Grants.gov Reaches 200,000 Application Submissions!

On Monday September 22, 2008 Grants.gov received the 200,000th electronic grant application submission for fiscal year 2008, far exceeding a core program milestone in the fourth quarter and reflecting a significant increase from last year. During the same period of fiscal year 2007, Grants.gov received 172,058 submissions; which reflects a 16 percent increase. This landmark achievement illustrates the institutionalizing of Grants.gov for finding and applying for federal grants, and exhibits that the program eliminates the need for grant seekers to learn and comply with multiple agency systems and requirements. The result is a simplified and effective environment for the grant community to find and apply for grants.

Successful ORC metadata update

The ORC metadata update was successfully implemented and all Grants.gov services were back online before 7PM yesterday.

Statistics..."In the last 30 days..."

In the last 30 days, Grants.gov has experienced...

1. 832,505 visits...
2. The 832,505 visits came from 196 countries/territories...
3. 639,432 or 71.64% were absolute new visitors...and
4. There were 2,384,907 page views with 1,731,119 being unique page views
5. Now contrary to the misinformed article below, note the following operating systems that accessed Grants.gov...
   1. Windows 791,350 95.06%
   2. Macintosh 36,480 4.38%
   3. Linux 2,008 0.24%
   4. iPhone 950 0.11%
   5. Danger Hiptop 830 0.10%
   6. (not set) 297 0.04%
   7. PalmOS 198 0.02%
   8. Playstation 3 136 0.02%
   9. iPod 114 0.01% and #10. Nintendo Wii 51 0.01%

The facts speak for themselves as to the site's versatility...

New! Troubleshooting Tips Page: Find Help with Technical Issues

We have established the following resource to help applicants who may be experiencing problems when submitting. You can call our Contact Center as well Monday - Friday 7:00 A.M. - 9:00 P.M. ET at 1-800-518-4726.

http://www.grants.gov/help/trouble_tips.jsp

Central Contractor Registration

The Central Contractor Registration (CCR) will be unavailable on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. EDT for installation of their next release. CCR’s release notes can be found at: https://www.bpn.gov/ReleaseNotes/

Registering with CCR is the second step of the overall process to register as an Authorized Organization Representative (AOR) with Grants.gov. An applicant must register or obtain their information from CCR in order to continue through the overall registration process. For more information on the registration process with Grants.gov and CCR, please visit the “Register with CCR” page: http://www.grants.gov/applicants/org_step2.jsp.

Anticipating the "Adobe Future"...

At this morning's staff meeting, I asked that we move 100% to an "Adobe mindset."

What does this mean to you, the reader, today? Nothing, today.

What does it mean to you, the reader, tomorrow? If tomorrow is defined as the coming weeks & months, then you can expect: the requirements for the Adobe Reader to be upgraded from a minimal version of 7.0.9 to something much more current and a more dynamic form with a built-in capability to use the built-in Adobe Reader features listed in http://www.acrobat.com/.

Stay tuned!

Putting things in perspective...

There is so much misinformation published, it is a constant echo that serves little good. The referenced article, although recently republished, merits updating.

We seven in the PMO are responsible for ensuring that nearly twenty percent of the Federal budget, >$526 billion, expended annually via grants in >900 programs in 26 grant-making agencies get out to the public.

All things considered, we do a fairly admirable job. For the record, the Grants community has and or is moving away from PureEdge. IBM did an admirable job at adapting PureEdge to Mac - and they ought to be commended for their efforts. Their efforts occurred a long, long time ago. The transition will to Adobe, nearly 80% complete, be be finalized by December 31st, 2008. We have no records, from applicants or agencies, documenting recent problems expressed in the article. But if problems have recently been experienced, we would like to hear of them and address & fix them.

As for the cost, well - suffice it to say the taxpayer's monies are very well spent; Grants.gov costs less than 0.000026% of the total Grants monies it services. What a metric to define success.

On a typical day >350 transactions are conducted at the Grants.gov website.

On a particularly active day >2800 transactions are conducted at the Grants.gov website.

On a typical day Grants.gov disseminates 615,881 emails to its customers. To date, >30,000,000 emails have been sent in FY2008.

As of April 30, 2008 Grants.gov is supporting 11,957 open opportunities with 66,147 forms supporting the opportunities.

And there is more...

