3 Things to Consider When Deciding Whether to Pursue a Grant

“I’ve found a great grant opportunity. We could get $1 million! There will be five awards across the nation. It’s due in three weeks. We can put something together in that time, right?”

If you’ve worked in a nonprofit as a director, program manager, grant writer, or front-line staff person, chances are this scenario sounds familiar.

Pursuing grants is an important part of nonprofit work. Grants help seed, build, and sustain programs providing important services in communities across the country. With more than 127,000 foundations and 1.9 million nonprofits in the US, that’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of competition.

Given that, how do you decide which grants to pursue? In my experience, it usually comes down to three things: alignment, capacity, and time.

Alignment: What Does Your Strategic Plan Say?

Whittling down your grant opportunities list goes beyond asking yourself if a grant aligns with your vision and mission statements, although those are excellent places to start. Together, they form your organizational north star. Will this help us further our mission? is one of the first—if not the first—question you’ll ask yourself.

Does this align with our strategic plan? and What goal(s) does it support? should be your next ones.

Why? Your strategic plan lays out what you want to accomplish (goals/outcomes) and how you’re going to accomplish it (objectives). You’ll often hear folks describe a strategic plan as a roadmap, laying out the route you take to get from Point A (your present state) to Point B (your future, or desired, state).

Many folks consider strategic plans to be agency roadmaps. Unfortunately, they don’t look nearly as cool as these old maps. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.

Collection of vintage roadmaps scattered on a desk.

But your strategic plan isn’t only a roadmap. It’s also an agreement between multiple stakeholders across your agency about where you’ll direct your efforts over a specific time period. And thinking about it as an agreement can lessen people’s inclination to ignore or handwave it, if that’s a problem you occasionally face.

Finally, your strategic plan is a little like bowling alley gutter bumpers: it keeps your ball on course and prevents others from hopping into your lane and causing a spectacular smash-up.

There may be times when you decide to pursue a grant that doesn’t fully align with your strategic plan, and that’s okay. Strategic plans aren’t meant to turn you into robots or shackle you into unyielding rigidity.

For example, maybe you or a partner agency stumble across a pilot grant opportunity that would allow you to finance a program you’ve talked about for years. Those kinds of opportunities can be few and far between, so you might decide to pursue it, even if it doesn’t fully align with your strategic plan.

Strategic plans are living documents and therefore subject to change. Be sure to keep the lines of communication open as you make adjustments. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Graphic with the word "plan" written in chalk in all caps. The "A" has been replaced with a single light bulb. Other words written in chalk around it include "strategy," "communication," "team," and "analysis."

But deviating from the plan should be an informed decision, made after input from people who’ll be involved in carrying out the proposed work, not a knee-jerk reaction because someone gets a wild hair. Few things leave a worse taste in people’s mouths than a decision that puts more work on their plates without first asking them what’s already on them.

In other words, evaluating a grant opportunity through the lens of your strategic plan keeps your goals front of mind, helps you stay focused, and aids your decision-making when you’re inevitably faced with hard choices about the highest and best use of your limited resources. (More about that in the capacity section.)

Capacity: What Are the Short- and Long-Term Costs?

Grants are not free.

Yes, they’re money you don’t repay…unless specific circumstances, like instances of fraud, require it. (Reminder: Fraud is illegal, don’t do it).

But preparing grant applications can be costly, whether in hard dollars or more intangible things like staff time. And your capacity isn’t just about preparing the application. It’s also about what happens if you get an award and the reality of what that means.

Let’s take each of these in turn, starting with preparing an application.

Grant Application Preparation

Think of this as your short-term capacity or your short-term cost.

In essence, it’s an upfront investment with no guarantee on return (e.g., you’re not guaranteed to get an award). Your job is to determine if the risk is worth the investment.

No project plan is complete without an evaluation of your capacity to do the work. Image by deemakdaksina on Canva.

Vector graphic of a woman holding books standing in front of a whiteboard with Post-It notes in three columns. She's planning involved in strategic planning.

If your organization doesn’t have a grant writer on staff, you could hire a freelance grant writer to prepare your application. Going this route will mean spending anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on their services.

Your capacity in this sense is partially defined by your budget and whether you can pay the freelancer’s fee.

But why isn’t it based solely on your budget?

