How A Grants Management Strategy Can Enhance Your Sustainability Strategy
4 min read
Grants management is an important part of a comprehensive sustainability strategy for aging services programs. How can it best be applied?
During the Age+Action 2024 panel discussion, “The Wind Beneath Your Wings: Designing Diverse Financial Sustainability Strategies,” five panelists shared various strategies for sustaining program funds, from commercial contracting to pursuing special tax revenue.
Grants management lifecycle
The grants management lifecycle consists of three distinct phases: pre-award, award, and post-award.
The pre-award phase involves preparing for grant pursuit, researching and vetting potential funding opportunities, objectives, and capabilities, and submitting grant proposal applications in response to identified funding opportunities. An important part of this phase is ensuring that funding opportunities being pursued align with the objectives and capabilities of your organization.
During the award phase, grant applications are reviewed and winners are notified. This phase also involves negotiating final details, like the project’s budget and scope, and finalizing the grant contract and its terms, including reporting requirements, grantee training requirements, budget management, and invoicing processes.
The post-award phase is when grantees implement their grant-funded program or project, monitor the program, and report on progress and outcomes per funder requirements. Grantees will also evaluate their program for lessons learned and outcomes achieved, and “close out” activities once the funding period has ended.
You may ask, 'Which phase addresses program sustainability?' The answer is that for optimal success, sustainability strategies should be woven throughout the grant management life cycle.
Applying sustainability practices
In the pre-award phase, as an organization conceptualizes or designs a new program or plans the expansion of an existing program, leaders should ensure that it aligns with their mission, overall strategic plan, and vision for impact on the community they serve. Program proposals designed in response to a funder’s goals and objectives that are not in clear alignment with the organization’s mission, strategic plan, and capabilities may represent “mission drift.” Mission drift proposals pose sustainability challenges as they may divert scarce organizational resources away from core programs and services to support the new program and may serve to dilute the overall mission impact.
From the very beginning, organizations should be thinking about how a program will be sustained after receiving the initial “seed funding.” This is an opportunity to brainstorm ways to strategically diversify funding (e.g., braided funding and revenue generation through program income) and leverage resources with strategic or collaborative partners that serve the same target population. This could include using resources on an “in-kind” basis that would otherwise require funding (e.g., meeting rooms or venues with access to technology equipment free of charge).
During the award phase, the grantee organization has an opportunity to clarify funders’ expectations and negotiate the terms of the grant award regarding project activities, milestones, timeline, project impact, and sustainability. This is also an opportunity for grantees to collaboratively refine dissemination plans that raise awareness about the project among relevant, diverse audiences and gain support for continuation and capacity building to scale successful projects. This pre-implementation phase is also essential for clarifying how data will be collected, analyzed, and reported on to demonstrate the success and impact of the project.
During the post-award phase, it is essential to implement and maintain an effective communication plan with key stakeholders. The grantee organization also maintains a sustainability strategy that incorporates braided funding, diversified income revenue streams, and resource-leveraging strategies.
Researching grant funding prospects
Generally speaking, there are two approaches to identifying potential grant funding sources: “passive” and “active.” Using a combination of both approaches yields the largest field of funding opportunities. The active phase is the most time consuming as it requires using creative keywords in searches on funder websites and free online grant databases. You can find these opportunities at Grants.gov for federal opportunities and Philanthropy News Digest for local, regional, national and international private foundation funding opportunities.
A less time-consuming approach is a passive approach through free or paid subscription services and funder listservs, emails, and newsletters. While the passive search process provides alerts about potential funding opportunities, grant seekers still have to take the time to carefully review announcements to determine alignment with their organizational and programmatic goals, objectives, capabilities, eligibility requirements, and timeframe for developing a competitive proposal. This timeframe generally averages around four weeks.
An example of a free subscription service is Candid/Philanthropy News Digest (register here).
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