Grant project management: How to plan, write and submit your grant on time

Foundant Technologies

Grant writing is a multifaceted process involving different moving parts and steps, including preparation, research, writing, evaluation, documentation, submission, and follow-up. It’s a project by itself—making grant project management an essential skill for grant writers.

Project management skills become increasingly important for large submissions of 25-50 pages, which demand considerable time and resources just to compile. Various challenges, from strict compliance and timeline requirements to stakeholder engagement and capacity building, always pop up. Some grant applications introduce even more complexities with specific forms and niche guidelines.

However, grant project management doesn’t need to be this hard! Project management strategies will help streamline your writing process, allowing you to submit proposals that reflect your values, objectives, reputation, and mission—and do so well ahead of deadlines.

The result? A winning proposal for your nonprofit.

Below, we explore how to use project management tips for grants to help you plan, write, and submit your proposal.

Why effective project management is critical for grant success

Larger grant proposals often involve multiple people—including writers, researchers, editors, financial experts, budget leads, directors, and grant coordinators. In these cases, seamless grant team collaboration becomes crucial to drafting a winning application.

Each party holds unique roles across the proposal’s completion stages, demanding strong project management and communication to meet strict deadlines and avoid unexpected delays.

With effective grant management, the proposal’s project manager can:

Define the project’s scope
Build a strong team to draft the proposal
Create timelines and schedules
Simplify grant progress tracking
Assign tasks and responsibilities to members

Project management in grant writing creates a clear project plan for the proposal, making it effortless to collaborate, address different challenges, and work within the defined timelines to ensure early submissions. Effective project management brings these pieces together, allowing teams to understand all requests and devise how to respond effectively.

Best practices for grant project management

There’s more to writing grant proposals that win the hearts of funders than strong composition. Your entire team must understand the evaluation criteria and review process. Then, follow these grant management best practices to draft a strong proposal for your nonprofit.

Create a clear roadmap

As the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advises, you should develop a project roadmap for the grant money proposal to help you plan the outline and stay organized. This should start with reading the grant guidelines and requirements to understand your proposal's required details and structure.

With a roadmap, you can assign tasks to your team, show dependencies, encourage feedback, and communicate key goals and objectives. Leverage a checklist to keep track of all critical tasks and ensure every element is accounted for before moving to the next step.

Don’t forget to set a grant project timeline that ends well before it must be submitted—aim to complete the proposal at least four weeks before the submission deadline to avoid last-minute rushes, per the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). This also gives you time for internal review and revisions, especially when there’s new data. You can finally submit it a day or two before the deadline.

Host an effective kickoff meeting

A kickoff meeting will prove vital for successful grant proposal management and submission. It offers the opportunity to introduce team members to each other, define roles and expectations, and establish the roadmap for success.

Remember these tips for hosting a successful kickoff meeting:

Set roles and responsibilities: The meeting allows you to assemble all stakeholders, clearly define their roles, and discuss how the grant management process will work to ensure seamless collaboration.
Recap the grant: Use the meeting to recap the key points of the grant program and identify the action items. To stay organized, prepare a ‘narrative skeleton’—required resources and their owners—before the meeting.
Review the requirements: Ensure every team member understands the grant funding requirements outlined by the funder. This includes the application instructions and the eligibility criteria.
Set or confirm deadlines: Decide on reasonable deadlines for each task and ensure every member understands them. Some tasks might require signed letters or official resolutions—consider the time it takes to secure them.
Get feedback: Encourage contributions and feedback from team members. Experienced members can provide invaluable insights on tasks like information requests, outlines, and nonprofit grant planning.
Make changes if needed: Based on the feedback and insights, you can revise your timelines, change task ownership, and finalize your meeting cadence.

The kickoff meeting lets you stay organized and ensure a smooth grant writing process. It’s an opportunity to get everyone involved, share insights, and strategize the way forward based on your goals and grant deadlines.

Establish regular communication

Create a communication schedule to track progress, share updates, address issues, and make changes. Depending on the deadline and complexity of the grant, you may set daily or weekly check-ins. Consider time zones when scheduling meetings and use notifications to remind members to attend them.