Because the freelancer won’t be working alone on the project. They may work independently for most of it, but they’ll need guidance from you or someone else on your team. That might include:

Attending meetings, whether quick check-ins or more in-depth program design sessions
Answering questions or requests for information by email, text, or phone
Providing copies of organizational documents for further information or reference
Reviewing and and providing feedback on written drafts

Staff time and availability are also part of your capacity, but they’re often overlooked or taken for granted. Usually, that’s because they’re not visible in the same way a freelancer’s fee is. Tasks associated with application preparation are part of a staff person’s duties, and their salary is already a budgetary line item—it’s not an “extra” cost to the agency.

Unless you or other staff members track time associated specifically with grant-preparation tasks, it gets easily lost in the whirlwind of everything you all do in a day. (Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it later.)

Evaluating capacity includes looking at key staff members’ availability during the project’s proposed timeframe. Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash.

Photo of an open paper planner sitting on a desk. There are some items written on a few dates in the planner.

What happens if you don’t consider staff time/availability when deciding whether to pursue a grant? You end up with a distorted picture of your capacity, and that can lead to poor decisions.

Let’s say you’ve retained a freelancer to work on the grant. But you didn’t check with other staff members who will be involved in the project.

It’s only when you hold the project kickoff meeting that you discover three key staff members have limited availability during the grant preparation timeline: one will be on vacation for a week, and two will be out of town for several days at mandatory training.

Whoops.

And just like that, a project you believed would be relatively easy became much more complicated.

Consider another scenario: maybe you can’t hire a freelancer. What do you do then? Will one of your program staff or directors write the grant? What, if anything, must they postpone to do so? Is it even possible for them to put aside those other things to focus on the grant, or will it be one more thing on an already overfull plate?

The look of an overworked nonprofit professional when they learn they’ve just been given another project. Don’t be the cause of this look. Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.

A photograph of single egg with an illustrated face on it. The face is turned to the right and looks apprehensive. The items in the background are out of focus, so it's hard to tell what they are.

Even if your agency has a grant writer (or multiple grant writers) on staff, don’t skip the conversations about capacity. In fact, they’re even more important if the project team comprises only staff members.

Why? Because their days include agency business besides pursuing grants and preparing applications—particularly if they’re program staff who serve clientele.

Having upfront conversations about what’s already on everyone’s schedules—other projects, vacations, trainings, monitorings, etc.—will help you make better, more informed decisions about your ability to pursue a grant and submit a well-written, thoughtful, and complete application.

Post-Award Grant Obligations

Think of this as your long-term capacity or long-term cost, which is your ability to carry out the work you promised to do in your grant application.

And that’s not only the direct work of the program—housing people, running afterschool programs, providing healthcare for those without insurance, or whatever your agency does.

It also means fulfilling other requirements laid down by the grantor.

Here’s an example: the US Department of Justice (DOJ) requires financial managers, program administrators, and authorized organization representatives (a fancy governmental term for folks who can sign and accept grant awards) to take and pass their financial management training.

Makes sense, right? You want people to know the ins and outs of handling federal money because it comes with a lot of regulation.

Everyone required to take the training must do it within a certain period of time and provide a certificate of completion to their federal project officer. If they don’t, DOJ will freeze the grant award until the requirement is met.

And that means you can’t draw money to do important things like pay the program staff.

Be sure to consider what your post-award obligations will be. It can save you a lot of unexpected headaches in the future. Photo by Vasilis Caravitis on Unsplash.

View through a window of a woman sitting at a desk, in front of a computer, rubbing her head as if she has a headache.

The training takes up to 20 hours to complete. That’s half of a full-time staff person’s weekly hours.

Grants also have reporting requirements. Usually these are roughly outlined in the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for a grant. They’ll vary by grantor, but most grants will require at least quarterly reports. And they’ll contain both financial and programmatic components, with the programmatic one occasionally including questions you’ll need to answer.

If you have 15 grants and each one requires a quarterly report, that’s 15 reports your program and finance staff will be completing each quarter over the life of those grants.

And sometimes those reports can be really gnarly. I’ve seen nonprofits decline to re-apply for grants they’ve had for only one year because the grantor’s quarterly reports were so onerous.

If you want a peek at what might be required for a report, check out the Hearst Foundations’ grant reporting guidelines. You can download PDFs of guidelines for both endowment and non-endowment grants.

And while you’re there, see if you notice anything in particular about endowment grant reporting requirements.

Reports are part of a grant’s post-award obligations. Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash.

