Your organization must be prepared before you can propose and perform grants. This requires and investment of effort upfront so you position your organization to win (PROPOSE) in a highly competitive environment and subsequently comply with all of the rules, regulations and requirements (PERFORM).

To prepare you should:

• Build a capture plan

• Define your projects

• Craft goals and objectives that align with the awarding agency

• Build a winning team internally and externally

• Know the source and timing of available funding

• Take advantage of every opportunity to campaign for your project goals and need for funding.

By taking the necessary actions to PREPARE to succeed, you will develop a competitive advantage to win and keep winning grants.

It's not how you write a proposal that gets you to the win. It's how you craft a winning proposal that gets you to the win. To craft a winning proposal you must communicate:

• How your project supports the awarding agency program goals. Both now and in the future, after the grant.

• You know the Federal grant regulations so you will be a low risk for the awarding agency to manage as a recipient.

• You have a strong record of success to show you can meet the requirements of the award.

• You have trained personnel, vetted subrecipients, systems, and processes with adequate controls in place to ensure funding is expended as required and documented adequately.

That's the easy stuff. You can get a jump on that when you PREPARE. Crafting a winning proposal requires:

• Effectively managing a project with a tight deadline.

• Identifying and meeting the requirements and criteria.

• Managing a team of contributors toward a common goal (win strategy).

• Adequately reviewing the proposal to ensure it answers the requirements and is ready to compete.

To win and keep winning with a competitive advantage, you have to be prepared, craft a winning proposal, and have the ability to PERFORM Federal grants successfully.

When you perform a Federal grant you not only are managing project outcomes (objectives, deliverables, etc.) but ensuring compliance with Federal regulations. These regulatory requirements include:

• Expending funds only for allowable cost.

• Ensuring funds are only distributed to eligible recipients.

• Purchasing, managing, and reporting of equipment, supplies, and real property.

• Complying with Federal grant procurement rules.

• Tracking matching, level of effort, and in-kind contributions.

• Managing subrecipients.

• Meeting financial, program and other reporting requirements.

• Complying with Federal prevailing wage requirements.

To this end staff engaged with implementing grant awards must be charged with knowing the rules and requirements, obtaining and managing subrecipients successfully, assigning a trained staff, having policy and procedures in place with sufficient controls, and documenting evidence of compliance.