Due dates and timelines abound when managing your grants strategy, and it can become overwhelming to keep track of every moving piece.
A grant timeline template helps you visualize and oversee grants from application through award. You can manage your capacity and remain organized when applying for multiple grants with overlapping deadlines and different requirements—without worrying about whether something is falling through the cracks.
Keep reading, and we will show you how to create a grant timeline template suitable for your organization’s specific needs.
Let’s dive in.
A grant timeline template is a key tool for successfully managing deadlines and due dates associated with your grants strategy.
Despite the differences in timeframe, most grant proposals will follow a similar format of the steps involved, so a grant timeline template means you don’t need to start from scratch in planning your strategy every time.
With a grant timeline template:
Working on multiple grants at the same time can feel complicated, but this timeline approach simplifies the process and creates clear action steps so you stay on track with every application.
The grant lifecycle can be broken up into three specific phases: pre-award, award, and post-award. Here is a broad overview of each:
This phase can be summed up with one word: preparation. Before a grant award, you are preparing the proposal and documents needed for a grant application. This preparation may also involve analyzing your team’s capacity and preparing for its ability to implement a program.
The award phase is when a funder announces their decisions and lets your organization know whether you were chosen to receive funds. If you weren’t, try not to take it personally. Grant proposals are often very competitive and funds are limited. If possible, this is a great time to request personalized feedback on your application.
If you were awarded funds, then congratulations! During the award phase, the foundation will provide its requirements to release funds, such as collecting signatures and bank information, as well as notifying you about the timeline to release funds and other key details.
While receiving a grant award is an exciting time, it definitely doesn’t mean your work is done. After funding comes in, foundations will have various requirements for reporting and other updates depending on the specific grant.
This often requires your team to track your spending and evaluate the impacts of your program. The post-award timeline will depend on the specific project you are implementing.
When preparing your grant strategy, it helps to have effective planning processes. A grant timeline template is a key tool that ensures you proactively complete the necessary steps to a successful grant.
Below, we will walk through the elements that should be included in a successful grant timeline template, the steps involved in each, and the general amount of time to allocate to tasks through the process.
The purpose of this stage is to identify grant opportunities that are the best fit for your nonprofit, thereby increasing the likelihood of success. When looking for mission-aligned opportunities, nonprofits should:
Grant research can be an arduous process, and the amount of time it takes wildly varies. Using a dedicated grant search database like Instrumentl can streamline this part of the process for you.
It’s also important to take good notes while researching. For example, if you have clear records of opportunities that you’ve researched that aren’t a good fit, you won’t waste time reviewing them in the future. Additionally, if you find an opportunity that may be a fit but doesn’t have information on upcoming grant cycles, it can be useful to bookmark this for a more complete review in the future.
With Instrumentl’s grant tracker, you can assign a status to each of your saved grants, making it easy to identify what stage of the process they are in.
After creating a list of potential opportunities, you’ll want to do a second sweep of the funders and a more in-depth review of their requests for proposals. You can read through:
The goal here is to ensure the grant aligns with your program or project needs and is worth applying to.
If you need help narrowing down your list of opportunities to the best fits, this article offers more insight on using decision matrices to prioritize grant opportunities effectively. You can generally undergo a comprehensive review of a potential RFP in 30 minutes to a couple hours, depending on how lengthy the application information is.
Preparing your application really involves two pieces: narrative and documents. If working with a team, cloud-based sharing can help this collaboration run smoothly.
Source supporting documents
Most grant applications require at least some documentation related to your organization, such as:
Sometimes, requests for more unique documents will arise, such as letters of support, brochures unique to a program, or financial statements that go back a couple years. These types of documents are not always on hand, and it's useful to compile the list of supporting documents you will need as soon as possible so that your team can work to acquire and organize the files.
Initial proposal development
The time it takes to prepare an application will vary depending on the specific grant. When developing your proposal, make sure to pay attention to word or character count limits.
After going through the process of creating your draft document, you will have a clear idea about how long the application is to help you best plan the amount of time needed to complete it.
If you’d like more information on this process, check out our 15 key components of writing a winning grant proposal.
Once you’ve completed your first draft of the application, it’s important to give it a complete review. If you have a team, it is helpful to request a fresh set of eyes on the content to ensure you’ve completely answered the questions.
This is where a grant timeline template can help you plan enough time to have this space for a quality review process. Generally, having three days set aside for this will allow you and your team members enough time for a thorough edit.
You’ve made it a long way and should be ready to submit your proposal!
When it comes to attaching additional files, it can be helpful to rename them to match what the funder is requesting. For example, if they are looking for a 501(c)3 determination letter and your organization previously called the file “IRS documentation,” take a couple minutes to update the file to align. This also makes a cleaner transition for the review period, and funders will appreciate that your application is complete and easy to understand.
If you receive news that you’ve won grant funding, congratulations!
This is the step in the process where the real work begins. Post-award management involves:
This stage is critical for maintaining a good relationship with the funder and potentially securing future grants.
To effectively launch a grant-funded program, a team meeting will help you review next steps and a timeline for implementation. This should include:
Now that your team is on the same page about the grant, you can begin successful implementation. Everyone will be able to use the grant timeline template to stay up to date on their tasks and activities that allow the program to move forward.
The plan will include the specific details for reporting required information, and your team will have a clear understanding of how to get this done so that the funder is satisfied with the outcomes of their investment.
Now that we’ve covered the key pieces of a grant timeline template, we have a few more questions to answer that will give you the best foundational understanding about the process.
This varies greatly depending on the funder. Some funders offer clear timelines within their application details so that you are aware of these key dates ahead of time.
In general, most funders offer award notifications three to six months post-submission. If you are unable to get clear information on the specific foundation’s timeline and at least three months have passed, it’s okay to reach out to inquire about the status of your grant.
The honest short answer is: it varies. The amount of time needed to write a grant will depend on the specific opportunity (e.g. government grants are more lengthy than private foundation grants).
To help get a better understanding of what it takes, we surveyed grant writers to get their specific insights on how long parts of the process take. See what they had to say here.
Many foundations will operate with the year broken into quarterly initiatives, so it's safe to assume the end of each quarter will mean more deadlines loom. We analyzed over 45,000 grants in the Instrumentl grant database between 2022 and 2023 and found the end of Q1 (March) and the end of Q3 (October) to be the busiest.
Check out more key insights you need to know for your year-round grant strategy.
A grant timeline template will help your nonprofit easily track all the moving pieces of your grant strategy, from application through submission and implementation. We encourage you to use your temple to stay organized with key deadlines and roles required to make your grants process a success.
Ready to spend less time in the research phase? Try out a 14-day free trial of Instrumentl to start finding mission-aligned grants more easily today.
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