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Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lael Lubing. I am the Director of Grants and Fiscal
Policy at USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Our Grants Officer, Kimberly Shields, will
be listening in, and so she'll be participating in that regard. And our Program Officer is
Acua White, and we were blessed to have several people from HHS who handle grants.gov who
will walk through our presentation, and I'll turn over the presentation to them. Please
hold any questions that you have. I would suggest writing them down if you need to,
and we'll try to answer all of them either on the call or subsequently if we don't get
to all of them. So thank you very much, and we'll begin. Right. So thank you so much for
inviting me to speak and present to your group today. I appreciate it very much. Judy Ceresa
from the Grants.gov Program Management Office, and I have with me my colleague Tricia Glass,
also from Grants.gov, and we are going to go through our presentation, and at the very
end we'll take questions. So let's get started. We're going to begin the presentation with
mainly three sections. We're going to talk about the registration process, how one would
go about finding funding opportunities on grants.gov, and how one would go about applying
for those funding opportunities, what to look for and to your submission through to successful
completion. So let's get started. Everything that you could possible want to know as an
applicant about Grants.gov -- oh, I went backwards. Sorry folks. Here we go. All right. So Grants.gov
is the site where 26 federal grant-making agencies post their grant funding opportunities.
It's the site where applicants such as yourself go to find and to apply for those funding
opportunities. Grants.gov offers listings for organizations that want to apply for federal
grants, as well as individuals. But for the sake of this presentation, and for the fact
that most of the announcements that are provided on the site are for organizations, we're going
to focus primarily on the organization registration process. So if you don't already have one,
you'll need to go to the Dunn & Bradstreet website and get what we call a DUNS number
that will actually represent your organization. Now this process will require that you have
your tax ID number when you request a DUNS number, and keep in mind that the process
can take up to a week. Once you have a DUNS number, your organization officially has a
DUNS, your business person, we call them the e-business point of contact at your organization,
the person that oversees all the funding, will need to go to the System for Award Management
website. This website is run by the GSA. And the e-bus POC will go there and register as
well using their DUNS number. Once they've completed the registration process at SAM,
they'll be issued what we call an M PIN number, and that will serve as the e-bus POC's password
the first time they actually register with SAM. And also, once the e-bus has completed
registration, they're in a position to authorize whoever is going to be actually submitted
the application in Grants.gov, we call that person the Authorized Organization Representative,
or AOR. So there are two things to take away from this. There are two roles in Grants.gov.
One is an e-bus POC. And the e-bus POC's role in Grants.gov is to only authorize the AOR
to submit. The AOR will be the person that actually puts the application package together
and submits, and they must make sure that they are authorized to do so. Now this process
can also take up to three to five business days to complete, and in some cases can actually
take longer because the System for Award Management, or, as we call, SAM, is actually dependent
on getting approval from IRS as well as DOD. So give yourself plenty of time to get registered
for both DUNS and particularly SAM. Once the e-bus has completed registration, the person
at your organization, and that actually could be you, you could have both roles if you're
going to serve as both e-bus and AOR, the AOR person planning to submit the application
would create an applicant account on Grants.gov. Once they do this, the e-bus POC on record
will get an email telling them that you have gone in and registered as an applicant and
you need to be authorized. One point to note for e-bus POCs is that SAM registration must
be renewed on an annual basis. If your registration is deactivated for whatever reason, the process
to get it reactivated can take a little bit longer, so make sure that you keep your registration
current. And you can do this at any time. SAM also sends emails out to the e-bus POC,
from what we understand, to let them know. So I said earlier, the AOR and the e-bus POC,
one person can serve both roles if you're a small organization. But in the case here
on this slide, we're showing an example of where you have a large university and they
have several different DUNS numbers because they have several different departments. So
you'll have an e-bus Point of Contact associated with one particular DUNS number, say department
Mathematics or whatever as an example. But they could have several AORs that actually
are authorized by them to submit different applications. So if you're the e-bus, you
want to make sure you keep track of who those AORs are, it's your responsibility. And it's
your responsibility to make sure that you authorized them, and when they leave you deactivate
their accounts in Grants.gov. So, as I was saying, if you're an applicant and you're
registering for the first time, you need to make sure you use your DUNS number, and you'll
go into a screen that looks just like this. You'll enter your DUNS and you'll set up your
User Name and Password. The e-bus POC associated with that DUNS number that you have entered
will get an email telling them to click on the link in the email and authorize you as
AOR. In some cases those emails can get caught up in spam, and the e-bus may not receive
the email, so make sure, if you're an AOR, you know who your e-bus POC is and you make
sure you tell them, if they don't authorize you right away, to authorize you, because
you don't want to wait until the day your application is due to work through this process.
