Features
Part of Grants for women: four structures, scam signs, and where to verify listings
Grants for women mistakes in sponsor contests
Grants for women mistakes in sponsor contests: what the rules hand over, what a voting round costs, how an in-kind prize is valued and where dates come from.
Much of what a woman founder finds under the heading of grants is a sponsor contest, where a prize is called a grant and the terms sit in a rules document that nobody reads. The mistakes in these contests are specific, and each one can be checked before you enter.
This page follows one contest from the moment you find it to the moment you decide. Where the contest is not a contest at all, the grants for women overview covers the wider picture.
What to take away
- Owner identity is an eligibility factor, not a qualification. Something else is always doing the deciding.
- For a sponsor competition, the rules document is the product. Read it before you enter, not after you win.
- A public voting round is a marketing campaign that you run, so price it before you enter.
- Ask what the prize is paid in, and value in-kind awards at what you would otherwise have paid.
- Confirm every date on the sponsor's own page, never on a third-party listing.
Read what the entry hands over
Entering a sponsor contest is a trade, and the rules document states its terms. It holds the judging criteria and the sponsor's right to decline to award, so read it before you write a word of the entry.
What entering a contest grants
What you give
- Name and image
- Used in publicity
- Business story
- Sponsor publicity
- Entry effort
- Full application
- Award certainty
- None guaranteed
What you may get
- Name and image
- Sometimes permanent
- Business story
- No award owed
- Entry effort
- Subjective judging
- Award certainty
- Sponsor may decline
Sponsor programs are frequently contests governed by an official rules document issued by the sponsor, which the marketing page may not summarize. Rights to your name, image and business story can be used in publicity, sometimes permanently, in exchange for an entry that the sponsor may not be obliged to award at all.
Check whether judging is subjective and whether the sponsor can decline to award. Decide on the rules, not on the marketing page, whether that trade is acceptable.
Price the voting round before you enter
A public voting round turns an application into a marketing campaign that you run with your own audience. The cost is hours, goodwill with customers you ask repeatedly, and sometimes advertising spend, against a prize you might not win.
Should you run a voting campaign
Is the campaign worth it without the prize?
Enter and price the hours
Do not enter at all
Decide in advance what the campaign is worth to you independent of the prize. If the answer is nothing, do not enter. If it is something, treat the prize as a bonus.
The patterns these opportunities come in show how to recognize this shape quickly, before you spend the first hour on it.
Ask what the prize is paid in
Cash, credits against a product, donated services, equipment and a place in a program are all announced with the same vocabulary. Ask what arrives, in what form, when and to whom it is paid, before you enter.
A win that does not solve the problem you entered to solve is a poor result, and sometimes it brings a tax question you had not planned for. Value in-kind awards at what you would otherwise have paid, which is usually well below the figure attached to them.
| Form of award | Ask before entering | Value it at |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | When it is paid, and to whom | The amount that reaches you |
| Credits against a product | Which products the credits cover | The retail price of those products, if you would have bought them |
| Donated services | Who performs the work, and on what terms | The going rate for the same work |
| Equipment | Who delivers it and who owns it | The cost of buying the equipment yourself |
| A place in a program | What the program actually provides | Only the parts you would otherwise have paid for |
Take the dates from the sponsor
Third-party listings go stale, and programs open, close, change eligibility and run out of money without the listing noticing. Work prepared to the wrong terms, or submitted after a cycle that closed, is the usual result.
Verify a listing before working
- See a third-party listing
- Treat it as a lead, not a fact
- Go to the funder's own site
- Confirm dates and terms
- Then start the work
Confirm dates and terms on the funder's own site before doing anything else, and treat every secondhand description as a lead rather than a fact. WomensNet's Amber Grant, a long-running example aimed at women-owned businesses, publishes its own amounts, deadlines and rules each cycle, so those come from its page and not from a summary.
Find contests from the funder, not from a paid list
Subscription directories and matching services sell aggregation of information that funders publish themselves. The fee buys a stale copy of something free, plus the false confidence that you have now seen everything.
Free sources versus paid lists
Free, from the funder
- Source
- Funder itself
- Freshness
- Current
- Cost
- Nothing
- Coverage
- Verified opportunity
- Also free
- Grants.gov, state office
Paid subscription list
- Source
- Aggregator
- Freshness
- Stale copy
- Cost
- Subscription fee
- Coverage
- False confidence
- Also free
- SBDC, local center
Take opportunity information from the funder, the federal listing at grants.gov, your state economic development office and your local Small Business Development Center. The FTC's advice on government grant scams agrees: do not pay for a list of government grants, and do not pay any up-front fees.
Keep the WOSB credential apart from the prize
Certification verifies ownership and control against a standard. It is a credential, not a payment. For federal contracting, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) administers the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) Federal Contract Program, which includes WOSB and Economically Disadvantaged WOSB (EDWOSB) certifications.
Certification versus payment
Certification
- What it is
- A credential
- What it verifies
- Ownership and control
- What it opens
- Purchasing doors
- Time cost
- Months
- Wrong expectation
- Produces a check
Award money
- What it is
- A payment
- What it verifies
- Nothing
- What it opens
- Not applicable
- Time cost
- None
- Wrong expectation
- Not applicable
A contest win and a WOSB certificate do different jobs. Pursue certification for what it does, which is to open doors in purchasing and contracting. The requirements for women's grants show where ownership is a stated condition and where it is not.
Run a pass test before you enter
Run these checks in order. A contest that fails any of them is not ready for your time, however good the prize sounds.
- You can say whether the page offers a grant, a contest, a credential or a service.
- You have read what you grant by entering, how winners are chosen and whether the sponsor can decline to award.
- The voting round, if there is one, is worth running even if you do not win.
- You know the form of the prize and what it is worth to you.
- Every date comes from the sponsor's own page.
A contest that passes still has to fit your business. The failure behind these checks is searching by identity alone instead of for a funder whose purpose your work serves. Name the outcome you produce, and the document folder and the order to build it in covers the reusable core of an application.
Compare this with the minority business grants mistakes, where the traps sit in certification rather than contests.
Common questions
I was told I am pre-approved.
There is no such status. Awards follow applications, and an unsolicited claim otherwise is an approach to report to the Federal Trade Commission through ReportFraud.ftc.gov. See the official guidance on where to report a scam for other options.
A consultant offered to work for a share of the award.
Decline contingency arrangements priced against an award, and be careful with anyone promising success at all. Pay for defined work on an opportunity you have verified yourself.
Nothing fits. Have I missed something?
Probably not. Most businesses are not eligible for most grants, and reaching that conclusion in an hour rather than a season is the most valuable outcome this research usually produces.
