5 Steps to Improve Your Nonprofit’s Grant Management Process

For Danielle Dougherty, assistant director of grants management at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, her grant management strategy grew from the struggles she experienced throughout her career. Despite scrambling to gather details or documents and submitting last-minute applications, she had success in securing grants, but knew there had to be a better approach. 

“I never really felt I was submitting a strong proposal that I was really happy with,” she said during her AFP ICON session, “Building the House: Applying Project Management Principles to the Grant Proposal Process” on Sunday. “So over the years, I have developed and honed my approach to these large grant applications, approaching them as projects instead of tasks.”

Here’s a brief overview of Dougherty’s process, broken down into five steps. 

1. Determine If a Grant Is Right for Your Organization

Your organization can’t apply to every single grant. To help prioritize the best opportunities, Dougherty designed a core document (opens as a pdf) that helps her keep track of all of the important elements of each grant’s notice of fundraising opportunity (NOFO) or request for proposal (RFP). 

“So anytime I am reading a NOFO, I always have [the NOFO] up on the screen parallel with this document,” she said. “And I’m just going back and forth, pulling out this basic information.”

That information might include all of the important due dates to properly schedule time to hit each milestone. It can even help your organization to determine if the grant is a good fit for your organization. 

For example, Dougherty noted your organization might not have the capacity to complete a matching requirement or a memorandum of understanding with another organization at the moment, so it might be best to pass at least for the current round of funding. Noting these requirements up front will save time and aggravation and allow your nonprofit to better focus on grant opportunities that are achievable for your organization.

“A big grant award is very enticing, and it can be very enticing to read through the NOFO and think about all the things you could do with all this money and all of these possibilities,” she said. “But does your organization have the capacity to even complete this by the due date? Be honest with yourself. Do you have the time to implement a new program or expand an existing one? … And do you have the systems in place to adhere to any post-award grant requirements?”

2. Build an Action Plan Based on Deadline

Work backward from the application deadline to build a schedule you or your team can successfully manage. Dougherty provided a variety of questions to ask to help create this plan: 

• Updated information. When will the annual report be completed for the most up-to-date statistics? When will the budget process conclude to have the most recent organizational annual budget?
• Staff resources. Are there upcoming major events that will monopolize staff time and resources? Do any key staff members have planned time out of the office?
• Necessary processes. Does someone need to review the application prior to submitting it? Do any documents need signatures or notarization?
• Deadlines. Are there multiple deadlines to meet?

It’s also important to ensure team members — especially those who may not see grants as part of their job responsibilities — buy into the process since it’s the responsibility of the person managing each grant application project to ensure the project’s success. 

“This is making sure team members know that they are being tasked with a portion of this project to complete,” she said. “And without their input, we can’t submit the application.”

3. Streamline the Process to Maximize Value

Overly complicating the process may make it hard to get program staff or organizational leaders to comply so keep it simple and learn each team member’s communication preferences. 

Have a folder to which team members can contribute key information and important documents, such as Form 990, annual operating budget, audited financials, recent W-9 and boilerplate language. In her core document, Dougherty links to key documents when needed and provides templates with headers and word counts to make it easy for her colleagues to share their expertise that she relies on to complete strong grant applications. 

“And then I can make it sound good,” she said. “I can make it formatted the way it needs to be, but [they are] the ones with the knowledge, so I need [them] to give me the answers to these questions.”

4. Obtain Feedback Before Submitting an Application

Feedback might come in the form of your organization reviewing a provided scoring rubric or the funder reviewing your grant application draft. Though some funders discourage outreach, you can build rapport with others by submitting a letter of intent or draft application. 

“If it’s possible to take advantage of that, I highly recommend that you do,” Dougherty said. “I have done this in the past, and they do come back with really fantastic feedback. That can be the difference between being funded and being not funded.”

5. Log in Early to Submit Your Application

Between technological issues and user errors, Dougherty strongly encouraged not waiting until the final hour before the grant application deadline to submit. Early submissions may even garner a grace period. 

“So I have had a few instances where I’ve submitted a week or a week-and-a-half early, and the [funder] has come back and said, ‘Oh, you missed a signature here.’ Or ‘Can you upload a more recent version of this document?’” she said. “And you’re able to get it in by the deadline and it increases your chances of being funded.”