To reiterate, AORs are authorized by the e-bus POC. E-bus receives an email notifying you
of AOR registration. E-bus logs into Grants.gov, using their M PIN to confirm you as AOR. Once
you've been confirmed as AOR, or approved as AOR, you can then submit applications on
Grants.gov. You cannot submit an application if you're not approved by the e-bus POC. You
can also track the status of your authorization at any time on Grants.gov by using the website
itself or by calling our Contact Center, and I'll give you that information towards the
end of the presentation. So that pretty much concludes the registration process. It is
long. It is lengthy. It can be complicated. Register early, early, early. It can take
up to a month -- Or longer. Or longer, if there's complications, if they're not getting
the right DUNS number, the right PIN number. You can look at upwards, you know, two-plus
months. Yes. Yeah. So it's a while. And that's, you know, SAM's regulations, nothing to do
with us. Well, they have to access IRS to verify your PIN number, and then they have
to also access some office at DOD that authorizes or provides -- they assign a cage code to
your account, your SAM account, so all that has to happen, and during tax season, things
can get backed up. So it is a process, so if you're not registered now, we suggest,
even if you don't have an opportunity you want to apply for, register anyway. Get that
all set up. So if you are an organization, you have to have a DUNS number. So even if
you're a tribe, you'll need a DUNS if you're a part of an organization, unless you're submitting
an application by yourself and you don't then require that registration process. So let's
talk about how you navigate the site if you're actually looking for a funding opportunity.
Here's a peek at our Home Page. If you're familiar with Grants.gov, we basically revamped
the entire site. It still works exactly the same, but it looks different. And hopefully
it's easier -- we've improved upon our search processes considerably, so hopefully you'll
have an easier time navigating the site. Now you can navigate Grants.gov, you can pull
down application packages and instructions, and you can save them on your computer, and
you don't have to be registered to do that. However, you definitely have to have completed
the registration process to submit an application. There's lots of resources on our website,
so please take advantage of those resources. We have applicant user guides, we have application
registration user guides, we have a YouTube tutorial, we have Frequently Asked Questions
and Answers. We also have a Contact Center available to applicants 24 hours a day, seven
days a week, except for federal holidays. You can request to receive email notifications
for funding opportunities within certain categories or from certain organizations such as the
USDA. And when an opportunity is posted from USDA, you'll receive an email notifying you
of that opportunity with a link that takes you directly to that synopsis on the website.
As I said, improved our search functionality quite a bit, and hopefully you'll find that
to be the case if you've ever used the site before. You can search by opportunity number,
if you happen to know that. Or by the CFDA number. Or you can actually do an exact search
where you can put in keywords. So here's an example of where we entered the phrase, affordable
care act, and it pulled up several different funding opportunities in which that phrase
was used, whether it was in the title or somewhere within the opportunity itself. You can also
-- we have this what we call a faceted search, so you can narrow down your opportunities
by eligibility, be category, by agency. So it should make your search -- if there's something
on Grants.gov, you should be able to find it now is what I'm trying to say. And if you
can't, reach out to the Contact Center. Basically what we mean by faceted is it's modeled after
the same thing you would see at Wal-Mart's website, Target's website, so if you want
a size six blue pair of flats in shoes, it will drill down to that specificity on our
site. And of course Tricia would being up shoes. So these are just screenshots of what
this search functionality results were. So let's take a look at what's in a funding opportunity.
