How to Avoid Missing Grant Deadlines

The American author, playwright, and screenwriter, Tony Kushner, once said, “I work best after a deadline has passed, when I’m in a panic”. That may work in the entertainment business, where art can be delayed for the sake of greatness, but it’s detrimental for nonprofits reliant on external funding opportunities. 

Missing deadlines can have consequences. These include financial losses, a breakdown in relationships between nonprofits, and initiatives falling apart. That’s why it’s critical for nonprofit organizations to keep track of deadlines and do their utmost to meet them. This post will examine the pitfalls of missing grant deadlines and what nonprofit organizations can do to avoid missing them. 

Why Missing Grant Deadlines Hurts More Than You Think

On the surface, missing a grant deadline can mean a loss of funds, but that isn’t the biggest repercussion. Your reputation with funders takes a greater hit than your pockets. Remember, funders aren’t just looking for fundees; they’re looking for trustworthy partners and organizations who can keep their word or commit to financial (or any) obligations.

If you miss a deadline, you violate or break that trust, appearing wishy-washy in the eyes of funders, who may show less enthusiasm for your future requests and applications. A survey conducted by the Grant Professionals Association highlights the undermining power of tardiness, citing that 67% of funders keep track of “applicant reliability” and “deprioritize” organizations that miss deadlines in accessing funding in the future.

Sometimes, board members at nonprofit organizations forget (or simply don’t realize) how resource-intensive the grant application process can be. The agencies providing these funds often spend weeks or months gathering metrics, creating narratives, and drafting documents to provide rationales for these grant opportunities. All of this effort goes in the bin when an organization misses a deadline. Not only does that interrupt workflows and dampen morale, it can also delay or even lead to the cancellation of initiatives or events that depend on receiving those grants.

Repeat offenders can cause their implosion. One missed deadline, although never ideal, can be forgiven if there’s a suitable cause, but frequent late submissions can unleash a barrage of internal troubles. Dejected staff, diminished productivity, increased turnover, and tarnished branding arise when a nonprofit continually misses deadlines. Of course, collaborators will become more skeptical of these organizations, micromanage them (which creates a vicious cycle), and even impose leadership changes. And there’s always the risk that funders may terminate their relationships with nonprofits who seem “dysfunctional”.

How to Set Up a Grant Calendar

Understanding how crucial it is to submit deadline applications on time, nonprofits must have some accountability tool ready. They need a fail-proof system that keeps the team on track, so they don’t succumb to distractions or forget deadlines among the sea of tasks they face. That tool is quite simply a grant calendar. It can be as straightforward or as complex as you want it to be (although simple is usually better), as long as it serves as a visual reminder for you and your team. Regardless of form, a well-designed grant calendar will help you make sense of your priority tasks, so you’re not scrambling at the eleventh hour to meet upcoming deadlines. 

Centralize All Deadlines: Use a Shared Calendar 

Your calendar should look clean, clear, and, more importantly, easily accessible and organized. Centralizing all deadlines into one tool or platform makes that all possible. Some tools you can use include:

• Google Calendar—Lets you create shared calendars, which can be color-coded, and schedule event reminders and task notifications, which can include grant deadline submissions.
• Airtable—Provides you with calendar views to visualize grant deadlines in timeline format, along with templates to structure them, collaborations, and various automations and notifications.
• Outlook—Allows you to manage multiple calendars under one “hood”, color-code categories, and schedule alerts and reminders. It also sports a scheduling assistant. 

Color Code by Stage: LOIs, Full Proposals, Reports, Renewals

For additional clarity, color-code priority tasks by stage. For example, use blue for Letters of Inquiries (LOIs), yellow for proposals, red for reports, and green for renewals—you choose the colors. What matters is that your staff can easily identify what tasks are coming up and what takes precedence.

Include Internal Milestones: Draft Due Dates, Review Windows, Sign-Off Deadlines

Keeping one big deadline can make it more difficult to stick to it. A single “finish line,” so to speak, can foster the illusion of plenty of time to complete tasks, encouraging staff to cram and rush tasks at the last minute. It’s better to break grant management into chunks. For instance, you can separate it into phases: draft completion, internal review, and executive sign-off. These milestones ensure that team members get adequate time to complete tasks, with additional grace periods if certain items need revision. 

