Understanding the Federal Review Process
CharityChannel.com  Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Sarah S. Brophy

The length of the federal review process has always frustrated my clients and me. That silence following the deadline is so profound.

This is how I explain it to them. The comments here are mix of my own experience applying for these grants, information from the agencies’ websites and staff, or comments from peer reviewers for each of the following agencies:

• Department of Education (ED)
• Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• And the National Science Foundation (NSF)

My most basic conclusions are:

• your comfort level with federal applications increases with your understanding of the bureaucratic demands of the federal process
• it is foolish not to let the agency staff to help you design a responsive proposal
• they expect successive applications
• and being a reviewer is a huge, marvelous experience.

Please use the information here as examples of how it may be done at an agency, not as verbatim. Programs within agencies may have slightly different formats, and rules can always change before you apply. Of course, as conscientious grant applicants you were planning to call your agency before applying for funding anyway….

Understanding Agency Conditions and Processes

Most agencies describe the review process somewhere on their website. NEA has a beautifully simple interactive chart on its “apply for grants” page of www.arts.gov. The Department of Education www.ed.gov has a page under “orientation” answering questions about reviewers, criteria for scoring the applications, what the in-office review process is, how score sheets and scoring work, and reasons why sometimes high scores don’t win. “Each reviewer reads and scores a group of assigned applications. After the reviewers score the applications, the grant team conducts an internal review to assure that the reviewers’ scoring sheets are correctly completed and that the application meets all the requirements of the program.” At the bottom of the Web page they note, “The Department must follow carefully its own procedures, as well as requirements established by Congress and OMB, in reviewing applications and awarding grants. We must assure that the review and award process is fair to all applicants.”

The NOAA website provides a schedule of the process segmenting the time from mid-August to early spring. After the reviewers do their job in the first seven weeks there’s still five months of work left: a month for a merit review from the government agencies involved; then one or two months for pre-award negotiations with recommended applicants; then three months for final staff reviews, final recommendations to the grants division at NOAA and the official awards. This six-to-seven month period is typical for the agencies I reviewed.

Agency Staff as Allies: Meetings, Calls, Drafts & Successive Applications

The NEA, IMLS and NEH staff, and apparently many of the others want you to stop in if you’re visiting Washington (after making an appointment) so that they know who you are, about your organization, and if you have any plans for applications. If you can’t get to Washington, do call. They can make sure your project is eligible, and tell you if there are issues in the design that make it less competitive.

It’s a huge bonus if the staff will review a draft proposal. They usually prefer to comment by phone, describing strengths, weakness and real problems. It’s take less time than writing you a letter and is more helpful because you can discuss their recommendations to be sure you understand and even float a ideas of how you’d make changes in the final proposal. It’s not a guarantee of funding, but it’s a great help. The guidelines will note if they read drafts.

If you don’t get an award, take a day or two to read the comments, let the deadline roar subside in the agency office, and then call to ask if you can make a date to discuss your proposal and how you can make it better next time. Remember, they’re from the government and they’re there to help.

The NEA & NEH staff is very willing to discuss unsuccessful applications and the reviewers’ comments after the fact to help you understand the process. NEH staff will send you a letter explaining the process and including the panelists' comments, should you request it.

IMLS, too, is very willing to schedule a phone chat to discuss reviewers’ comments after an unsuccessful proposal. That conversation is invaluable for understanding how reviewers and the staff interpret projects and proposals. Though your next set of reviewers will be entirely different, you can develop a general understanding of the questions they ask and the discussions they have. Remember; write with the audience in mind.

A Reviewer’s Life

Being a reviewer is simultaneously wonderful and (almost) punishing. We should all volunteer for reviewer work to help out and because reviewers learn a great deal about the process and about good (and bad) proposal writing. The rewards do outweigh the costs, but let’s be explicit about the time involved so that you can appreciate why this takes so long, and just what a contribution reviewer’s make to the federal process.

