Grants

Grants.gov Changes URLs Without Warning

As part of a set of announced changes that went into effect Sept. 4, Grants.gov quietly renamed the Internet addresses for many pending grant opportunities and those with deadlines that have recently passed without publicizing its plans.

In early July, Grants.gov officials launched a transition to an Adobe format. Grants.gov began phasing out PureEdge, while introducing advanced search capability, but technical issues quickly arose. Several weeks later, Grants.gov reverted back to the previous system to address the problems.

On Sept. 4, Grants.gov redeployed the new system with its previously announced changes. At the same time as the redeployment, the Web addresses for many grant opportunities unexpectedly changed. The move created confusion, taking by surprise many members of the grants community.

“It’s just one of those flaming hoops that they set for us to jump through,” said Alice Boyd, owner of West Harwich, Mass.-based Bailey Boyd Associates, a grant research, writing and training firm. “I think ultimately it will work out well, but right now, we’re all hunting all over the place for these grant announcements.”

What happened?

As an example, the Department of Veterans Affairs posted a new opportunity, State Cemetery Grants, to Grants.gov on Friday, Aug. 31. The URL for that notice

was: http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?oppId=15404&mode=VIEW.

If a visitor to the site that day saved the funding announcement notice as a bookmark, by the following Tuesday, the link would no longer work. Instead, the page would say the opportunity could not be found.

The following is the new Web address for the same notice: http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?oppId=15404&flag2006=true&mode=VIEW.

By inserting “07” after “www” and “&flag2006=true” after the opportunity identification number, which is unique to each announcement, Grants.gov users can update many of the previous links. However, some links do not require replacing “www” with “www07,” and there is no way to determine when it is needed.

“The ‘flag2006=true’ is used to identify if the opportunity is 2006 format (PureEdge) or 2007 Adobe for the system to redirect the user for download,” a Grants.gov official told L/SFR. “The ‘www07’ was added to better manage the routing of traffic between 2006 and 2007 servers.”

There is no mechanism in place to redirect visitors who enter the old URL to the new one, but they can do it manually by substituting the old elements with the new ones using “find” and “replace.”

Lack of information

Grants.gov posted an announcement when the general changes went into effect, noting the search enhancement that uses Google technology and the switch to Adobe forms, but it did not mention the URL changes.

“I’m on their listserv where they send you the automatic updates, and I don’t recall seeing anything,” said Jessica Bullock, a grants consultant in Oak Park, Ill. “That would seem like it would be common sense to let people know that major change is coming down the pike.”

In an e-mailed inquiry to support@grants.gov on the day the changes were made, L/SFR requested more information about the need for the URL changes and noted the lack of transparency, but the response was neither direct nor timely.

Received nearly 48 hours later, a customer support representative replied: “Yes, the 2007 system will be permanent. This is a change that has taken some time to deploy, and there will be continued updates on the homepage of Grants.gov under ‘What’s New This Week at Grants.gov.’”

It should be noted that in the daily “Grants.gov Opportunities Posting Update” e-mail received by L/SFR from Grants.gov on Sept. 5, all of the links to grant opportunities were faulty.

Impact and implications

Katherine Wojick runs a grants consulting firm out of Bowie, Md., and said she recently tried to find a grant opportunity that she was working on, but could not locate it.

“It was like digging for gold,” she said. “I literally had to go in and Google and put the name of the announcement in Google. I think that’s what people will do.”

Glenda O’Neal, an L/SFR Editorial Advisory Board member, predicts that it’s going to create confusion until everyone becomes aware of the changes. “The worst case scenario, in my opinion, is that organizations could miss grant application deadlines because they aren’t aware of the changes,” she said.

Many grant writers, managers and consultants subscribe to listservs or newsletters that feature grant opportunities and their Grants.gov links for further information.

“We are having to scramble now to make sure that those links are all good, because we did an e-mail Sept. 1, and they’re all bad links,” said Danny Blitch, a grants consultant and grants manager for Roswell, Ga. “That just looks bad. It looks like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Jessica Pater had a similar experience. Pater produces a publication through the Georgia Tech Research Institute aimed at kindergarten through 12th grade educators to alert them of grant opportunities. Like most everyone interviewed for this article, she said she was “unaware of the changes” and will now need to take down the current issue and update some of the affected links.

“Grants.gov is a wonderful resource, but if it is not in a continuous and usable format, it defeats the purpose,” Pater told L/SFR.

Blitch suggested that those in the grants community who circulate funding opportunity lists may have to discontinue using links and just list the grants by name or their Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance numbers.

“But links are so much easier for folks,” he said. “Not everyone is technologically savvy. … If they were to click on it and it not go to where it was supposed to go, I think they would give up … and I don’t think that’s what Grants.gov wants.”

Deborah Golden-Gestner, founder of Boca Raton-Fla-based Capital Philanthropy Group, said she expects that the vast majority in the grants community will find ways to work around the changes, even if they are unaware of them.

“They are not going to waste time,” she said. “It might take one or two clicks to find this isn’t working. They might wait until the next day to see if the system is down.

Then they’ll double check, and make a phone call.”

Reprinted with permission from Local/State Funding Report.