So when you pull up an opportunity, when you actually click on the link that takes you
to an opportunity, it takes you directly into what we call the synopsis page. And as you
can see from the screenshot, it's highlighted with a red box. This information in this synopsis
lets you know when the opportunity was opened and closed. It lets you know some information
about how much the program is estimated the total funding to be, how many awards they
expect to make. These are all estimates. And if you scroll down even further through the
synopsis, you'll find a short description of the program that the funding is for and
a contact person or email or link. And that contact information is particularly important
to you if you're incurring any complications or you have a specific question about the
program, that's who you would like to contact. This synopsis also will display certain histories
of previous versions that were posted, so if a program goes in and changes something
about the opportunity, synopsis portion of it, you'll be able to look through those various
versions to see what was changed. If you also subscribe to the particular announcement,
when there's any modifications made, you will be notified when those modifications are made,
so you will ensure that you're submitting the right application. Yes, so you'll get
a notice through your email. You'll provide your email address when you sign up for a
subscription to an opportunity. So the tab on the far right -- actually the tab Full
Announcement is provided -- sometimes agencies put information here, sometimes they don't.
It's used for a place for agencies to provide additional information, supporting documentation,
for the opportunity. Full Announcement doesn't -- it's not a good term to use for this link
because you won't find the application package there. However, you will under the Application
Package link. So in this case it has pulled up several different packages for the opportunity
listed above, Fundamental Research to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's obviously
a DOD opportunity. And they have it set up in such a way that they have different application
packages. Not all agencies do this, but this is one way of providing opportunities. In
order to get to the application package where you'll find the forms that you'll need to
fill out and the instructions to fill out those forms, you would click on the download
link. Here is where you'd have an opportunity to provide an email address in case the agency
decides that they want to make a change to that application package. They want to take
a format, or add a form, or change the form template entirely, you would receive an email
message notifying you that the agency has changed that package. So you don't have to
provide your email address here, but we strongly encourage folks to provide that email so that
you're not left out in the dark, you do know, you are alerted of a change. Because in many
cases, if the agency actually changes the package or the applicant type, you'll need
to re-download a new package and fill it out because the old package will no longer be
any good. So, again, you don't have to provide your email address, but we strongly encourage
that you do so. And, again, you can do this, you can download application packages either
providing your email or not providing your email, and you don't have to actually be logged
in to do so or be registered. But, again, you can't submit until you're registered.
So this is what the page looks like once you pass the email page. And it provides a quick
peek at what's inside, you know, the title of the opportunity, open and close date, and
then you have two links. You have download application and instructions, which are your
directions for filling out the application package that are provided by the organization.
There is almost always -- there should be -- a contact in that application package,
or within the instructions, so that if you have any questions whatsoever about this particular
opportunity, you can speak with the agency directly, because Grants.gov doesn't know
what the agency wants you to provide other than what's in those forms. We can only help
you if you're having a technical issue or if you need to verify whether you're registered,
or verify whether your application was received, those sorts of things. If you can't log in,
whatever. But for program questions, contact the agency. Now how do we get around an application
package? Well here is what the first page of an application package would look like.
So, again, this is when you've clicked on the download application package. You see
a list of forms. You have a list of mandatory forms, and you have a list of optional forms
here. Grants.gov will reject an application if you have not filled out every mandatory
form that the agency has posted. They'll also have optional forms, and we always encourage
people to fill out the optional forms, but you really don't have to. The system is not
going to prevent you from submitting an application without including those optional forms. However,
if the agency takes a look at your application and you don't have all the information you
need, that may be a problem. Okay, we're going to have to take a short break until we can
pull the opportunity to pack the presentation up again. Okay, we're good to go. Sorry about
that. This isn't our computer, this belongs to someone (inaudible) detail. Minor computer
technical glitch here. Okay. And let's continue. We'll hurry through this. Okay. So here's
what an SF424 looks like if you've never seen one. All the highlighted fields need to be
filled out. Those are considered mandatory fields. If you don't enter some information
in that field, the system is not going to let you go any further. Okay. So you have
field out every field on every required form, and you are ready to submit your application.
