Happy New Year 2010!  

You might think I’m rushing things a bit, but for grant writers, and grant makers, the calendar page has pretty much turned, leaving 2009 in the past. 

There are several reasons why the grant seeking and grant making timetable is so far ahead of the real calendar. 

First, it simply takes time for a proposal to work its way through a funder’s process. Even though many funders have been responding recently to calls to increase the speed of their grant making, due diligence takes time. 

Another aspect of timing concerns how funders like to see their support applied to projects. In many cases funders like to avoid making a funding decision for a program late in a fiscal year. The reason for this is that the later in a year a funder makes a decision, the less discretion that a funder feels it has. 

Here’s an example: Let’s say your organization operates on a calendar fiscal year. Let’s say you wrote a grant application to support this year’s operations that the funder receives around the first of August. It could easily be mid- to late-September before a board could approve a grant. And it may be the end of September before a check would show up at your office. 

When faced with this grant application some funders may have a concern regarding their ability to say yes or no to such a request. Since your organization is three-quarters of the way its fiscal year a funder has to wonder what kind of impact it can really have this late in the year. Obviously new staff can’t be hired and you can’t have much impact on the level of program services for the year. A grant, then, so late in the year doesn’t have a lot of impact on increasing services. 

What if your goal is simply to maintain a level of service that you’ve built up during the year? 

Foundation staff often feel uncomfortable taking such proposal to their boards late in the year because the request puts a board in an awkward position. If it denies the grant so late in the year, how can your organization make up that amount of funding?

This timing issue is a challenge for many organizations. One reason is that when a current year’s budget is falling behind it can be difficult to get leadership, board and/or staff, to deal with the reality that funding is going to fall short in the current year and you have to move on to work on the future. 

Another reason is that many nonprofits fail to look at cash flow budgets that reveal not just how much money is coming in, but when it is coming in and how that timing relates to providing services. 

Yet failing to deal with that reality can hinder an organization’s work year after year because there is no catching up.