How To Get Your Fair Share of Government Grants

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Washington is rarely a bastion of harmony, and few issues are as contentious as the nation's war on terror. Party lines and personal views make up just a few of the divisions that contribute to the debate, but there is one factor that all sides concede: The war on terrorism cannot be fought without funding.

The reliance on federal dollars to secure the homeland has created an industry within an industry. Federal grants have become a critical channel for the distribution of much-needed dollars to state and local emergency-response organizations. And learning how to navigate those grants is a must for any agency looking to expand its homeland-security and counter-terrorism efforts.

With so much at stake, it's becoming ever more important for service providers and systems integrators to school their clients on the grants process and help government agencies--large and small--wend their way through the increasingly competitive grants environment.

At last count, there was approximately $425 billion of federal grant money available during 2005 from scores of funding sources. In addition, there were hundreds of other opportunities for securing matching grants at the local, state and national levels.

In fact, it's almost impossible to calculate exactly how much grant money is available overall, even after trawling through House Appropriations bills and reports from oversight organizations, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The prospects for further increases in grant allocation during the next two or three years are almost certain, especially in the fields of information technology, homeland security, defense, law enforcement and emergency management.

Grant-seeking has become a multibillion-dollar-a-year business and, if it were a single company, it would rank at the top of the Fortune 500. As such, the process of grant-writing has to be tackled professionally.

The most successful grant-writing teams have two things in common: good intelligence sources and highly professional grant-writers.

When it comes to grant writing, you have to be ahead of the field and on top of the game. If you are not, it can have serious consequences.

Just last month, a law-enforcement agency in Florida learned that it had lost out on a major interoperability grant allocation because it failed to include one form in the budget section of the application.

Meanwhile, a neighboring county sheriff's department, with one of the most successful grant-writing teams, was successful in its application. That agency funds a quarter of its $100 million-plus budget from grant money.

In the face of ever-increasing competition for grants, local and state authorities and agencies are faced with the challenge of developing a process that gives them a competitive edge. Research by the Homeland Defense Journal at the state and local levels shows there are still many authorities and agencies that either don't have in-house grant-writers or have ones that are too overwhelmed to pursue a lot of grant opportunities.

Dr. Bev Browning, grant consultant and author of Grant Writing For Dummies, says many authorities find grants "so totally foreign that they believe they have no way of obtaining them. On the other side, there are those who think that grants are so easy to get that all you have to do is submit the paperwork to get funding," she says. "The truth is somewhere in the middle."

In reality, Browning says, grants are accessible, the information needed to get them is accessible, and they are becoming increasingly more accessible at the federal and state levels.

"However, once you have that information, it's not just a matter of submitting some paperwork to get funding to buy whatever you want," she says. "Grants typically solve a specific kind of functional problem, and you have to make a compelling case in order to win funding. Simply saying that you want the money to replace X, Y and Z vehicles because they are old is not a compelling case. You have to explain the implications of using old vehicles and how that impacts your ability to do your job, and how upgrading would allow you to achieve your mission more successfully."

Grant-writing organizations and, increasingly, companies providing products and services to authorities and agencies at local and state levels, are offering both information and intelligence capabilities, as well as grant-writing support to assist their existing customers and attract new ones.

"This is a significant trend," Browning says. "We are seeing more vendors taking a proactive role in terms of informing their customers at state and local levels about what grants are available to fund their products and services."

Reston, Va.-based research firm Input helps buyers purchase and vendors sell in the government marketplace by promoting collaboration between government and industry. It tracks almost $600 billion in federal and state technology opportunities and works with a wide range of organizations in the public and private sectors at federal, state and local levels.

"Input's State and Local Grant Opportunities product is a valuable tool that's minimized our research time," says Amanda Day, City of Alpharetta, Ga. Police Department. "It has helped us better utilize our time to obtain homeland-security funding and enabled us to easily see where other jurisdictions were receiving grants we might also be eligible for."

NEXT: Formula-based grants vs. competitive grants.