NOFO Builder

In December 2023, I shipped the NOFO Builder, a first-of-its-kind document converter for publishing accessible PDF grants on Grants.gov.

A ‘Notice of Financial Opportunity’ (NOFO) provides government funding for certain projects or activities (similar to an RFP). Companies bid on the NOFO for a chance to win funding.

NOFO documents are typically written in Microsoft Word but must be published on Grants.gov as accessible (508-compliant) PDFs.

Converting a Word doc to a PDF should be simple, but creating an accessible, tagged PDF of this length can involve days of tedious manual formatting by an expert practitioner.

My conversion pipeline streamlines this publishing process by automating the majority of accessibility tagging: creating a (nearly) one-click Word-2-accessible-PDF conveyor belt. With the NOFO Builder, creating a compliant, publishable NOFO takes minutes, not days.

The NOFO Builder is a Django app that owes a huge debt to python-mammoth and PrinceXML. It uses the super duper US Web Design System to bootstrap its clean UI.

The NOFO Builder is an integral part of HHS’ Simpler NOFOs initiative to radically simplify its grant documents for a better applicant experience. As of December 2024, the NOFO Builder has created over 140 grants published to Grants.gov, with a combined estimated total funding of over $5.3 billion USD.

The NOFO Builder is invite-only, but the source code is available on the Health and Human Services’ (HHS) GitHub page.