First of all, you want to save it on your local computer. Not on Grants.gov, but on
your local computer. Check it for errors. Print your application. And once you've done
all those things, your application is free from errors, the Save and Submit button will
become activated and you can then submit your application. Upon clicking Save and Submit,
a screen will pop up that will ask you to enter your User Name and your password. It
is at this time that our system can look to see whether or not you are authorized to submit
an application based on your User Name and password. You'll be prompted to quickly sign
and submit your application. By clicking Sign and Submit, this will serve as your electronic
signature. It says you are approved by this organization to submit an application on their
behalf. Upon submitting, you will receive immediately a confirmation email and a screen
that looks like this. And it depends on the browser you're using, some cases you have
to click on the little icon in the middle of the screen, and then this confirmation
page will show up. It any case, it will have two fields that are very, very important for
you to remember. You'll have a Grants.gov tracking number. This number allows you to
track the status of your application to see it through submission. And you'll also receive
the official date and time stamp of your submission. If there's any issue down the road, you can
use this information because the agency is going to ask you for this. You should expect
to receive the confirmation in an email, which basically says Grants.gov received your application
and we're validating it. And then the second email you'll receive will either tell you
your application has been successfully validated and is in our system, or it was rejected and
here are the reasons why. Fix your application and resubmit. A good reason to submit your
application early. Don't wait until the last minute. Or the last day for that matter. Submit
early. Then if there are problems with your application, you can resubmit it. And then
the third email you would receive is that the agency has picked up your application.
They've gone into Grants.gov and they've pulled it in, they've uploaded it to their computer.
If you have any questions during this process, you can call our Contact Center with your
Grants.gov tracking number, and they can pull up the information that you'll need. Or you
can track the status yourself at any time to see it through the various stages of validation.
And those stages are -- the statuses are -- received, validated or rejected, and received by agency.
We have a few tips that we like to tell our applicants. Thoroughly read the instructions.
If you have any questions about the instructions, contact the agency. Include enough information
in both the programs, narratives, and budget narrative and details. Fill out the optional
forms. If you have the information, fill them out. It can't hurt. When reviewers review
your application, or the agency reviews it, it will support your application as best as
possible. Make sure that you limit any attachment that you upload into the forms to 50 characters
or less. If you type in more characters than 50, your application will be rejected. And
make sure that you avoid certain special characters. But we need to change that little bullet point
because we have just recently relaxed that rule a little bit. The special character rule
has to do with just the name of your attachment file that you upload into the form. Also make
sure you use the correct DUNS numbers in the SF424 cover page, and make sure that you use
compatible software. And the compatible software to submit grant applications in Grants.gov
is Adobe Reader. Please, please, please do not use any other reader. Use Adobe Reader.
Others readers can cause your application to be rejected. Adobe Reader is free. Download
it and use it. Thank you. Also, the Contact Center, available 24 hours a day, seven days
a week. You can email them at support(inaudible)grants.gov. You can call their toll free number, which
is listed on this slide, which you'll have access to. And if you are sometime out of
the country, you can call the number there below, the 1-606 number, and it will take
you directly into the Contact Center. We also have a self-help portal with many Frequently
Asked Questions and answers that folks find very, very helpful. And this concludes the
presentation. We do have one more slide we were going to show you a quick look at all
the special characters that you can use when you name your attachment file to be included
in your submission. Now I just need to figure out how to pull it up. If you could just pause
for one moment, be right with you. Okay, so here are the special characters that you can
now use when you name your file. So as you can see they're pretty common. There are some
special characters that you can't use when you name your file, otherwise it will cause
your application to be rejected, and we don't want that to be the reason why you are unable
to submit a successful application for review and consideration for funding. So we have,
again, relaxed that rule. If you've used Grants.gov in the past and have had your application
rejected because you named your attachment file name a name and you used a hyphen or
any one of those characters there and it caused your application to be rejected, particularly
at the last minute, that was very disheartening and maddening and all those very negative
things. Anyway, let's take questions at this time. Sheila? Thank you. We will now being
the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star
one, unmute your phone, and record your name clearly. If you need to withdraw your question,
press start two. Again, to ask a question, please press star one. It will take a few
moments for the questions to come through. Please stand by. The first question comes
from Danielle Thompson. You're line is open. Thank you. That was a really nice presentation.
I have a quick question. Are you -- is it possible to register for multiple applications
with the same registration or do you have to do a separate registration through the
DUN and through the SAM.gov for each application you want to apply for? No, you don't have
to -- thank you for the compliment. We appreciate that very much. You're welcome. No, you don't.
