The art and science of good grant operations
Grant operations is a term that gets used to refer to two quite similar but different things. Sometimes it refers to funding organisation’s systems and processes, especially those that actually get grants made. But it's also used to refer to ‘human resources’ otherwise known as people, specifically the people who directly run these processes and systems.
Most funders - whatever their focus or size - operate a grantmaking process that runs a bit like a conveyer belt. At the beginning of the conveyor belt you put incoming funding applications. As these move down the conveyor, they are normally assessed, and those that are approved are turned into grant contracts. After the contract is agreed, money gets sent to the applicants: but this is not actually the end of the conveyor belt. Instead the belt keeps on grinding - now rather slowly - until the grant is monitored and managed, and eventually finished. At the very end of the belt the original grant idea drops off into a box marked ‘closed grants’.
Grant operations are all the things that need to happen to make this conveyor belt work smoothly. But just like a real factory, with a real conveyor belt, things won’t work properly without the right people doing the right things along the way.
Four things you need for good grant operations
Design your operations to be in service of your mission
At the very highest level, your grant operations should be in alignment with your vision, mission and strategy. If you are a high-volume funder giving out many small grants per year, you will need different grantmaking processes to enable this compared to a funder giving out only a small number of relatively large grants per year.
Not only will you need differently appropriate and proportionate grantmaking processes, depending on your mission and strategy, you will need the right number of people with the right mix of skills and experience.
Put simply, if you are a medical research funder, you’re probably going to need some grantmaking experts in that specific field to help you make informed grant decisions. And if you are a high-volume funder, you are not going to be able to provide a good grantmaking service (or any service at all) if you don’t have enough staff and good monitoring data to keep track of the load.
A misalignment between a funder’s mission and its grant operations tends to leak out in the form of various tell-tale problems. One obvious problem is a grantmaker with a turnaround time so slow that opportunities to make timely grants have long passed by the time it makes decisions. Another tell-tale can be a funder that ‘talks the talk’ about being trust-based but in the real world imposes strict requirements on grantees while being heavy on compliance and low on transparency.
Simplify and standardise
Even lean and sleek grants operations have an annoying habit of becoming slower and more burdensome as time progresses, particularly for grantseekers and grantees. This is a common pattern in our world and so you need to put in place measures to guard against it - even if you work in a small team.
One thing that can really help grant operations to avoid this accretion of barnacles is to focus on simplification and standardisation.
Simplification could mean periodically reviewing your application form and asking yourself, “Are these questions all really essential?” Application processes tend to accrete new questions; scraping these barnacles off by paring back questions and forms can be a timesaving for both sides of the grantmaking relationship.
Standardisation, by contrast, can mean swapping out separate application forms for five funding programmes with just one carefully designed form that works for all. Or using standardised grant assessment systems which mean colleagues all score against clear criteria which don’t have to be developed or re-written each time.
Use tech to save time
Nearly all funders now use some sort of digital technology to help them make and administer grants. Some funders use generic software, whilst others use systems that we call ‘Grant Management Systems’, or GMSes. There are some features found in quite a few GMSes that can definitely help keep your grant operations running more smoothly:
Automatic reminders for your team about what needs doing next, and when.
Automatically retrieving data about an applicant from approved databases, to speed up due diligence. In England and Wales, this would be the Charity Commission.
Application forms which lead applicants through clear steps and validate the completeness of an application prior to submitting, reducing the back and forth between grantseekers and grantmakers
An interface for reviewers to access and score applications without requiring them to juggle PDFs, scoring rubrics, and countless Excel spreadsheets.
You do need to be careful when choosing a GMS, though, because they can have values baked into them. So if - for example - you use a GMS that has been set to auto-request progress reports absurdly often from your grantees this can undermine your own mission and values, as well as causing a massive headache for grantees. Buyer beware.
Schedule and Invest in continuous improvement
One axiom of the grantmaking universe is that grants operations get worse as the years roll on. We may have mentioned this already.
But why? Usually, the more experience we get, the better we become at something. But grant processes and systems definitely rot and get worse if not carefully maintained. What’s going on?
This issue isn’t really about the capabilities of people in funders, per se. It’s mainly about two other things…
Over the passage of time, repeated requests for new features, rules and exceptions without understanding how any seemingly reasonable request, multiplied by 100, will eventually clog up the system and process unless someone takes ownership of the quality of the whole thing.
The world is constantly changing. What worked well as grant operations five years ago, may not be so appropriate now. Funders don’t always recognise this and so grant operations can become stagnant and suboptimal simply because they don’t change all that much.
A lack of impetus here can be down to a sense of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Except, it may well be broken but you don’t know because you haven’t asked anyone or you’re mysteriously getting 10/10 feedback scores from applicants or grantees. Hint - they’re (understandably) lying to you.
To guard against these issues, funders should acknowledge that their grant operations will require ongoing improvement.
Continuous improvement is not something that can be done ‘on top of the day job’. It is the day job, partly. People working for funders need to be supported here so that they can carve out time to research and analyse how operations can be made better. They also need time, and potentially specialist training, to enable them to test and implement related changes.
TL;DR: Good grant operations, they’re not just for Christmas.
Latest Reading, Watching & Listening - Modern Grantmaking recommends
Back with a bang from his summer break Vu Le shares a new blog in which he talks openly and personally about the challenge of staying motivated when you feel a “sense of being overwhelmed combined with a creeping apathy and general…blah-ness.” He doesn’t just rant, of course, but also provides tips about how to try and stay motivated. We were massive fans of Ray Madoff’s ‘Immortality and the law’, a survey of how dead people’s wishes about the use of their money are enforced or ignored by the legal systems in different countries. Now she’s got a new book coming which also connects the law with wealth. The Association of Foundations in the UK (ACF) is inviting all grantmakers to complete a short survey to share their experiences of funder collaboration. Learning from the survey will be used to inform the future development of the Funders Collaborative Hub - for more background read this blog. The survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and is open until 30 September 2025.
How about a new job or trustee role in grantmaking?
Oxfordshire Community Foundation (UK) is hiring for a permanent Grants Officer. Salary is £28,300, full time (35 hours) though part-time will be considered. Deadline is 11 September 2025. European AI & Society Fund (EU) is hiring for a Co-Director. Part-time between a 0.6-0.8 FTE basis. Gross salary: €92,000-€105,000 per annum gross (pro-rata). Deadline is 12 September 2025. Garfield Weston Foundation (UK) is hiring for a Grants Manager. Salary £40-45k per annum, depending on experience. Deadline is 8.30am Wednesday 17 September 2025. Dulverton Trust (UK) is hiring for a full-time Grants Manager. Salary is £40-42k. Deadline is 10am, 22 September 2025. Civitates (EU) is hiring for an Impact and Learning Manager. €4,100-4,500 per month gross (€53k-58k per year gross). Deadline is 11.59 CET 28 September 2025.
Want to see your job ad in next month’s newsletter? Ping us, it’s free! Just… #ShowTheSalary
Grantmaking ‘joke’ of the month
Why did the grantmaker break up with the proposal?
Because it had too many attachments.
Got any terrible or actually funny grantmaking jokes to share?......tell us.
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Who are we?
Gemma Bull and Tom Steinberg run Modern Grantmaking, and write this newsletter. We do consulting and training specifically for funders, and wrote a book on how to be a modern grantmaker, too.
