. I like that they have a Twitter account, but since I’m not on Twitter, I can’t vouch for any of their social media posts.

Pros: A lot of grant and grant-related information; on social media

Cons: It is very busy

Tab #3 Search Grants

Most of you will be using Grants.gov to search and apply for federal grants. Honestly, the other stuff is awesome, but in reality, it’s supplemental fluff. The ‘Search’ performance is great and is akin to searching on Google. For example, if you have two or more words and want the search to show up all of those words you put them in quotations. So if you are looking for youth conservation projects, you would put “youth conservation” in quotations. This helps narrow the search.

You can also narrow the search more by selecting one or more of the following:

• Opportunity status (i.e. is it a forecasted, posted, closed, or an archived grant). This is really good if you are familiar with certain grants and have a general idea of the time of year that they are awarded, want to check on old grants, or only want to know the grants that are currently open.
• Funding Instrument Type: This includes the type of funding that is offered, such as Cooperative Agreement, Grants, Other, and Procurement Contract.
  • As mentioned previously, Cooperative Agreements are grants that have a higher level of interaction with the federal government that include the feds scrutinizing your budget more closely and approving your staff and oftentimes include monthly webinars, technical assistance, and other involvement. Cooperative Agreements are very popular under research categories, and are the next most prevalent after Regular Grants.
  • A Grant is a normal grant agreement, which still includes involvement with the federal government on programmatic reporting and fiscal reporting, but it is not as interactive as Cooperative Agreements. Regular Grants are by far the most popular.
  • “Other” is a mixture of other types of grants that might include contracts, earmarked grants, research grants, and other types of funding.
  • Procurement Contracts are different than grants, as they are contracts and are legally binding agreements. As this falls under ‘procurement’, these types of funding instruments are for the feds to buy services or products.
• Eligibility: This category is very effective in narrowing down what your organization is actually eligible to apply for. For instance, if you are an IRS 501(c)3 nonprofit that is an animal shelter and provide services for stray animals, then you would click on the ‘Nonprofits having a 501(c)3 status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education’ category. If you are a city government applying for grants for urban planning, then you would click on the ‘City or Township governments’. In this way, you aren’t sifting through a huge number of grants and then finding out that you are not eligible. That’s a waste of your precious time.
• Category: This search box is for a certain type of projects that you are looking to fund. I am not going to list all the categories as there are quite a few, but to give you an idea, these include categories such as agriculture, business and commerce, housing, and science and technology. The federal agencies will include what category their grant will be under, so this narrows down your search into ‘better fit’ grants.
• Agency: The agency search box includes all of the 31 agencies that list grants on Grants.gov. These include agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense, and so forth.

If you know the exact grant you would like to apply to, you can also insert the Opportunity Number or the Catalog for Domestic Assistance Number.

Pros: The search page is super good. Love it.

Cons: None

Tab #4 For Applicants<...