Start Strong: Build a Strategic Grant Pipeline for Success

There's always an opportunity to develop a comprehensive grant strategy that will serve your organisation. By investing time now in strategic planning and pipeline development, you can transform your grant-seeking from a reactive scramble into a proactive, systematic approach that maximises your resources and chances of success.

 

Assessing Grant Readiness

Before diving into new grant opportunities, take a look at your organisation’s current position.

• Review your mission statement, strategic plan, and program objectives from the previous year. Are these still current? If not, workshop revisions and updates before you look for grants or other funding. This will inform grants research so that you can identify opportunities that best align with your goals and demonstrate your credibility to funders.
• Collect documentation, including your latest financial statements, program evaluations, and impact metrics. Having these materials at hand will streamline your future applications.
• Create a clear narrative about your organisation and each project’s unique value proposition. A great tactic is to build a key message document. What evidence demonstrates your effectiveness? What partners are you collaborating with? This core messaging can be used across multiple grant applications and funder proposals throughout the year.

 

Building Your 12-Month Grant Pipeline

A well-structured grant pipeline (or ‘grant calendar’) helps you plan, manage deadlines, allocate resources effectively, and maintain a steady funding stream. Here’s how to develop yours:

Grant and Funder Research

Start by casting a wide net. Use broad search parameters and explore trust and foundation grants, corporate foundations, and government funding opportunities. Make a long list of grants your organisation and projects are likely to be eligible for.

You can use grant finder databases, funder websites, social media, association newsletters, and other resources to find grants, or you may already have a strong pipeline based on past applications.

Qualify and Shortlist

Next, refine your search criteria and narrow down your list to opportunities that are a great match. Consider past success rates, funder alignment, funding value, appetite for multi-year or recurrent funding, likely competition, and reporting requirements. You may find a simple scoring rubric to be valuable here.

Opportunity Tracking

Create a calendar template using Excel, project management software, Outlook, or whatever system your team can access and will use regularly.

Many free and low-cost options can help you collaborate, track progress, and automate notifications so that you can focus on program design and proposal development rather than pipeline management.

Did anything fall through the cracks last year? Were you successful with an application and eligible to apply again? Add relevant deadlines from last year in your calendar, as many funders have cyclical, or regular, funding rounds. These cycles allow you to plan with reasonable accuracy.

Calendar Development

As you plot out your qualified opportunities, consider milestones for:

• Application deadlines
• Internal review processes
• Program data collection
• Partner collaboration
• Team capacity and competing priorities

Then, add contingencies for unexpected opportunities as well as potential hiccups.

Remember that quality applications need planning, substantial lead time and teamwork.

You don’t need to be able to resource everything in-house but to have the best chance of success, you do need to delegate and engage external resources as early as possible.

 

Strengthening Your Grant Strategy

To maximise your success rate, implement these strategic elements:

Relationship Building

Prioritise opportunities where you have a warm relationship with the funder already. Where you don’t, make a plan for cultivating relationships with the funder. Many funders prefer to support organisations they already know. To get started, follow social media updates, make introductions, go along to briefing sessions, and read their reports and other materials. Involve staff at the right levels, as well as board directors where appropriate, in strategic engagement.

Capability Evidence

Establish systems to track and measure your program outcomes throughout the year. Most funders want to see robust evidence of your impact track record. Implement processes to collect both quantitative metrics and qualitative stories, case studies and testimonials that demonstrate your effectiveness, community and partner reputation. You should also monitor your sector so you can build on what works where evidence exists rather than duplicating solutions.

Capacity Building

Who writes grants in your organisation? Consider investing in professional development for relevant staff and external grant writers for complex applications. We can also help create boilerplate content so your team can feel more prepared for general grants. Your upfront investment will pay dividends in improved success rates.

Collaboration

Identify potential partners for joint applications as soon as possible. Many funders value collaborative approaches because they have the potential for greater impact. Begin partnership discussions early to allow time for relationship building and program design. If you wait until a grant opportunity is published and there are just a few weeks to the deadline, it will be too late to put in a quality application.

Project Planning

Develop your project outline before you begin a funding proposal (use this free template). If you design your project while writing a grant, you will wind up retrofitting it to the funder’s expectations. This may severely inhibit your ability to deliver the outcomes you really want. Instead, plan out the activities, milestones, stakeholders and budget and then identify which of these you can pitch to a specific funder.

Implementation and Measuring Success

To effectively deliver your grants pipeline throughout the year, you need to:

• Assign clear roles and responsibilities for grant research, writing, and management
• Create key messages and templates for common application elements to increase efficiency
• Ensure internal review processes are followed
• Use a system to regularly track deadlines, reporting requirements, success rate, return on investment, diversity of funding sources, average award value, and potential for renewal
• Schedule regular pipeline review meetings to monitor progress, identify patterns, and adjust strategies

Doing this now in January will help set your team up for success with grants in 2025.

 

Final Thoughts

A well-planned pipeline and strategy will pay off in the long term and ensure you focus on the right opportunities, maximising efficiency and resources.

Most importantly, it will maintain focus on your organisation’s mission and impact by aligning funding with genuine needs rather than chasing grants that require mission drift or that have very low success rates. With careful planning, implementation and execution, you can deliver a grant program that sustainably supports your organisation’s vital work.