Building Blocks of Federal Grant Registrations

There are numerous components that go into assessing “grant readiness” for federal grant funding. Strategic planning and community development plans. Collaborations and partnerships with signed memorandums of understanding. What is often discounted is the critical registration processes required at the federal level. These registrations are what I call the building blocks of grant readiness. They are basic steps, but steps that require ongoing updating and attention, in order to ensure that they do not cause an issue for your organization as deadlines approach.

What are the key steps you ask? There are five steps to the federal registration process. The first two are the most common points of concern for grant-seeking organizations. You can see the five steps outlined below.

As soon as you think that you may want to apply for federal grant funding, your next step should be to find out if your organization is already registered with grants.gov, and if so, who is the AOR (Authorized Organization Representative). If the organization is already registered, but you personally want to have your own organization, it is far simpler to create your own user account, and link yourself to the organization as an AOR, than to start from scratch with registering an organization.

If you are not registered in grants.gov, you need to either a: obtain a DUNS number, or b: confirm what your DUNS number is. Please note that you want to carefully check to see if your organization already has a DUNS number. You want to avoid having duplicate DUNS numbers assigned to your organization, as it creates a significant registration headache if a grant is awarded. If you need to obtain a DUNS number, you do so as illustrated in Step 1 below.

If you know that your organization already has a DUNS number, your grant readiness challenge is to log-in and ensure that all of the organization’s information, including executive director/president and board chair are current in the DUNS record. Triple check your legal name, your DBA name, and all of your contact information. I often find this information has not been updated by organization in years. The DUNS website, where you will update your record, is illustrated below.

After you have obtained a DUNS number or updated your DUNS record, it is time to move on to Step 2: registering with the System for Award Management (referred to as SAM). SAM is the system required for all government contracts and grants and is illustrated below. You are required to register, and provide detailed information about your organization’s finances, in order to be in good standing to receive a grant award. You want to again carefully look through your organization’s records and ensure that you do not already have a log-in. If you have an E-Biz POC (point of contact) in SAM, they can authorize you or other members of your organization to submit applications in grants.gov.

Once you have successfully navigated the registration process, your homework now is to put a recurring reminder on your calendar to update your SAM and DUNS information. You will find some of the systems such as SAM provide renewal reminders to the administrator on the account, while others, such as DUNs do not email as many reminders, if any at all. Basic building blocks of grant readiness? Absolutely. Critical to pay attention to? Absolutely. Especially when you consider that many federal applications take more than 100 hours to complete and submit.