How To Create Your First Grant Strategy

Creating a grant strategy is the way for foundations to transition from giving grants to making a repeating impact. Your foundation might not even know that grant giving is not an efficient process without a grant strategy. With a grant strategy, your team will know exactly what you give grants for, why you give them, how you will know you are successful, and how you will improve over time based on changes to your grant portfolio.

A grant strategy is simply taking your foundation's priorities and making them into a process that your staff can implement repeatedly and that grant applicants can understand. A grant strategy begins with knowing what a grant strategy is.

What Is a Grant Strategy?

A grant strategy is a plan developed by a foundation that explains how the foundation will spend money to achieve certain goals. It is a plan that explains what the foundation's priorities are, what types of grants the foundation will give out, what criteria the foundation will use to determine which grant applicants will get money, and what types of reporting and learning the foundation will do to determine if the grant strategy is working.

A grant strategy is not just a list of priorities that a foundation wants to address with grant giving. A grant strategy is a way to connect priorities to actions by showing how grants are found, reviewed, granted, monitored, and measured. A simple example would be a foundation that wants to give out grants for youth workforce readiness. A foundation might choose an area to work in and set an annual budget for two types of grants: multi-year program grants for established providers and capacity building grants for new providers.

Why Your Foundation Needs a Grant Strategy

Grantmaking becomes more difficult as the volume, the number of programs, and the expectations all grow. A good grant strategy provides consistency, equity to applicants, and fewer misunderstandings about changing priorities and policies.

Having a good grant strategy also serves governance well. If a member of the governing body, a donor, an auditor, or a partner wants to know the reasoning behind a particular grant, or how the foundation is progressing towards its mission, a good grant strategy provides a structure to answer those questions.

Core Grant Strategy Components

A good grant strategy should contain a few simple elements that staff members can understand, the governing body can defend, and applicants can comprehend.

• Mission and priority areas: Clearly articulating the areas the foundation supports and those the foundation does not support to help streamline the process and minimize misaligned applications.
• Grant types and structures: Determining whether the foundation makes grants to support operations, program grants, capital grants, multi-year grants, regranting, rapid response grants, etc., and the implications these types of grants might have on the reporting and oversight process.
• Eligibility and selection criteria: Developing the basic criteria to determine who to fund and how the foundation will evaluate the applications based on alignment, feasibility, capacity, equity, and risk factors.
• Grant lifecycle and governance: Describing the process from the beginning to the end of the grant, including who makes the final decisions, the documentation process, etc.

Setting Goals and Reporting On Them

A grant strategy becomes real when it is measurable through goals. It is essential to make goals measurable by outcomes rather than activities. For example, rather than tracking the number of grants made, it is better to track the outcomes of the grants.

Firstly, it is essential to establish goals that are achievable, followed by making them measurable based on various programs where applicable. The reporting of grant strategy is essential as it caters to various stakeholders.

For instance, the program teams require detailed reports on the implementation of the strategy, finance teams require detailed reports on the budgets, and leadership teams require a portfolio of what is working or not.

Another essential aspect of a grant strategy is building a positive experience for applicants. This is essential as the grant recipients are aware of the reporting requirements from the onset.

Who Executes The Grant Strategy

Grant strategy is a shared responsibility among various teams within a foundation or a firm, although a single team is responsible for the grant strategy document.

A grant strategy involves various teams within a firm or a foundation, as discussed below:

• Program teams are responsible for translating goals into application criteria.
• The grants management or operations teams are responsible for maintaining a smooth workflow.
• The finance teams are responsible for maintaining a smooth flow of finance.
• The leadership teams are responsible for governance.

Software Needed To Execute Your Strategy

However, a good grant strategy requires more than just documents and meetings. Many funders already use software to help manage the process, including tools to help with intake, review, payments, reporting, and learning.

Some of the software that might be necessary includes:

• Grant management software
• Financial software
• CRM software
• Document management software
• Analytics software
• Collaboration software

The key here is to make sure the software all works together. If the software does not integrate well, the process becomes inefficient.

Managing Your Grants With Fluxx

Fluxx is a software tool that assists a foundation in managing a grant strategy. It makes the process actionable. It takes the goals of the foundation and makes them a reality.

With the help of this tool, a foundation’s grant management process becomes more streamlined. It allows the organization to standardize the application process, review the grants based on governance rules, and report the process. It makes the reporting process easy because the requirements are all set. It also allows the organization to see the grants that are in the pipeline, those that are overdue, those that are already awarded, and those that align with the goals.

Build a Strategy That Scales With Your Giving

A first grant strategy doesn’t have to be fancy, just clear enough to guide decision-making and results. When your strategy outlines your priorities, processes, governance, and reporting, you can act with speed, invest with confidence, and build a portfolio that achieves your mission.

If you’re ready to standardize your grant strategy execution, simplify reporting, and get real visibility into your portfolio, then you should book a demo with us to see how Fluxx can help you better manage your foundation’s grants.