Streamline Your Grant Planning Process: 8 Expert Tips

Identify your funding needs.

Review your strategic plan.

What projects will help to move you toward the objectives?

What personnel are available or needed for new projects or expansion of existing projects?

What partners are committed to your plan that could collaborate on a grant application and/or provide letters of support?

Create a calendar of grant deadlines.

Document due dates and anticipated time needed for each application. Keep in mind that some grants can look deceptively simple and even grants with low funding amounts can require a lot of time.

In your calendar, mark the grants that are the highest priority, such as those that your organization receives annually or those with the highest dollar amounts.

Identify any potential conflicts, such as Giving Tuesday, annual fundraisers, or similar events that may take you off grant writing or affect the availability of grant team members to meet a deadline.

Assemble key documents in a shared drive.

Funders usually request the current operational budget, board member list, most recent audited financials, and IRS letter verifying nonprofit status. Include a list of the top 5 funders over the past 3 years and funding amounts, as this is commonly requested. If you will be developing grant budgets, ensure you have access to personnel salaries/hourly rates, percentage of benefits, and other financial information.

Summarize key patient data annually and maintain this in a readily accessible folder.

Basic data include total visits, broken down by type (e.g., primary care, dental, mental health), demographics (e.g., age group, gender, race/ethnicity, insured/uninsured, percent below federal poverty level, new/returning).

Maintain up-to-date data for your needs statements.

Use local and national data that describe the demographics of your community and the health problems they face to provide context for your clinic's proposed work.

Summarize the organization's history in 500 words or less.

You can adapt this summary for a variety of grant applications and for other communications, such as annual reports or webpages. Be certain to specify the date the organization was incorporated, as this is often requested by funders. If your organization has added locations, populations served, or services, describe these briefly in your narrative.

Review your organization's evaluation plan and key metrics that are tracked annually.

These can provide baseline and target data for indicators you propose to measure in the funding request. Keeping metrics consistent across grant applications can simplify work across multiple funders and reduce workload. Make sure that the metrics are reasonable for the project timeline.

Identify at least one alternate staff or volunteer that has access to your grant folders and knows how they are organized.

A quick tour of the main grant files can take 15 minutes and save the organization significant stress and disruption if you are called out of commission. Keeping your folders logically organized and labeled can save everyone time.