The 5 Steps in the Grant Process: Navigating the path from grant readiness to funding success

Image by Melody Hernandez

The grant process begins well before you write the first word of the grant proposal. There are five major components to grant work that, ideally, are completed in this order:

1. Grant Readiness: During this step, you are working to get your organization and programs ready for grant funding. Each program – and your organization as a whole –needs S.M.A.R.T. goals and objectives, reasonable budgets, staffing plans, and evaluation systems in place with all pertinent documents in an easy to access and centralized place. Root Reach Rise offers a grant readiness checklist that can help you find out how ready your organization is to embark on your grant journey.

2. Finding Grant Opportunities: Find funders or grant opportunities mission-aligned with your work and focused on your geographic region, focus area, population served, etc. For best results, move beyond determining if you are eligible and ask yourself, “Are we competitive?” then save resources for the best fits.

3. Cultivate the Relationship: In the industry, we say that “cold proposals” (i.e. proposal submitted with no prior contact with the organization) have about a 10% success rate. Warm that relationship up with a phone call, meeting, or email and the success rate jumps up to 50% or higher! While relationship cultivation with funders occurs throughout the process, it is often between finding the funder and submitting a grant when the relationship is forged or deepened to best position your organization for funding.

4. Apply/Re-Apply: During this step, you are crafting and submitting a well-reasoned grant proposal with required documentation, following all of the instructions outlined by the funder. Ideally, by this point your programs are so fully planned out and you have had enough communication with the funder that you know exactly how to answer each question.

5. Manage Award: Complete all the necessary paperwork and then spend the funds as intended while tracking progress toward outcomes, objectives, and deliverables. Be sure to keep the funder apprised to major changes along the way and submit grant reports according to the schedule. If they don’t ask for a final report, submit a courtesy report that will help to to keep them in the loop about the impact their funding helped to make along with your goals for the near future. This helps tee up the next grant request!

In an ideal world, everyone would have the luxury of time and resources to get fully grant ready before embarking on their grant journey and to progress through each of these steps in order. In practice, jumping into grant work can feel like trying to climb onto a merry-go-round that’s already in motion. If your organization is already receiving grant funding, you are likely jumping from searching for and vetting grants to relationship building to writing proposals to managing awards and submitting reports. Sometimes, we are responding to emerging community needs quicker than we can plan for them. Other times, funders drop a grant deadline with barely enough time to scramble together a proposal. In short, grant work often occurs in less than ideal circumstances.

If your grant work has you feeling like a plate spinner trying to keep it all from crashing to the ground, I recommend using this approach:  Each time you come back to something, give that “plate” a stronger push. For example, you may have to quickly pull a budget together to get a proposal in. Then the next time you submit a proposal, take a little time to update that budget and make it a little better – whether it’s improving the formatting and adding a logo or reaching out to a colleague to see if the revenues are accurate and expenses are reasonable including that salaries are commensurate with the going rate. Or if you wrote a quick need statement to get a grant proposal in by the deadline and it relies on anecdotal evidence, go back to it for the next proposal and add in one or two more citations.

Successful grant work consists of slow and steady progress that ultimately results in impactful change. By continuously refining your proposals, strengthening your relationships with funders, and staying aligned with your mission, your grant work will become more effective and rewarding — leading to more grant wins for your organization and more opportunities for the communities you serve.