Grant Calendar

A grant calendar, as we’ve talked about on our blog before (ICYMI: What is a Grant Calendar) is at its core, a visual representation of an action plan for the year, whether fiscal or calendar, for applying for and maintaining grants. It should contain all grant deadlines, relationship building efforts, and grant reporting/management work as well. 

A grant calendar should be visible/accessible to more than “only” the grant writer/grant professional. That helps others in the organization and on the grant team know what is coming up and also to keep the work going should the grant writer/grant professional be unexpectedly unavailable.

A grant calendar is also a great way to ensure that the plan for the year is rather even in its work load and should be able to be accomplished at a sustainable pace of work without any heroic efforts. In fact, it is fantastic if the grant writer/grant professional also notes their anticipated vacations on the calendar as well to build that into capacity planning for executing the plan.

The image below is what a proposed grant calendar when laid out on a wall in a conference room or a digital tool may look like. The red represents government applications, the yellow represents foundation applications, and the blue represents grant report deadlines. While the application work looks sustainable in this theoretical calendar, there is definitely a need to see how to address all the reports due at one time. This is something that wouldn’t likely be apparent to the team as a future concern without taking the time to make the calendar visible in some way.

(Click the image to enlarge)

Now that you know what a grant calendar is, and how helpful it can be for addressing concern about a sustainable pace for the work during the year…we can tackle our definition of a grant strategy, and how it is different than having an agreed upon grant calendar.

Grant Strategy

A grant strategy is an agreement in an organization about what the sequentially ordered priorities are (whether programs, initiatives, equipment purchases, etc) so that the grant team can use the priorities as a filter in designing the grant calendar.

A grant strategy is often agreed upon by an executive level leadership team that either meets on a regular basis for all organizational strategy discussions or is assembled at the request of a senior leader and empowered to agree upon these priorities. 

The grant strategy should not be “only” the responsibility of the grant writer/grant professional. 

The grant strategy should also not be something that is agreed upon in a meeting and delivered to the grant writer/grant professional who will lead the implementation of the grant calendar (regardless of title) without the opportunity to ask clarifying questions of the group that sets the priorities.

By taking exactly those same deadlines (except the reports) and placing them under the 12 sequentially numbered priorities the organization’s leadership put forward for the same period of time, we see in the image below that there are not a lot of grant opportunities being pursued for the number one resource need (priority 1 column on the far left) that leadership identified. There are however a lot of opportunities for priority 2 being applied for. By looking at the proposed funders against priority instead of deadline, this opens the door for a strategic conversation about perhaps NOT applying for some funders – perhaps those listed under priority 9 and 10 in the image below, and instead, researching more grant funders that would align with priority 1.

(click image to enlarge)

The grant strategy should also not be something that is agreed upon in a meeting and delivered to the grant writer/grant professional who will lead the implementation of the grant calendar (regardless of title) without the opportunity to ask clarifying questions of the group that sets the priorities.

By taking exactly those same deadlines (except the reports) and placing them under the 12 sequentially numbered priorities the organization’s leadership put forward for the same period of time, we see in the image below that there are not a lot of grant opportunities being pursued for the number one resource need (priority 1 column on the far left) that leadership identified. There are however a lot of opportunities for priority 2 being applied for. By looking at the proposed funders against priority instead of deadline, this opens the door for a strategic conversation about perhaps NOT applying for some funders – perhaps those listed under priority 9 and 10 in the image below, and instead, researching more grant funders that would align with priority 1.

Grant Calendar Versus Grant Strategy

The grant calendar image above helped to visualize the sustainable pace (or potentially not) of the plan for the year for applying for and managing grant funding for an organization. The grant strategy image above helped your organization to visualize how the proposed work supported the priorities for securing funding resources. As the images showed, those results may look very different. Using only one eliminates a key part of the overall discussion for a sustainable grant seeking effort in an organization.

A high performing grant team will have BOTH a grant calendar and a grant strategy as outlined above because they show the team different things. 

Using our free Grant Research Guidebook to help facilitate the priority conversation and then our grant calendar action guide free download to help layout your calendar can support these conversations in your organization. Our team is also here to help facilitate these priority conversations and grant strategy processes for your organization. Contact us to find out more about how we can help.

Do you want to hear a few more of my thoughts about the difference between a grant calendar and a grant strategy? Check out this short video here.

Do you have thoughts about the difference between a grant calendar and a grant strategy? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below!