Grants are critical for your mission but carry a high burden of monitoring and accountability.
After the application process, receiving and tracking your grant funding is crucial to the grant management process. Improper grant management could result in losing future funding or even having to return the grant money you were awarded.
Showing you’re a good steward of granted and donated funds highlights your commitment to donors and showcases how your organization is meeting its mission.
These three tips improve nonprofit grant tracking:
1. Create a calendar
Grants come with many crucial deadlines during the application process and when implementing your grant funding into your organization to support your goals, responsibilities, and mission.
Creating and maintaining a calendar the whole team can access ensures everyone is updated with essential deadlines and changes.
Many nonprofits keep track of the progress of grant applications and fund tracking on calendars as a type of internal reporting system. Whether a physical or virtual calendar, both offer unique benefits to nonprofit organizations while displaying the critical dates and deadlines for all the organization’s grants.
The benefits of a physical calendar for grant tracking include:
- Visible to the whole department or office
- Does not require the internet or a computer to access
- Simple for every member of the company to use and update
The benefits of using a virtual calendar include:
- Streamline information such as deadline changes across multiple different grant projects
- Send notifications about critical due dates and meetings
- Accessible by every team member, no matter their location
Whether physical or virtual, it’s crucial to have somebody consistently updating the calendar as scenarios change to ensure your organization doesn’t miss out on essential funding.
2. Coordinate team roles and responsibilities
Before beginning a grant application, have a meeting with your entire team to discuss specific responsibilities and a timetable of expected work.
To ease the burden on your team, consider creating calendars, to-do lists, and timelines organized by employees’ responsibilities to show responsibilities clearly. Color coding tasks are a great way to identify which tasks belong to which person and make it easy to quickly figure out who’s working on what aspect of a grant project.
Remember to be flexible. Sometimes, a team member will be too busy to assist with a task. Having other team members in mind who can step in and complete tasks across various roles will be instrumental in ensuring the success of your grant application.
3. Tracking and reporting
When you’re receiving funding—and often other sources—the party responsible for your funding wants to ensure you’re using it within their guidelines.
That’s why grant and fund tracking and reporting are so important. Your tracking responsibilities include:
- Detailed documentation of spending
- Any changes to your planned spending
- Outcomes of your grant-funded programs
Some grants may operate on a reimbursement basis, which means tracking all your spending is a definite requirement. Others reward funds proactively for you to use on different programs, but you still must keep careful track of what you spend and where all that money goes.
Regarding reporting, some grants require you to compile all the information from your grant programs into reports for your funders, investors, or board. Reports often include things like:
- Financial data: In terms of financial information, you’ll need to provide detailed data to explain where every penny of your grant funding went. This will include information on specific projects, departments, and other organizations that received money or services as a result of your grant funding.
- Accomplishments: This space is a place for you to note what that money allowed you to accomplish, and how that relates to your organization’s larger mission. Having a robust accomplishments report can show that you planned and organized your funding efforts effectively, which can go a long way in getting more funding in the future.
- Outcomes: Even after using the money, you will need to track the impacts of how your organization spent the grant money to ensure it has a positive effect. Outcomes-based reporting can help you get more funding in the future if the data shows that the need still exists in specific sectors of your community.
Tracking grants is crucial for nonprofit success and ensures that your mission receives the necessary funding to accomplish its mission. Following these best practices lays the foundation for your organization to track grants efficiently.
To level up that foundation and learn even more about grants, including ways to discover new grants and more tips and tricks to keep funding once you’ve secured it, this thought leadership webinar dives deeper into grant management.
