Best practices for managing a grant pipeline

Carrie Watkins

Hello Grantmaking Community! Your friendly neighborhood Blackbaud Grantmaking Content Marketer here. We are putting together a guide on managing a grant pipeline—from promoting, to reviewing, to communicating with organizations throughout the application period. I would like to add any tips, suggestions, and best practices that you might have. What have you found that works well to:

• Make sure the right organizations find your funding opportunity
• Decide how long to promote your grant before the application deadline
• Find the right partners to help you spread the word
• Communicate with applicants during the decision process

If you have any tips, please put them in the comments! If you’d prefer, you can message me directly and we can set up a time for a call.

Monica Jordan

@Carrie Watkins Thanks for launching this conversation - I'm happy to share our process and look forward to learning others' best practices.

Our Community Grants Program funds community initiatives supporting mental illness, addiction and mental wellness. We have 2 application deadlines each year. For this reason, we promote our grants program all year - the next application window is always less than 6 months away! Information about the grant program, eligibility and exclusions is available on our website, along with the dates for the upcoming round of funding. We promote the grants program through our own communications channels by highlighting the work of our grant recipients.

The actual window during which applicants may submit their requests is 4-6 weeks spanning Christmas and summer holidays, so I have also developed an application guide (hints on what reviewers are looking for) and worksheet (containing all the questions and word limits) so that applicants can work on their application anytime throughout the year and paste their information into the online portal during the application window. I think it's helpful for applicants to have the questions in advance of logging into the portal, especially with word limits as sometimes it's harder to write less!

We promote our Call for Applications to other community-serving organizations and umbrella groups, past applicants and other stakeholders through our communications channels. I also receive requests from organizations that have found us through a Google Search, so SEO is important. The majority of applicants in the current round of funding are past applicants.

For us the challenges is less about “the rights orgs” finding us, and more about helping applicants create a strong request that articulates the connection between the proposed project and our funding priorities. I have hosted a webinar for prospective applicants to highlight elements of a strong proposal and answer questions.

I hope this is helpful, please do reach out with any questions!

Carrie Watkins

@Monica Jordan Thank you for sharing! I love the idea of the worksheet. Do you have any idea on the percentage of applicants that use the worksheet or any qualitative responses on time savings from having that resource available?

Monica Jordan

@Carrie Watkins I developed the worksheet for our most recent round as we just launched BBGM! I have sent a survey to applicants this round to invite feedback on the new grants portal vs. our old Word doc and the vast majority indicated they had found the resources useful and planned to refer to them again next round.

• I found the resources on the Foundation's website including the Community Grants Application Guide, Worksheet and FAQ, helpful in preparing my application. 98% of respondents agreed with this statement. 2% indicated they didn't use the resources.
• I plan to refer to the Community Grants Application Guide and Worksheet to prepare my application next time I apply. 97% agreed with this statement.

As we were launching BBGM for this round of funding, the application window was 2 weeks shorter than usual. We knew this would happen, so I emailed past applicants and those on the notification list to advise of the upcoming dates, promote the deadline and to share these resources with the encouragement to use them to prepare their application in advance of the portal going live.

Happy to share our very positive experience with BBGM!

Melinda Pierre

@Carrie Watkins @Monica Jordan This is interesting - is there somewhere we can see the guide you created?

Monica Jordan

@Melinda Pierre, yes the resources are available on our website. Please feel free to reach out directly with any questions monica.jordan@nshealth.ca.

Carrie Watkins

Hi @Melinda Pierre! The guide I'm creating for Blackbaud is with our design team right now and I hope to have it live on our resource center the first week of March. Once it's ready, I can link to it here so you can take a look. I always appreciate feedback!

Melinda Pierre

@Monica Jordan Thank you!

Carrie Watkins

@Monica Jordan @Melinda Pierre Thank you again for your help as we created our guide for managing application pipelines! We launched our guide last week and it's up on our resource center. Here is the link. Feel free to message me directly if you don't want to fill out the form and I can send you the PDF.

Monica Jordan

@Carrie Watkins Yes, please do send along the document! TIA