Photograph of two open laptops sitting on a table. A pile of papers sits between then. Two people, whose faces are out of frame, point to information on the paper with pens.

I’ll just hang out here while—oh, you’re back! Did you see it? The part about endowment grant recipients submitting reports on an annual basis in perpetuity?

That’s forever, forever-ever, y’all.

Put another way: If you get a Hearst Foundations endowment grant, you’re committing not only your organization’s current staff to that reporting requirement. You’re committing your organization’s future staff to that requirement until the Hearst Foundations close, your organization closes, or the heat death of the universe happens.

When you’re determining whether to pursue a grant, make sure to review the Request for Proposals (RFP) thoroughly to know what your post-award obligations will be. They’ll have a direct impact on your staff’s time, so you need to make sure you have enough capacity not only in the program, but in other agency departments as well (e.g., finance), to meet those obligations.

Time: Is It Really On Your Side?

In short: probably not.

I’m not trying to be that little rain cloud that follows you around, moping and thundering and drizzling desultorily on your parade. But the fact is human beings are notoriously terrible at estimating the time (and costs and risks) it will take to complete a project due to a phenomenon called the planning fallacy.

Okay, so maybe I will be that little cloud…

Vector graphic of a gray thundercloud with two lightning bolts coming from the bottom.

First introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in a 1979 paper, the planning fallacy describes a type of cognitive bias that leads us to be overly optimistic about our capabilities and over-reliant on intuition when it comes to making predictions about the future.

In other words, you believe you can finish a task more quickly than your past experience has repeatedly demonstrated it will take you.

When you’re thinking about time needed to pursue a grant, you need to be realistic and—dare I say it—perhaps a tad pessimistic. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but project progress is rarely linear. It comes in fits and starts and happens between distractions, tangents, and urgent tasks that pop up seemingly out of nowhere. In the end, it looks more like the meandering path on an old cartoon treasure map than it does an arrow.

As you evaluate your timeframes, you need to build in contingencies that allow you some leeway to deal with random things that pop up or plans that go awry.

Remember: Everything always takes longer than you think it will.

Let’s return to the scenario I opened the article with. Three weeks to assemble a grant with a potential award of up to $1 million. Let’s say your grant writer believes they can finish the first drafts of all the written components—narrative, implementation plan, and logic model—in 20 hours. Assuming another three hours to make revisions after getting comments from reviewers and to do a final read-through puts their total writing/revising time at 23 hours.

Better plan on a total of 26 hours, just to be safe.

Grantor due date on a Friday? Make your goal to submit on Wednesday of the same week. That way, if something goes wrong during the online submission, you’re not right against the deadline.

You get the idea.

Everything takes longer than you think it will. Sometimes, small things take longer than big ones. Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash.

Closeup photograph of vintage alarm clock with a single bell on top and Roman numerals on its face.

It’s a fine line to walk. You don’t want to add so much contingency that the timeline is grossly exaggerated. But you do need to be hard-nosed and realistic about how much time you need to do your work well. And to figure that out, you need data about how long specific tasks have taken you in the past.

Time tracking is a crucial tool in your ability to timeline and forecast accurately. If you haven’t tracked your time before, I recommend doing it at least for a little while. Lots of time tracker apps have free plans. (Toggl Track is one I’ve used in the past.) Or you can do it old school and write down your tasks’ beginning and end times in a notebook. No need for fancy technology.

If your grant-related task is to review and offer feedback on drafts, track the time it takes you to get through each draft, and then total it up once you’re all done. Do that a few more times and you’ll have an idea of how long that task will take. And, if you reviewed different types of grants (e.g., foundation, federal, etc.), tracking your time will enable you to see the variation in review time between them.

Armed with real data—not just vague recollections—of how long it takes you to complete certain types of tasks, you’ll be better able to judge your ability to complete an application within the time available to you. And knowing that is crucial to your decision about whether to pursue a grant.

Wrapping Up

Although I’ve talked about them separately in this article, alignment, capacity, and time are intimately connected.

You may pass on an opportunity that fully aligns with your mission and strategic plan because the due date is too close and your capacity too little. Or you may decide to pursue a grant with a rolling deadline because it fits your strategic plan, and the extended timeline allows your small staff to fit its preparation into their busy schedules.

No matter what, make sure you carefully consider all three when you’re deciding whether to pursue a grant.