On deadline day the staff checks proposals for timeliness, completion and applicant eligibility. Then they finalize review panels according prevailing factors – perhaps project budget and institutional size, certainly by topic and/or category, and often by geography. Agencies find reviewers through public calls for reviewers, selection from state or regional agency review boards, or from lists of principal investigators (PIs) currently working on funded projects. In one of NOAA’s programs on Marine Mammal research and protection, west coast scientists review east coast applications, and visa versa.
The agency staff sends review copies (the ones you prepared) to panelists electronically or on paper, sometimes in both formats. Reviewers typically have two to three weeks to review and comment upon their lot of proposals. Now remember, you and I submit narratives 10 to 30 pages long, with 5 to 20 pages of attachments: abstracts, support letters, permit letters, budget justifications, board lists, CVs, etc. A reader can expect 5 to 20 proposals.

Some agencies’ reviewers meet by conference call, or visit DC for sessions lasting from one day to five. Most agencies mix these methods among their programs. Susan D. Smith, Consultant in Philanthropy from New York State (of Charity Channel fame) commented that for her twelve DOE proposals she spent at least “40 hours worth of reading, reflecting, writing/analyzing and scoring” before the conference-call panel discussions. Minda Borun, Director of Research and Evaluation at The Franklin Institute Science Museum, and an NSF reviewer, agrees that it’s four to six working days of reviewing proposals and submitting their comments to the panel.

Susan’s ED panel submitted their scores to the website and then finished the review in three, yes three, conference calls. During Minda’s NSF review process there were four panels of 20 members each: web projects, community based projects, science exhibits, and a more general grouping of interdisciplinary projects. Panelists had two and a half days of review discussions. It began with a reminder of the criteria, guidelines, and any other expectations; and a caution about the number of applications and the funding available. In the Panel Room reviewers have personal terminals and keyboards with all the FastLane (the NSF electronic proposal submission program) summaries and comments accessible for discussion. Program officers shepherd each panel and help with computer issues. No one goes home until the work is finished.

During an NSF review it's possible that some reviewers are aware of the work of the PI or submitting organization and comments about the quality of the work, research, publication or program are permitted during the panel. If panelists have financial or other specific ties that would preclude a fair review, conflict of interest rules prevent them from writing reviews or participating in the deliberation. Of course the panel's recommendations must be based on specific strengths and weaknesses relative to the NSF review criteria.

Such discussion isn’t allowed at every agency, though. At ED and IMLS outside knowledge of an institution or a person is not admissible during review. So checkout your agency’s policy and use it to your advantage.

At IMLS, for the Museums of America application, field reviewers work at home and send their comments and ratings to Washington. The staff standardizes the scores and ranks the applications. In DC a sitting panel of museum professionals then reviews the top-ranked applications and makes the funding recommendations. Other IMLS grant programs have a sitting panel review in DC followed by an overview panel reviewing the work of many sitting panels. In all cases IMLS Director makes the awards decisions based on these peer reviews.

Whenever I speak to reviewers or listen to them at conferences they say that

- someone on the panel always finds the anomalies in the budget; inconsistencies in scheduling, or perhaps a planning weakness other panelists missed

- it’s surprising how proposal weaknesses, inconsistencies an cover-ups are so obvious to reviewers

- and that the most common errors are failure to read or follow directions, and to build a budget that matches the narrative.

Every agency has a different ranking system, but it’s clear that in only rare occasions does any fund an application with the equivalent of a high school “B”. Only “A” and “A+” work gets the go-ahead.

Six-to-Nine Months Later….

Let’s not forget the last piece – the award announcement. After all these months of deliberation and rating, the final result will appear on most agencies’ websites at a given date and time (I’m surprised the websites don’t crash within minutes). They will always send a follow-up letter, saying “yay” or “nay,” often explaining why. Every once in awhile, they call you. Your heart may stop when the staff says who they are, but I promise it starts again when that someone says “yes!”.

Copyright © 2010 bMuse, Sarah S. Brophy