Your Guide to Building a Winning Grant Pipeline

A robust grant pipeline is the secret weapon of many nonprofit organizations. Building a process to manage your fundraising and grant-seeking helps make grant funding sustainable. Here, we’ll go over everything you need to know to help build a winning grant pipeline for organizing your grant applications.

What is a Grant Pipeline

A grant pipeline is, essentially, any system that helps you streamline your grant opportunities by dividing the process of applying for grants into stages. You can then, at a glance, tell how each of your funding opportunities is doing. What a grant pipeline looks like will depend on the particular organization in question. How you will handle grant tracking will also differ - perhaps you’ll use a spreadsheet, Airtable, grant management software, or CRMs.

In general, these are some common steps on the “grant lifecycle” that many nonprofits will use.

Researched

This stage of the grant pipeline is where any potential grants will go. These are funders that you’ve found that are possibly aligned with your mission, but which you haven’t contacted yet. Even if you’re uncertain, you should note down the eligibility criteria and application windows, to make sure you don’t miss any deadlines or requirements. Your goal at this stage is to determine if any of these potential leads are worth pursuing as partnerships later on. 

Contacted

Any funder that you’ve reached out to regarding grants can be listed as “contacted”. Ideally this means that the contact has gone well and you have been invited to make an application. It’s often worth it to contact funders first in order to get a better idea of what they’re looking for, rather than make blind grant applications. At this milestone, you want to focus on building relationships and scheduling meetings. 

In Progress

If you have team members actively working on eligible grants, then you can mark them down as in progress - simply as that. You may have grant writers working in the narrative, someone looking at the expenditures to fit the grant into your budget, and letters of support or other documentation being collected at the same time. The goal here is to simply get a great grant application finished and ready.

Submitted

Any grant proposals that have been submitted by the reporting deadlines can be safely marked down as submitted. You’ll want to keep an eye on these in case there’s any other followup deadlines to meet. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of the funders and do what you need to keep on top of things. 

Awarded

Congratulations! Every awarded grant brings you close to your project goals - and should be properly recorded on your pipeline. Once a grant is awarded you will need to acknowledge and accept the grant, set up an internal tracking system for grant deliverables, and begin implementation of the grant - presuming you haven’t already stated that.

Declined

If a grant has been declined, it still benefits your strategic planning to make a note of this. There’s still plenty of use you can get out of declined grants. Requesting feedback will help you improve your strategic planning in the future. Some grants might also be open for reapplications later. 

Needs Renewal

If a grant is eligible to renew its funding, make sure that it is clearly marked as such. This grant may need to go through the cycle of checking for eligibility again, or have other issues of upkeep to address. 

Final Report 

As a grant nears the time for its final report, you should mark this down in the pipeline. Grants at this stage need to have their outcomes measured and reports prepared. You need to prove that your nonprofit was responsible with the funding, and was able to make a real impact. This will help strengthen your case for future financial aid to your grant program.

Why a Grant Pipeline Matters

Grant writing is itself a time consuming process. So is it really worth it to add building a pipeline on top of this grant management process? There are a few reasons why many nonprofit consider a pipeline invaluable. These include

1. It keeps your team on schedule, on task, and all aligned on the same goal
2. It helps you to see the forest despite all the trees. You can focus on short-term goals, while understanding the long-term forecast
3. Your nonprofit can avoid common mistakes made when dealing with grantmakers, such as missing deadlines or sending redundant messages
4. You get a glimpse of the future - you can predict possible funding gaps or the need for renewals before they become emergencies.
5. You can maintain an effective grant management process even when you have team members leave or join.

Tips for Building Your First Grant Pipeline

As mentioned, every nonprofit is going to have its own method for creating grant pipelines that works best for their particular needs. If you’re interested in creating your own, the following are some tips to consider.

Organize Opportunities

Before you begin any initiatives to organize your grants, it can be worth it to organize your opportunities first. Yes, this sounds like a lot. But this is actually a way to get a head start. If you have any previous funders you’ve worked with, or new prospects that have been directly recommended to you, you’re already on your way to a finished pipeline.

Use the Right Tools

The whole point of the grant pipeline is to break down a complex set of tasks into segments easily understandable by team members and stakeholders. You want to make your job easier. The job can be made even simpler through the use of automation and organizational tools. This doesn’t have to be complex, of course - color-coded spreadsheet is a great place to start. The main idea is that you want it to be clear. There should be no confusion over due dates. A template is a great place to get started.

Save the Dates!

One of the most often forgotten about pieces of information are the dates. It sounds obvious, but sometimes the obvious things are the easiest to overlook. You need to make sure that you have recorded deadlines for all applications, letters of intent and reports.

Assign Ownership

Something sitting in the grant pipeline is useless until you get a team member on it. Make sure to assign people to each task as you put tasks on the pipeline. Who will be doing the decision-making for each actionable item? Who will be handling any reporting requirements?

Leave Notes on Insights

Don’t leave any insights out. Does a particular funder prefer emails or calls? Do you know what feedback they gave? Do you have records of meetings? Anything that can be useful on a secondary round of funding should be saved somewhere for further reference.

Common Grant Pipeline Mistakes

Just as there are tips to make a grant pipeline run smoothly, there are also plenty of ways to turn the process into a confusing snarl. The general idea is that you want to keep it clear, legible and with actional workflow.

Don’t Let the Pipeline Go Stale

The worst thing you can do is build a grant pipeline... and then not commit to it. Make sure that you are constructing a project management tool that you’re actually going to use to help you through the grant application process. If the pipeline ends up being never touched for months and the information on it slips out of date... it’s not going to help you. Make sure to set up a recurring monthly reminder for your team.

Don’t Forget to Assign Ownership

This was mentioned already, but is a really easy thing to miss. Make sure every opportunity has someone specific assigned to it. It can be very tempting to simply encourage everyone to “chip in”. But when potential funders have strict deadlines, you need to know who to talk to on your team.

Don’t Ignore the Post-Award Steps

It can be very easy to get caught up in the giddiness of a successful award, so that you start to forget the other parts of nonprofit grant management. The metrics of grant management after the grant is actually awarded are all essential as well. You need to measure how the grant was used, and what the results were. This is especially true for funders you may use again.

Don’t Overcomplicate the Pipeline

You don’t want to confuse your team with an over-stuffed pipeline. And even if you trust that your team understands what you’ve created, its important that other stakeholders can understand it as well. You want to be able to show the pipeline to funders and board members and have them understand exactly what everything means.

Using software that provides a clear dashboard is an excellent way to make sure that things are organized in a clear way. If you need further help, templates are also a great place to get started. You can find plenty of grant pipeline templates online, like this one right here.