Build Your Grants Strategy
BUILD: Creating a sustainable process for grants success
Identifying potential funding opportunities is an important step in grantseeking, but successful nonprofits go beyond compiling a list of funders. To secure sustainable support, opportunities must be organized into a coordinated funding strategy that determines how much to request, when to approach each funder, and how different sources can work together to support a project.
A funding strategy helps your organization determine how different funders can work together to support a project. Rather than pursuing grants in isolation, you begin to build a structured plan that aligns funding opportunities with your organization’s goals, timelines, and financial needs.
This tutorial guides you through the process of transforming identified funding opportunities into a practical grantseeking strategy. Continuing the steps from the FIND tutorial:
- Step 5: Position Your Opportunities Within a Funding Strategy: The next step is to determine how each funding opportunity fits within your overall funding plan.
- Step 6: Create Your Grants Calendar: Next, you will organize opportunities into a clear planning timeline.
- Step 7: Establish Grantseeking Goals and Objectives: Once your opportunities and timeline are clear, you can set realistic grantseeking goals. GrantStation offers two tools to help you establish these goals and objectives: a Grant Diversification Assessment and the Benchmarker Tool.
- Step 8: Evaluate Your Grantseeking Success: Finally, you will learn how to measure the effectiveness of your grantseeking efforts.
Create Your Infrastructure
A strong funding strategy also depends on the right internal systems and support. This section focuses on building the infrastructure needed for effective grant programs.
You will explore how to:
- Develop grant policies and procedures to guide proposal development and compliance.
- Build a grantseeking team that includes staff, leadership, and program partners.
- Prepare for grants management, including tracking awards, monitoring budgets, and meeting reporting requirements.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have a clear framework for turning a list of funding opportunities into a strategic grantseeking plan supported by practical tools, realistic goals, and systems that strengthen long-term grant success.