A Grant Professionals’ Letter to Santa

Dear Santa:

I have been a very good grant professional this year. I crossed all my t’s, dotted all my i’s, and balanced all my budgets. I met every deadline, even the ones that moved, and filed all my grant reports on time – or almost all of them.

Santa, I hope that you will use your magic to bring a very Happy Holiday to all the other good grant professionals around the world. Specifically, will you please bring us:

1.     No more character (or word) counts! We waste countless valuable hours cutting a narrative from 1,001 characters to 1,000 or trying to explain a complex program or organization in 100 words – only to have reviewers ding us because they didn’t understand the program, or we left out one of 100 details.

2.     No more grant deadlines on weekends, holidays or between December 23 and January 15. We work very hard all week and all year and deserve these breaks! I know you understand the stress of a marathon workday to meet a deadline.

3.     Make all grants due at midnight on the due date not 5 PM, 3 PM or noon. No one will read it overnight anyway – and we can manage those last few hours without technical support if that’s the funder’s rationale for putting the deadline during the day. If we waited that long, we should suffer the consequences anyway.

4.     Make all online grant applications savable and printable. We want to review our work and save a copy of what we sent to the funder. Technology glitches happen; we want a backup just in case.

5.     Do not allow online application to reformat our work. I want the ability to intent, add spaces between paragraphs, and otherwise make the application easier to read. And, heck, while I’m dreaming, what if we could add bold, underline, italics, and bullet points to these applications?!

6.     Put all grant application information in front of the log-in screen so we can review the application and its requirements without setting up an account and logging in. And make sure the application instructions match the actual application, so we don’t have to scramble when we do log in.

7.     Make all funders send a grant decision to applicants. If we can spend hours writing an application, they can send a form letter telling us if we got funded. Better yet, make them tell us why they didn’t fund our application so we can learn and do better next time.

8.     And please, above all else, let our bosses, board members, and co-workers understand the valuable work that we do and recognize that while it may seem like we “work magic,” a lot of hard work, knowledge and skill goes into these successful applications – and the unsuccessful ones too.

Happy Holidays, Santa. I’ll leave some milk and cookies for you and carrots for the reindeer on your long night.

Until next year,

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