Grant-making best practices are the processes, controls and reporting methods that help organisations design, award, monitor and evaluate grants effectively.
OmniStar is an industry-leading, cloud-based, end-to-end grants management solution. Built in consultation with experts and grant-making practitioners, OmniStar can be personalised to suit individual organisations’ objectives. It has been continuously improved over the past 15 years, on advice from grant-making professionals.
OmniStar is based on grant-making best practices, making it the gold standard solution to support grants management. OmniStar ensures grant-making decisions are informed by real facts in real time.
What are grant-making best practices?
Grant-making is a complex process. Organisations often tackle big issues, such as alleviating poverty or improving the quality of women’s education in the world’s most vulnerable populations. When the scope is wide, defining what matters can be complicated.
Additionally, resource constraints often limit grant-making organisations’ ability to make the best of their programs. Research shows that following grant-making best practices can help deliver optimal results. Missing information or scattered data from poorly defined metrics are also common risks that will leave you with little insight as to the effectiveness of your grant.
As a result, designing grant programs is never an easy job. However, applying grant-making best practices can help you focus your efforts where they are needed most.
Common Issues in Grant Making and How to Avoid Them
Even after carefully researching how to manage grants, organisations can still experience issues when implementing their programs.
Poor program planning can derail applications and cause applicants or evaluators to expend unnecessary effort. Grantors should take the time to establish priorities and eligibility criteria upfront and post this information in an easily accessible and understandable form.
Inefficient application processes can create administrative delays that push out deadlines. Simplifying lengthy processes such as eligibility screening and reviewing applications minimises effort and improves workflow.
Scattered or uneven data collection makes it difficult to track the program’s performance and compile accurate reports. A system that facilitates consistent data capture provides the reliability and transparency needed to make critical decisions concerning the grant.
Ineffective communication with applicants jeopardises trust and creates confusion. Definite expectations and touchpoints throughout the grants process allow stakeholders to provide updates, feedback, or outcomes that enhance the program’s effectiveness.
Proactively addressing these issues assists grant-makers in building stronger and more accountable programs from the outset.
Governance and accountability in grant making
Having the right processes in place is one thing, but strong grant making also comes down to good governance and clear accountability. Mapping out roles and responsibilities keeps funding decisions fair, clear and aligned to the organisation’s goals.
One of the key principles is separating responsibilities where possible. You’ll find that tasks like assessment, approval, administration and reporting are often better handled by different people or teams. This is done to reduce risk of bias and provide an extra layer of oversight throughout the process.
Being open about how decisions are made matters too. Keeping records of the criteria used to assess applications, the discussions that happen during reviews and the final decisions creates a clear paper trail. If anyone ever asks how a decision was made, you can point straight to the documentation. Many grant-making organisations also ask people to declare conflicts of interest before reviewing applications. It’s a simple step, but it goes a long way in maintaining trust with applicants and stakeholders.
When you put these practices together, they help make sure funding is distributed fairly and that the whole program stands up to scrutiny.
Grant-making across the full lifecycle
Grant making isn’t a single event where funding is handed out and the job is done. Think of it more like a journey that moves through a few stages, and what happens at the start can affect everything that comes after.
It usually begins with program design. This is where organisations decide what they want the program to achieve, who it’s meant to support and what kind of projects they want to fund.
Next comes the application and assessment stage. Applicants put forward their proposals, and reviewers take a close look at them to see how well they match the program’s goals and criteria.
Once decisions are made, the process moves into the award stage. Successful applicants are confirmed and agreements are set up that explain what’s expected, how funding will be provided and what reporting will be required.
After that comes the monitoring stage, where organisations keep track of how projects are progressing. This usually involves reviewing reports from grantees and checking that funding conditions are being met.
Finally, there’s the evaluation and learning stage. Once projects wrap up, the data and insights gathered along the way can be used to understand what worked well and what could be improved next time.
9 grant-making best practices
Even after you’ve designed your program, there are several challenges of grant management to overcome, including implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
Building on long-term industry experience, we summarise nine grant-making best practices that every grant maker should implement.
1. Establish a Clear Vision and Mission
One of the best practices in grant-making is to establish a clear vision and mission for your program. Spend time during the planning and design phase to flesh out your program’s vision and mission. It will help you stay focused on the outcomes and impacts you want to achieve with your funding. Your grant seekers will also know whether or not your funding opportunity aligns with their values. As a grants program manager, you can review your organisation’s strategic objectives and then think about how funding can make these objectives operational. The mission will then inform your grant-making strategy.
2. Determine the Funding Focus
One strategy for good grant-making is to have a specific focus for your funding. Having a funding focus can help you to develop your grant assessment guidelines by defining “deal-makers” and “deal-breakers”.
“Deal-makers” might include grant applications that:
- Match your geographic or demographic area of focus
- Are from organisations with a strong network of community leaders who align with your niche community focus
- Come highly recommended by trusted colleagues.
On the other hand, “Deal-breakers” might be grant applications from organisations that:
- Have a notable deficit in their financial report
- Lack project experience
- Don’t have an organisational sustainability plan
- Have biases and prejudices that conflict with your organisation’s values and objectives.
3. Provide Clear, Transparent Guidelines for Grant Seekers
Once you know your focus, it’s then important to develop clear guidelines for your grant applications. Comprehensive submission guidelines would include:
- Clear details about eligibility
- Timelines outlining each stage of the application and evaluation processes
- Details about the information you’ll need from grant seekers at each stage of the grant's lifecycle
- Evaluation criteria
Remember to keep the guidelines succinct to make it easy for your grant seekers to understand their obligations.
4. Ensure Expectations are in Line with the Size of the Grant
It’s logical to anticipate that you’ll expect more from larger grant programs. If you’re following grant management best practices, it’s important to make your expectations clear. Be specific about the level of detail you need in your applications and the evidence your grant seekers will need to provide when reporting. Clarifying your expectations will help ensure your grant seekers aren’t unnecessarily overwhelmed with administration for small grants, while also understanding that larger grants require more comprehensive reporting on outcomes and impact.
5. Streamline the Application Process as Much as Possible
When you start accepting applications, you can expect your administrative load to build. To keep on top of your workload, you need to streamline your grant application process as much as possible. Savvy grants managers who are looking to follow grant-making best practices, are benefitting from using Grant Management Software (GMS). GMS will reduce your manual workload with automated workflows and advanced record-keeping and help you to better manage your grant applications.
6. Rely on a Multi-faceted, Efficient Platform Like OmniStar Grants
Not all grants management solutions are created equal. Your organisation may already have an existing solution in place, such as an online survey tool or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. These solutions may address some of your grants management pain but are unlikely to include the tailored functionality of grant management software.
OmniStar Grants, one of the leading GMS solutions, is specifically designed for grants management. It will maximise your productivity with automated features such as notifications, workflow, dashboards and reporting. OmniStar Grants can adapt to meet your specific grant-making processes.
7. Design a Process that Will Filter Out Unfit Applicants
Grant management best practices include having a process to filter out unfit applicants. This starts with defining your eligibility criteria and then excluding applicants who don’t meet your mandatory requirements as early as possible. Many grant makers use an online survey for this purpose, and then manually apply the results to their assessment process. With a purpose-built GMS, you can incorporate this functionality to automatically filter out unfit applicants at the outset and email them to let them know that they’ve been unsuccessful.
8. Set Reporting Requirements in Place
Once your grant program has rolled out, you and your grantees need to work together to keep track of the project’s progress. You can implement the following grant-making best practices to ensure stewardship and accountability in the reporting process:
- Establish and reinforce performance measures based on the impact your grant program is trying to achieve
- Create a consistent reporting template to ensure you have the data you need to confidently track your grantees’ progress
- Establish checking mechanisms to ensure targets, milestones, and reporting deadlines are met.
9. Use Data to Improve the Process for Next Time
A good reporting system will gather critical data to provide meaningful insights into your grants program. These data and insights will help you to measure the impact of your program and provide comparison data over time, and between programs. Having access to the right data will also help you to design and improve future programs. To have quality insights, you’ll need efficient ways to capture and report on your grant programs. Do you have the right system in place?
Measuring impact alongside managing compliance
Most grant programs come with detailed reporting requirements. That’s usually about showing accountability and proving the funding has been used in line with the agreed conditions. While that kind of reporting is important, ticking the compliance boxes doesn’t always tell you whether the program actually achieved something meaningful.
Compliance reporting is mainly about confirming that the basics were done properly. That might mean checking financial records, confirming milestones were completed, or making sure reports were submitted on time. It helps show that the rules were followed.
Impact measurement looks a bit deeper than that. Instead of just asking whether the requirements were met, it asks whether the funding actually made a difference. Did the project create the change it was meant to create? Did it deliver the outcomes the program was designed to support?
To answer those kinds of questions properly, there needs to be reliable data. When information is collected consistently and reporting structures are clear from the start, it becomes much easier to see what’s really happening across a grant program. Over time, that kind of data helps organisations understand what’s working, what isn’t and how future funding programs can be improved.
Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Grant Program
Once a grant program has been implemented, it should be evaluated for efficiency. The evaluation can include how the program has demonstrated value, what insights can be used to improve future programs, and how it maintained alignment with organisational goals.
Blurred or inconsistent measures of performance make it difficult to know if a program has achieved its intended impact. Set clear success metrics during the design phase and check them at key milestones to accurately track progress.
Inconsistent reporting by grantees can lead to gaps in program data. Providing a standardised template assures you receive the insights you need to evaluate the program’s success.
Limited transparency makes it hard to apply insights to future grant programs. Organised data collection methods help build a more refined picture of its performance over time, identifying trends, revealing risks, and observing where funding is having the greatest impact.
Manual grant making and system-supported best practices
A lot of organisations start out managing their grant programs with the tools they already know. Spreadsheets, email threads and shared folders usually do the trick in the early days. But as programs grow and more applications start coming in, those tools can become harder and harder to keep under control.
Information ends up scattered across different places, teams might be working from slightly different versions of the same data, and tracking the overall progress of a program can take a surprising amount of time. What once felt manageable slowly turns into a lot of manual effort just to keep things organised.
When organisations move to more structured systems, things tend to run a bit more smoothly. Applications, reviews, reports and documentation can all be handled in the same place, which makes it easier to see what’s going on across the whole program. Instead of reacting to issues as they pop up, grant managers get a clearer view of the program and can stay a step ahead.
Future-proofing your grant programs
Grant-making best practices aren’t something you set once and forget about. The environment around grant programs is always changing. Funding rules shift, reporting expectations evolve, and stakeholders often want more insight into outcomes and impact.
That means grant programs need to be able to adapt. Eligibility requirements might change, reporting frameworks might need to be updated, or evaluation criteria may evolve as priorities shift.
Over time, the data collected from past programs becomes incredibly valuable. Looking back at previous funding rounds can reveal patterns, highlight what worked well, and show where improvements could be made. Those insights make it much easier to design stronger programs in the future.
The real goal is to build knowledge from one grant cycle to the next. When organisations capture what they’ve learned along the way, they don’t have to start from scratch every time. Instead, each program builds on the last, gradually improving how funding is delivered and increasing the overall impact of the grants.
Implement Grant Management Best Practices with OmniStar Grants
Some organisations have limited knowledge on how to manage grants most effectively. They will often refrain from using purpose-built grant management software (GMS), and rely instead on existing tools or inefficient manual processes.
Grants management is complex. It makes sense to have a system to seamlessly manage the entire process, from program development through to acquittal. More efficient administration means more targeted funding, and more time to focus on your grant funding strategy.
OmniStar Grants, a cloud-based, end-to-end grants management solution, is one of the leading GMS solutions. Its automated workflows help reduce the time, cost, and effort of managing grant programs.
Implementing grant-making best practices is easy when you rely on OmniStar Grants. Contact us or book a demo with us today.
