No Seriously, Read the RFP. The Whole RFP.
I know. RFPs are long. They’re often boring, and full of jargon, sometimes pages and pages of legal mumbo jumbo that only kicks in if you end up winning the grant anyway. You’re hiring a grant consultant to write it, you’re only the finance person, not the program specialist, you’re only working on one section, so do you really need to spend your time reading the whole thing?
Yep. Get a cup of coffee, put on your favorite get it done music, and read the whole RFP. Here’s why:
1. Most obvious one first – you need to know everything that has to be submitted with the RFP. Some funders do a great job of including a nice clean checklist of what must be included with the RFP, but not all of them do. And if there isn’t a checklist ready to go, you’ll need to create one, because if you missed a required attachment because it was buried in the budget description annex section that you didn’t read, your proposal will be incomplete. Worst case scenario, your proposal can be rejected because it’s incomplete, and all the other hard work will have been for nothing. Even having to slog through the most boring RFP in history is better than that!
2. RFPs have errors. I know, I know, shocking, but true. I have read RFPs that reference three different deadlines, all in turn different than the deadline posted on the RFP release website. I have read RFPs that copied and pasted instructions from a totally separate RFP in one section of the submission instructions. I have read RFPs that reference crucial required attachments that can be found in Annex C, which is mysteriously missing. RFPs are written by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. If there are errors in an RFP, it often takes a few people reading it to catch them all. So read the RFP, and watch for inconsistencies, missing pieces, and strange sections that don’t fit.
3. Your proposal is the sum of a lot of parts. Each section of an RFP has somewhat different requirements and adds a little bit of a different piece of the puzzle. But those pieces have to come together to tell a whole story, or your proposal will be disjointed and hard to understand. And that means the people working on the RFP have to have a general sense of how the different elements of the RFP come together. How does the budget relate to the program activities? How do the personnel show the core experience of the organization? How does the workplan tie the budget and the activities together? If everyone has only read the paragraph or two that relates to exactly what they are responsible for putting together, you’ll have a bunch of different elements that don’t necessarily come together.
4. RFPs often have to be cross-referenced to get a complete picture. Similar to the points made above, your workplan has to reference the four key elements listed in your activities, which must in turn reference your timeline and your staff CVs. That’s fine, but if no one is reading the whole proposal, one of those components is going to be missed, and your proposal is going to be missing a reference here and reference there, which will whittle down your evaluation score. Sometimes a few points are all it takes to get into the final round, or to get the final award.
5. The RFP will set expectations about what is required of you when you win the award. Those legalese pieces in the back that talk about reporting, and systems, and payments will not only give you an idea of what you need to know when you accept the award, but might contain red flags that you need to prepare for. Implemented projects are required to enter their data into five different systems in three different formats? Are you willing to do that? Do you need to hire more staff if you are? All better to know up front.
The good news is, reading an RFP doesn’t have to be agony. If you know what to look for, it becomes more of a hunt for clues, which can be kind of fun. Want to know the secrets to a successful RFP clue hunt? Check out our resource page for our “How to Read an RFP” Guide for tips and tricks.
