Basic Grant Tracking for the Small Organization
April 23, 2008
by Michael Wells, GPC, CFRE
A typical nonprofit may submit a dozen, or 50, or 100 proposals a year and have maybe 30 percent of them funded. As a grantwriter, how do you keep track of them? In the course of that year, you or someone in your organization may talk to foundation or government agency staff countless times. How do you remember what was said?
Keeping on top of this information is vital to the success of your grants effort, but it receives little attention. While there are several decent fundraising software programs, their focus is generally on individual donors. I’m not aware of any that do a good job tracking foundation or government grants.
Local governments and large nonprofits have grants management offices that may (or may not) track this sort of information. But in most cases the grantwriter or development department will want to keep their own records. Your needs are different and you want to have quick access to these records. By the way, this isn’t about grants management, which involves compliance with (usually government) grant contract terms and is another complex field in itself. For a quick overview see “Essentials of Grants Management” by Harvey Flood in TGCI Magazine, http://www.tgci.com/magazine/01fall/grantsm1.asp.
When I was a development director I developed a simple, paper-based system that was cheap and easy to set up and easy to maintain. It has four components....
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