Assign Responsibilities: Who Owns Each Step?

A reason nonprofit teams sometimes miss deadlines is a lack of ownership. Who’s responsible for what? What tasks need which members? Failing to assign projects to staff members can have the team scrambling at the last minute when they realize certain action tasks haven’t been accounted for. 

So it’s imperative to designate responsibilities early on. Decide who’s in charge of drafting, reviewing, approving, and submitting items. These will be obvious for a reasonable number of tasks since they’ll fall in the domain of particular roles, but ensure no task is left to assumption. A proactive approach to this prevents confusion and tasks from being neglected. 

Sync With Your Development Calendar: Tie Upcoming Grants to Campaigns, Budgets, or Annual Reports

Although optional, we HIGHLY recommend integrating your grant calendar with your broader development calendars. You want to align grant deadlines with your fundraising initiatives, funding cycles, yearly reports, and so forth, to see the bigger picture and ensure that all staff, departments, and other parties are in sync. That synergy keeps confusion out of the building, ensuring everyone knows what’s due and when. 

Automate Alerts and Set Early Reminders

When it comes to deadlines, don’t rely solely on your memory. It happens even if those who can describe themselves as having “an elephant’s memory” can forget important submission dates when juggling a series of grant-related tasks. According to research, people forget 40% of new information within 24 hours! That’s why recording tasks and, these days, automating them, comes in handy. Setting alerts and reminders can mean the difference between calmly crossing an assignment's finish line versus racing to meet the deadline in a panic. 

But again, you don’t want to set just one “mega” alarm towards the end of a project. Set mini-reminders that correspond with the end of each phase of a project. More importantly, you must set multiple reminders for those reminders. For example, you can set reminders 30 days, 7 days, or 48 hours ahead of a looming deadline, depending on the urgency and time-sensitivity of the task. It may seem excessive, but multiple reminders safeguard against forgetfulness and confusion. 

Tools to Help You Schedule Multiple Reminders 

• Asana—Assign project management tasks, create due dates, and automate reminders that provide push notifications.
• Trello—Use “cards” to organize each grant-specific task, establish important dates, and provide reminders as push notifications.
• CRM Tools—Tools such as Salesforce or Bloomerang can enable automated emails or tasks as you approach upcoming deadlines.  

Establishing Visibility Across Your Team 

The other aspect of setting reminders is ensuring the whole team sees them. You can establish company-wide visibility by using a centralized channel, ideally one that everyone has a membership for, so that the whole team can stay up-to-date. 

Examples of Centralized Channels to Use

• Slack—Launch a channel that contains specific information about the grant management process (e.g., #grant-projects, #grants). Users can receive notifications via email or push messages if they have the app on their phones.
• Shared Inbox—Create a group email that your entire staff has access to. They will receive email updates, which should contain messages about upcoming deadlines.
• WhatsApp—Set up a WhatsApp group if you want a simple, low-cost method of keeping your staff informed about external and internal deadlines. Create a group, invite your work contacts, and proceed from there. 

Your choice of channel will depend on factors such as budget (some tools have more expensive setups), your organization's overall tech savvy, time constraints regarding training, and so forth. Nevertheless, it’s important to find a centralized channel and to stick with it. 

Build a Rolling 12-Month Grant Management Plan

Zooming out and looking at the big picture is as crucial for meeting deadlines as establishing the finer details. That’s why we (and many other sources) recommend creating a 12-month “rollout” plan. The plan can be a living document that helps you and your staff forecast, prioritize, and structure grant workloads and deadlines for the year ahead. Adopting this method ensures your team stays ahead of assignments instead of racing to complete them. 

Work Ahead by Forecasting Deadlines and Needs Quarter by Quarter

How do you break this plan down into manageable chunks?

Consider dividing this “calendar” into quarters—four groups of three months (or four seasons), typically from January to March, April to June, July to September, and October to December. This creates an easy-to-follow roadmap that helps you sketch out a year’s worth of grant deadlines, along with reporting essentials and internal checklists for each quarter. 

For example, if you know that a major grant proposal is due in Q3 (July to September), you can plan to complete key tasks in Q2, so you’re not pressured when Q3 arrives. 

