The Grant Was Due at 11:59

The Grant Was Due at 11:59 PM. We Were Locked Out at Midnight…the Night BEFORE the Deadline

Last week sucked. If you have ever written a grant, you know those weeks happen. After over 20 years of writing grants, we have a pretty high tolerance for, shall we say, adversity. But last week was a doozy, even for us. So, here’s a cautionary tale.

First of all, we already had a perfect storm on our hands. We had four major grants due last week and about six weeks to write them. A funder we have written to for years always has an early April deadline. We’ve been meeting that deadline consistently for a couple of decades. It’s inconvenient that this whopper always hits just before tax time, but we’re used to it.

Another funder is new to grantmaking and just held their third funding competition. The first time, their deadline was in September. They extended it a month once it was underway, so it became October. The second cycle had a December deadline. This particular funder has become our second biggest competition of the year, but last year, it never happened. The third cycle was extended even further and its deadline wound up falling in the same week as the other grant. Lovely.

So, our two biggest competitions of the year had deadlines the same week. We had a total of four major grants due and I needed to attend a major national conference we sponsor every year, the same week.

It wasn’t impossible. But it was close.

We planned meticulously to make this happen. 

We ensured that every client received very clear communication about what we needed to complete these grants. We set internal deadlines for getting documents and information back to us. We made sure the lead time for handling documents and information was built on a staggered schedule so we weren’t getting everything at once. We did everything we reasonably could do to make this pile of deadlines. 

The plan was to have all four grants actually submitted a week ahead of the deadlines. And that almost happened, but…

Last Monday morning, just as I was leaving for the conference, I finally received the last of the letters of support that needed to be included for the Friday deadline.

It wasn’t just a matter of adding these required attachments. There were narrative edits at play. Still, it should have been doable. But there wasn’t internet access in the exhibition hall at the conference and with thousands of people in one place, mobile hotspots weren’t working either. Hotel room internet was slower than cold molasses and trying to use a system that is already notoriously slow and unreliable on janky internet was not feasible.

We were dangerously close to missing a deadline.

But that does not happen.

Ultimately, I left the conference a day earlier than I had planned and drove back overnight. It was exhausting.

The files got uploaded. The narrative was edited. And, at 7:59 a.m. on the day of the deadline, a full 16 hours ahead of the 11:59 p.m. deadline, I logged into the system to find it was closed.

Human error. 11:59 p.m. on April 10 is not a minute before 12 a.m. on April 10. It is a minute before 12 a.m. on April 11. Fortunately, I happen to know the administrator over this particular system and I happen to have their direct email address. Gratefully, this person is outstanding and not only saw my email that came through a full hour before their workday started in another time zone, they had the system reopened within about 10 minutes. And the grant got submitted.

But this was a close one. And it was only a close call because we didn’t get what we needed by the internal deadlines we had set.