When most people think about grants, they immediately jump to “grant writing.” While writing is critical to the process, it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle. The secret to grant success is to be grant-ready before your fingers touch a keyboard to beat an oncoming deadline.
Grant readiness and grant management are the coming together of the chocolate and peanut butter that makes the guilty pleasure known as the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. It’s the combination that makes the flavors sing.
Here’s where many organizations go wrong: they start with available funding and try to fit their programs into whatever grants they find. Skipping the step of setting funding priorities could lead to a severe case of mission drift, where an agency skids from one grant opportunity to another without pausing to consider whether they are truly good fits. This leads to organizations constantly scrambling, staff burnout, and ineffective programs.
Instead, start with what members of the communities you serve need to succeed. That will determine funding priorities to grow, expand, augment, or start programs and projects.
Whether grants are the right form of revenue for those priorities depends on what you need most. For example, most agencies could use more admin staff but grants rarely cover those positions. You’d be better off pursuing individual donors, special events, or monthly giving programs for that type of support. Amanda and I detail how grant cycles work and offer suggestions for building a grant-ready library of the most commonly requested documents in the latest episode of the Fundraising HayDay Podcast HERE.
Successful grant development isn’t a solo act but requires team effort. The size and structure of your team will depend on your organization’s size, but every grant-seeking program needs to address these key roles:
For Larger Organizations
Consider establishing a formal Grants Task Force with these components:
(1) Funding Priorities Team: Senior Leadership, Development Director or Chief Development Officer, Grants Officer, and Finance representative
(2) Grant Writing Team: Project Director, Grant Writer, and an Editing Committee for quality control
(3) Budget and Management Team: CFO or Staff Accountant, Program Manager, Development Director, Grant Writer, plus input from direct service staff
For Smaller Organizations
Your team might be streamlined to just three key players, but they need to work closely together:
These three people collaborate on everything from identifying priorities and defining programs to building budgets and managing reporting requirements.
Grant readiness and grant management aren’t just about having the right documents in the right folders. It’s about having solid operations, strong community connections, and systems that can handle the requirements that come with grant funding.
This means having financial systems that can track restricted funds separately, staff who understand compliance requirements, and programs already making a measurable impact in your community. It means having relationships with community partners who can serve as collaborators or provide letters of support.
Before you start pursuing that next grant opportunity, take a step back. Do you have your priorities straight? Is your team in place? Are your documents organized? Do you have the operational infrastructure to handle grant requirements?
If you can answer yes to these questions, then you’re truly grant ready. And that’s when the grants become a strategic tool for advancing your mission rather than a source of stress and scrambling to meet deadlines.
Combining grant readiness and grant management as one concept truly makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts—just like a peanut butter cup!
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