You just need to register once. Okay. (Inaudible) authorized. And once you're done, you can
submit as many applications as you want. The only difference is that you'll actually get
a different Grants.gov tracking number. Okay. So if you're AOR, you're submitting several
applications, and you're registered for a particular -- there are AORs that have multiple
accounts in Grants.gov, if you're part of a big institution. If not, if you're a small
organization, you'll probably only have one DUNS number that you're registered with. So
the only thing you need to do is to register with that one DUNS, but just keep track of
your -- every submission you make, no matter whether it's to the same opportunity or not,
you'll get a different Grants.gov tracking number. That's the only difference. And how
long is your DUN valid for? Did you say a year? So, your SAM registration, the e-bus
POC, has to just renew the registration. And it's very simple, it's very easy. If it the
account is deactivated after a year has passed, it takes a little bit longer to go through
the validation because you have to revalidate with the IRS and DOD. But if your e-bus renews
your SAM account within the year that they first register and keep that up, you'll be
fine. DUNS numbers don't have to be reactivated unless they're for some reason deactivated.
But, no, DUNS will not give you heartburn. Thank you very much. Sure. The next question
comes from Samia (sp), you're line is open. Hi. I have a couple of questions. First, I
just want to confirm. Are you saying that they have to submit their application in a
PDF file? What I'm saying is there are some agencies that require attachments be in PDF.
When you pull down an application package in Grants.gov, when you select the form and
you fill it out, those forms are all stitched together, we call it. And it becomes a PDF
form. So when you submit your application, it's going to be in a PDF format. Now you
can upload, if the agency says it's okay, and they can pull an application, you can
use any other software you'd like to upload that application. There is a limit on size,
however. I think it's 100 to 150 megabytes per attachment. But you could upload an Excel
spreadsheet, you can upload a Word document, those kinds of things. Was that your question?
Yeah, I guess I was just wondering if they had to convert their Word document, which
is what we get from FNS, to complete the application, if they have to go ahead and convert it to
PDF when they're done and then upload that. But it sounds like it kind of does it automatically?
The standard forms do, yes. The standard forms are in Adobe. They are PDF. FNS is saying
no, you do not have to convert your attachment files to PDF. Okay. And then my second question
was about registering with SAM. I know that many of our tribes have DUNS numbers, and
out of not knowing, would it be likely that most of them are already registered with SAM
or not? Yeah, Lael is going to answer that question. It's my understanding that for any
of the tribes that are participating in any of our programs, they would have had a DUNS
number and they would have been registered in SAM, but I understand the only issue is
is that some of the registrations are getting ready to expire or lapse. The year is coming
up, so they need to go back into SAM just to make sure that they update whatever information
they're required to update. But it should all be done initially. Okay. I'm sure a lot
of them have already submitted. Right. And hi, Samia. This is Acua. We did try to get
some initial information on SAM registration from Fiscal Management here. And out of about
101 ITOs, we received information that about 15 of them have SAM registrations that will
expire before this application is due or have expired already. So everyone in the region
should encourage their ITOs to speak to their Fiscal Management people on their reservation,
or administrative people on the reservation, who take care of SAM registration, to find
out if they're current before they have to submit this application. Is there any chance
that we could get that list so we know who to sort of target? I can send you the list,
Samia, but, you know, when I did my own little research on SAM and DUNS, I found the same
thing that these ladies just told us that some organizations have several DUNS numbers.
Okay. And Sam numbers, so what I'm saying to you, this is what FN was able to find out
for me, and I cannot vouch 100% for its accuracy. Okay. That's why we're encouraging the ITOs
themselves to find out this information from their fiscal people. But I will send you the
list. Their organizations. Their organizations. Right. And, again, we cannot impress upon
you the urgency of the matter because it is tax season, and on Sam.gov they will put a
red flag right at the top of their page that it will take a longer amount to renew these
accounts due to tax season. So the sooner the better for your applicants, that's what
I'm saying. And also, Samia, and for others, I have information on about 101 organizations,
so it's not complete because I believe we have like 110 or 111. But I'll definitely
send all the regions the information I have. Thank you. You're welcome. Again, as a reminder,
please star one on your phone and record your name if you have a question. One moment, please,
to see if there are additional questions. We are showing no further questions at this
time. Operator? Yes? Hi, this is Akua again. I just wanted to clarify something with our
Grants.gov presenters. When we're talking about the grant application submission package,
and I believe it's on slide number 29, which is not numbered but I numbered mine, so it's
about number 29, and it shows the mandatory forms that they must submit, I just want to
clarify that if they're going into the system, are those the forms they have to submit first?