The team should also decide on how to communicate—this can be through email or a project management tool that supports messaging and collaboration. Creating subgroups for different specialties will help those collaborating within their teams and cross-team collaboration on the proposal’s subsections.

For example, the finance team can have a group for everything budgeted-related. Conversely, including construction blueprints in your proposal might require adding an engineer, surveyor, and environmental scientist to the conversation and creating a cross-team channel.

Stay on top of tasks

Maintain a task checklist and a calendar with current due dates to stay on top of tasks and simplify tracking grant deliverables. The calendar can show each task and the owner under the date for seamless tracking and follow-up. This works best when using a project management tool or software to manage your grant writing project.

If using email, a quick checklist with due dates can work. However, this is only suitable for the simplest projects—it can get messy quickly when managing a larger proposal with multiple members and tasks. Regardless, choose a format that fits your team and budget.

Managing grant deadlines becomes even easier with notifications and reminders—alert your team members at least once a day or two before deadlines. However, avoid sending too many reminders, as they may come across as nagging or drown out the more important ones. Also, try to be flexible and adjust deadlines when issues arise.

Build a repeatable grant submission process

As a nonprofit organization, you rely on grants to sustain your programs, increase your capacity, and reach more beneficiaries. This demands applying for several grants every year to solicit funds, a process that can be time-consuming and cumbersome.

The good news is that managing grant applications for different funding opportunities is simple if you have a proven process for grant writing and submission.

With each grant application, you gain useful insights you can leverage for future funding applications, proposal writing, and nonprofit project management. For example, you can create processes, workflows, and templates to reuse in future grant projects, particularly for proposals, budgets, reports, forms, and agreements.

Use reports, stories, presentations, case studies, or videos to document lessons learned from each submission as part of your grant submission strategy. Have a central repository or digital storage for this data, allowing easy access for team members whenever you're writing another grant proposal.

Essential tools for managing grant projects

Beyond the grant management best practices above, you can also equip your team with resources that make their day-to-day work much easier. From writing to compliance checking, leverage grant management tools to further streamline and simplify your proposal writing project.

For project management, there are different options:

Spreadsheets are popular in data and grant budget management. However, these resources and their manual management quickly become quite complicated and risk errors like recording incorrect formulas or making typos during data entry—which peer-reviewed studies consistently show occurs at a rate of up to 3.6%. Moreover, integrating spreadsheets with other tools when writing a grant proposal can be difficult.
Project management tools and collaboration platforms like Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and Wrike help manage proposal writing projects. They allow you to set deadlines, assign tasks, track deliverables, and send alerts. However, they aren’t purpose-built for grant applications, so the workflows might not align with your project and needs, requiring intensive (and costly) customization and integrations.
Grant management software for nonprofits sets the ideal standard for organizations looking to simplify the application process and collaborate effectively—and unlike other options, the benefits scale with the number of grant applications populating your to-do list. It can streamline the proposal creation process using templates and intuitive tools. Some also feature AI assistance to further improve your application and proposal content.

The ideal tool for your organization depends on your project size and complexity. For example, you can easily use Google Docs and spreadsheets to complete a bare-bones, 3-to-5-page proposal. But for complex and detailed submissions, grant management software for nonprofits is perfect, providing the essential reporting, document storage, and task management functionalities needed.

Explore grant management software for nonprofits

Writing winning proposals gives nonprofits and other organizations the mission-critical funds to sustain operations and improve impacts. Accordingly, proposal management encompasses more than just responding to application requests (RFAs) or expressing interest. It demands an effective grant lifecycle management system that lets you stay on top of applications and streamline proposal creation.

GrantHub is just what you need to get things done faster and better. Our software offers an AI optimization tool to streamline content and create targeted narratives tailored to specific grant opportunities. It also provides a library of past proposals and documents to allow you to create a repeatable submission process.

With role-based permissions, you can control access to information to protect your confidential data. You can also assign tasks within the system to centralize your operations, reducing reliance on email, spreadsheets, and post-its. Even better, the software lets you bring all your members together to create winning proposals.

Learn more about our grant management software for nonprofits and discover how it can simplify your grant project management.