Again, like other calendars, share this all-encompassing, 12-month document with your whole team, using the centralized channels discussed earlier and sync it with other calendars to create a complete visual timeline. 

Use Past Grant Cycles and Public Funder Calendars to Anticipate Renewals or Annual RFPs

Looking at what you did yesterday can help inform us of what you will do tomorrow. Pour over data and trends from prior grant funding cycles to identify patterns concerning renewal dates and recurrent RFPs. That allows you to anticipate and plan for repeat opportunities or remember regular obligations well in advance. For instance, if you typically release an RFP every September, you can plan to complete your prep work in July and draft in August. 

Look for Trends: Is Q1 Heavy on Reporting? Do Summer Months Require Early Planning for Fall Deadlines?

Another way to analyze your data is to look more intently at seasonal trends within your organization. For example, a look at previous calendars may show some quarters as reporting-heavy periods while others might focus almost entirely on submitting grant proposals. Uncovering these patterns can also help your team decide what tasks take precedence, how much time is needed to complete them, and when your team should finish them. 

Update This Plan Monthly or Quarterly With the Whole Team

Remember that a rolling plan is a “living document”—you and your staff need to update it as new scenarios and situations arise. The same is true for when you complete certain tasks or when new ones emerge. 

Scheduling regular meetings, whether weekly or biweekly, can help you and your team identify changes such as delays, challenges, and other unexpected conditions early on, so you can adjust your calendar accordingly. 

Block Out Weeks for Work Like Drafting and Editing

Lastly, you must block out certain weeks for more time- and labor-intensive tasks, the ones that might take several days, if not weeks, to complete. Time-blocking ensures that other less pertinent projects aren’t assigned to prevent disrupting the workflow and focus needed to complete the more complex work. For example, it makes sense to block off time for tasks such as proposal drafting since this is a lengthy task with many moving parts. 

What to Do If You’re Falling Behind

Even with all safeguards, you and your staff will encounter delays. It’s normal. But falling behind on a deadline doesn’t matter as much as how you react and plan around the delay, and proceeding with the right strategy will get you back on track. 

Prioritize: Focus on High-Fit, High-Dollar, or Recurring Funders

When the clock is ticking, remember that not all grant opportunities are equal in importance. Focus your time, energy, and resources on applications that offer the best ROI, ones that best suit your mission, bring in funding, and come from funders with whom you already have a steady relationship. 

Communicate: If You’re Truly Stuck, Some Funders May Allow Deadline Extensions—Ask Early

In some scenarios, meeting a deadline may not happen. We mentioned earlier that missing deadlines can put you at a disadvantage, but communicating with funders ahead of time can smooth the tension. Simply telling them you’re running behind schedule and providing a valid reason can garner an extension, especially if you have a strong reputation or an existing relationship with the funder. 

Pull in Support: Grant Funding Consultants, Freelancers, or Program Staff Can Help With Specific Sections or Reviews

A glaring yet overlooked reason nonprofits sometimes miss deadlines is “Hero Syndrome”—the desire for one or a select few to handle a task by themselves. When facing an urgent deadline, don’t hesitate to call for help. Grant writers, consultants, freelancers, and other qualified workers can come to your rescue and share the workload so it doesn’t fall on the laurels of an overburdened few. Delegating specific tasks to the right talent can help you meet a looming deadline without rushing and making mistakes.

Create a “Parked” List: Keep Promising But Out-of-Reach Grants Listed for Next Year

Another approach to consider when time is running out is to put specific grant opportunities on the back burner. In other words, don’t forget them entirely, but put them on hold until a more opportune time surfaces. You can add a grant to an “on hold” list. Add details to that grant, such as its deadline, admission requirements, and notes on why you couldn’t complete it on time. These details will give you context on why this grant is significant and how you can better plan for it the following year. 

Don’t Let Deadlines be Your Downfall

Deadlines may be flexible, but it’s better to honor and commit to them. Barring some unforeseen circumstances beyond your control, always doing everything you can to meet deadlines is crucial. Meeting them bolsters your organization’s reputation, which makes it easier to maintain relationships with funders and stakeholders. Honoring deadlines also takes pressure off your staff, eliminating scenarios where you must scramble to submit proposals. When you can meet important dates, you keep your operations streamlined and stress-free.