Those are -- they're automatically pulled in. Okay. And then the optional forms, that's
the ones they have the option to pull in. Okay. They can fill them in any order. Okay.
Yeah, there's not -- yeah, it's not like a consecutive order. One, and then do two. Okay.
You can flip back and forth between them to fill them out. So if they elect to submit
the 424s in the lobbying form last, they could be at the end of their process before they
know they've missed something. Okay. And what exactly happens in the system? Does the system
tell them right away? It beeps. Pretty much it yells at you, you didn't submit all the
mandatory forms. Okay. And it's very specific. It will drill down to tell you what you didn't
submit. Okay. And so my other clarification question is, so we know about the mandatory
forms. In our application, we have something that's called the Grant Application. It's
the content that we want from applicants. This is where they give us their contact information.
It's also where they select their goals. Where they're telling us about their organization.
It's their budget narrative. Yeah (inaudible). Okay. So that's optional? Other attachments?
Right. Okay. Just wanted to clarify that. That's where you can put it. Yes. Is there
somewhere else you can put it? I don't have the form pulled up. We could go to the data
repository (inaudible) and look at these forms. But there are places where I think you do
-- don't you upload all these narratives? It's my understanding -- this is Lael -- it's
my understanding that the only forms that you can upload as a form is if it's an OMB
approved form. That's right -- No. No? Those forms that are listed --The mandatory. Those
are all the approved forms. Right. But you can upload attachments that aren't OMB. Oh,
okay, that are optional. Yes. Oh, I see. Okay. In other words, like her narrative. She has
something -- it sounds to me like this is a document you want them to upload. Okay.
Well, now that I'm looking at this, under Mandatory it has the SF424, which we know.
It has the project abstract summary. Right. In our application -- In some cases that's
just a form, a placeholder, where you upload an attachment. We have them all as part of
our application. We have them -- (Inaudible) Okay. But you're saying that if they don't
submit something that's called the Project (inaudible) Summary -- Correct. So what would
happen is the example there. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not -- (Inaudible.) That's not
the only way. No, no, no. Those are just an example of what you might see. So might have
(inaudible). Right. Okay. You got it. And I'm just saying that if you click on that
form and it only allows you to upload an attachment, you still have to upload an attachment. Okay.
Because that's considered completing that form. Okay. And it could be like we were talking
earlier, it could be in a Word -- Yeah. Right. So just to clarify and make sure we all understand,
we will be able to submit using a Word document or an Excel document. Right. As an attachment.
As an attachment. Okay. To the standard approved form. All those are approved. Yes. Okay. We
do have an additional question from Debbie. You're line is open. Great. Hi. This question
is for Acua. Can I get a list of what we can use for match? For -- to use as a matching?
Um hmm. Yes. Okay. And Debbie, where are you from? South Puget Intertribal Planning. Oh.
Okay. South Puget. So what's approved to use to meet the match requirement, correct? Correct.
Okay. Will do. Thank you. You're welcome. There are no further questions by phone at
this time. This is Lael. I just want to -- if anyone has any subsequent questions after
our presentation is over, please feel free to send them to either Acua or to Kimberly
Shields, and we will answer them as quickly as possible and get back to you. And we will
be posting this presentation on our website hopefully within the next few days. Depends
on how long it takes to get it transcribed so we can put it online. Again, thank you
very much. No, thank you. We're really happy. Hopefully we answered -- And thank you to
our Grants.gov facilitators. That was fabulous. Thank you. You're welcome. And don't hesitate
to answer questions later on if you have questions. Thank you all very much for joining us. Have
a great afternoon.