The Grants.gov Advantages.
- Principal beneficiary: Public

• Permits one-stop-shopping for public (vice the former method wherein public had to access >100 sites) to review of federal grant opportunities
• Inasmuch as the presentation of grant opportunities can be standardized, they now are (prior to Grants.gov, this was not the case)
• Federal grant-related forms are now standardized & maintained by Grants.gov

- Beneficiary: Grantor departments and agencies

• Grant-making redundancy significantly reduced
• Dollar savings to federal government estimated in hundreds of millions of dollars; more than enough to pay for Grants.gov

- Beneficiary: federal government

• Grants.gov brought a change in culture of government grant-making operations
• Grants.gov assisted in bringing grant-making departments and agencies to come together and cooperate for the first time & the cooperation between and amongst the departments via the GMLOB and GPC has never been richer and more productive

To say I am proud of Grants.gov is an understatement. We're doing well and know it. We can do better and we know this also.

NSF, NIH Award Ecology of Infectious Disease Grants

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have announced $16 million in funding for eight projects under the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (EID) program, a multi-year, joint-agency effort now in its ninth year of funding. More...

Just a passing comment...

Dealing with Grants on a daily basis, we get to see a bit of everything and everyone...from today's grant opportunity dealing with the burning of the winter roosting site for monarch butterflies (funding opportunity - N62473-08-R-MONARCH) to an understanding of the trials & tribulations folks might be encountering as a result of Hurricane Ike (funding opportunity - AHPG-FY09). For what it is worth, this could only happen in America.

Grants.gov Maintenance September 20 - System Impact

Grants.gov will be unavailable Saturday, September 20, 2008 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM ET in production due to system maintenance. The system will be unavailable to find and apply for opportunities during this time.

The maintenance taking place is to install the SunOS 5.10: kernel patch on the database servers. We apologize for any inconvenience.

September 30/October 1 Submissions - Two Busy Days

There will be a record number of closings on September 30th and October 1st, 2008. This means the Grants.gov system will likely be working at maximum capacity.

While we attempt to encourage the agencies to spread-out their closings, we were unsuccessful this year. (Next year, we hope, will be a different story.)

• HHS-ACF has 63 closings on September 30.
• EPA has 101 closings scheduled for October 1.

We, however, must deal with the present situation before us. I am, therefore, encouraging everyone who will be making a submission to do so at the earliest opportunity. Please do not wait until the last minute lest you get caught in the proverbial log-jam.

If you encounter difficulties, please contact the Call Center, 1-800-518-4726. Hours of Operation: Monday-Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. The advantages to engaging the Call Center are: 1) all calls are documented and if your submission should be late or unsuccessful, you will have a record for documenting an appeal - if your Grantor agency has an appeals process (some do not allow appeals); 2) the Center's principal objective is to assist you in making a successful submission.

There is, however, no better way to avoid the log-jam than to submit early. Thank you.

E-mail Opportunity Notices To Terminate

It is vital that everyone transition to the RSS Feed because the nightly emails will soon be terminated and or significantly reduced.

Grants.gov will soon be implementing a strategy to terminate the email effort, which presently transmits >650,000 emails/day. The processing load on Grants.gov is tremendous and this energy could better be used to process applications.

Please assist us in this effort. Thank you.

Update to GEB

Yesterday, the PMO made its end-of-fiscal-year presentation to the Grants Executive Board. The following information was provided.

1. Grants.gov is undergoing a "speed & reliability upgrade" which will result in 3 new T-1000 servers being added to the system. The upgrade will be completed by October 2008.
2. The Grants.gov LDAP will be totally rebuilt and reconfigured to support the demands of the community. This work will be completed within 30 days of the completion of the speed & reliability upgrade.
3. Grants.gov completed 20 new forms this FY & 144 forms were converted from PureEdge to Adobe.
4. In August the first "S2S User Group Meeting" for the Grantor Community was held.
5. The website has been updated with additional information regarding "Eligibility for Grants."
6. The "Broken Pipe" remedy has been posted on the website. If the remedy is adhered to the problem is non-existent.
7. A "trouble-shooting page" has been added to the website addressing the top 10 issues/questions faced by the Contact Center.
8. A systems monitoring tool has been recommended to the PMO allowing it to review and monitor the: a) user experience and b) engage in system diagnositics.
9. The Adobe transition continues on schedule.
10. An RSS Feed has been added to the Grants.gov website.
11. The RFI to transition Grants.gov to a cloud computing model has been published.

One comment for all readers: It is vital that everyone transition to the RSS Feed because the nightly emails will soon be terminated and or significantly reduced. Grants.gov presently transmits >650,000 emails/day and the processing load on Grants.gov is tremendous. This energy could better be used to process applications.

Grants.gov RFI

The Grants.gov PMO has released a public request for information (RFI). Click on the link below to review the document.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=cbddfe939b4432b28450d6870944412b&tab=core&_cview=0