Grants.gov has apparently been tailor-made for this column on Bureaucratic Hilarity. It was required that one “register” with Grants.gov in order to apply for other government grants like the NEA. The registration process included filling out an on-line form.
We’d fill out a page then click save and it would respond with red letters saying
YOU HAVE 4 ERRORS
with exclamation points by the 4 errors in question. We’d fix up those 4 errors and click save and the response would be
YOU HAVE 6 ERRORS.
We navigated the whole form with the DUNS numbers, TPINs, MPINS, not for profit codes, budgets, addresses and a whole other site for authorizing the company representative.
Then we did the on-line application for NEA, got a confirmation from Grants.gov, followed the next day by a rejection saying we did not have an authorized representative.
The head of a major theatre group was also surprised by a rejection notice and suggested I e-mail the NEA people to let them know what had happened. I chronicled my tedious journey and the 3 subsequent sets of instructions from the support team at grants.gov. They very graciously told me they had put me on the “list” of those who had run into the same problem.
I’m still in limbo waiting to see if they’ll let this herd of us who got the computer error treatment still have a crack at the grant we spent a hilarious amount of time, effort and dollars on. And I suppose I’m really hoping the Human Factor will kick in somewhere down the line.
Well, just to comment on my own story -
The Human Factor did indeed kick in and we who were lost are now found and approved and submitted.
o
After all the hoops and snakes and ladders, that grant made it all the way to the people who care, and we at Overtone Industries are the proud recipients of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts!