Grant Organization - Staying on Top of Opportunities and Deadlines

As a grant writer, there are always about 90,000 things on your plate - endless deadlines, reports, matching requirements, and of course researching new streams of revenue. I envy those who can simply write deadlines in their agenda and stick to them, but for the rest of us how do we stay on top of it all?

Kanban to the Rescue

A Kanban board is an excellent way to visually keep track of progress. This works for managing deadlines, balancing workloads, maintaining accountability, and keeping transparency. The board itself can be virtual or physical, many make use of a whiteboard and dry-erase magnets, you can simply use a wall and a bunch of post-its, my personal favorite is trello - a free online tool, and of course pinterest is full of attractive and inspiring alternatives. Depending on whether you are working on your own or with a team, you will want a board that is accessible.

When you start designing your board, keep it as simple as possible. Visual data is only valuable if you are able to make sense of it. So start with the basics, just three columns: to do, in progress, done. From there, add tasks into your to-do column. As you begin working move them to in progress, and once completed tasks can be filed as done. There is nothing like seeing all that you’ve already accomplished when you feel like your looming workload is insurmountable.

The Kanban board should be a snapshot of where you or your team is at in any given moment. Your Executive Director should be able to pass by and see approaching deadlines, projects that have been completed and where the development team is focussing their energy.

Start with the basics. Review all your current grant contracts and add every upcoming report, deadline, and meeting. It doesn’t hurt to add due dates and responsible parties as well.

Assessing Tasks

There are several different theories as to what should constitute a single task - some say projects should be broken down into tasks that last four hours or less. This could mean a single grant application could have several tasks - Letter of Intent, application, follow-up. Or you could choose to have one task for the entire application, start to finish.

However you choose to define your tasks, you should be able to comment on how long the task will take and how easy it is to accomplish. Drafting an RFP may take the same amount of time as staging the perfect photo for your thank you letter, but they require different amounts of attention. All of this information should be added to your task - if you run out of room make a color-coded system that can indicate priority and effort.

And that’s it! Prioritize your goals, assess your worklaod and never miss a deadline again.