Build Your Grants Strategy - An Overview

Skills, Staff, Strategy, Shared Value, Systems, Style, Structure

Are you seeking to create a comprehensive grants program for your organization? This section provides a step-by-step guide to build a grantseeking strategy filled with interactive tools, tutorials, ideas, resources, forms, and processes you can use and modify to organize your approach.

Securing grant support for your organization is so much more than just finding a funding opportunity and writing a proposal. There are many pieces that need to be in place for you to be able to successfully receive and manage an award.

Too often, nonprofit organizations fall into the trap of “chasing money” and not being strategic in how they find, investigate, and evaluate funding opportunities. This can result in mission creep as proposals are put together simply because someone says, “I found a funding opportunity—let’s apply.” 

Too seldom do organizations actually go through a rigorous process of finding and deciding which funding opportunities to pursue and then creating a calendar with all the essential steps to be successful in winning awards.

Having a clear process around your grantseeking program will allow you to say “no” to grant opportunities coming across your desk that may sidetrack you from your overall plan. It will also help you say “yes” to those that truly align with your projects and programs.

This section will help you establish a grantseeking program that helps you keep your efforts focused on the opportunities and the tasks that will efficiently lead you to winning awards.

  • To guide your program in the right direction, you first need to Set Grants Program Objectives that are realistic and achievable. You can create these objectives by using our R3 tool for reviewing your revenue and our Benchmarker tool for learning from similar organizations through The State of Grantseeking Survey and Reports. 
     
  • Then you need to Create Your Infrastructure for a grantseeking program that can handle submitting all of your requests in an efficient and sustainable fashion. This will include establishing policies that will guide your grantseeking program, assembling a team to help you with the various tasks involved in grantseeking, and developing a process to handle your awards. 
     
  • After you have those key pieces in place, then you are well-positioned to Find the Right Grantmakers that are most likely to fund your project or program. This will include documenting the needs of your project and then researching potential funders. 
     
  • Once you have potential funders identified, you can Craft Your Plan by developing a strategy on how to motivate the funders to support you, and by creating a calendar for all the work involved in submitting the requests.   
     
  • One of the most common issues for grantseeking is having the capacity to do all of this work. You can review our section on Creating Time to make it possible to take on the essential work of gaining the funds for your good work.

This process takes quite a bit of work upfront, but it is a worthwhile investment of your time and effort. Once you have these pieces in place, you will have a grants program through which you can submit requests effectively and efficiently, and most importantly, in a way that will result in awards that will power your programs!