The organizations that excel at getting funds are masters of what Tatiana Hernandez, a seasoned leader in arts philanthropy and the new CEO of Community Foundation Boulder County, calls “grantsmanship.” But polished grants don't necessarily mean an organization is tied to the community or is all that effective at anything other than paperwork and spin. “Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work?" she asks. "Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?” Duffy is among those nonprofit leaders who would prefer that foundations focus on her organization’s work and not polished applications, with their time-consuming and needlessly complicated paper and video reports. Still, she and other beleaguered nonprofit leaders play the game, contorting themselves into pretzels to meet foundations' requests. They field endless questions from grant managers, rewrite their budgets to fill in each funder’s slightly different form, and make sure that their organizations’ stories are tailored for each request.