How to Build a Grant Calendar that Keeps Your Team on Track All Year
Let’s talk about one of my favorite things: grant calendars! Even though I don’t plan on paper anymore (hello, I live in an RV), I still love walking through an office supply store and looking at all the beautiful calendars and planners and agendas. Yep, I’m a nerd.
However, I realize I’m an outlier. If you’ve ever had the crush of a deadline mean that you’re working over the holidays or had to race to collect outcomes for a report you forgot about, you’ll understand the absolute importance of having a solid grant calendar that makes your life easier.
In this post, I’ll talk about how to reframe your thinking about the purpose of a grant calendar, the most common grant calendar mistakes nonprofits make, and how to build a realistic grant calendar that works all year. By the end of it, you’ll understand how a capacity-based, team-owned grant calendar, supported by the right systems, helps you increase your mileage: spend less time and resources so your grant team can be more productive with what you have.
Reframe your thinking around the term “grant calendar”
I get it, you probably thought I’d tell you to whip out an 18-month dry-erase calendar and get to work with color-coded markers. And while that’s not necessarily a bad way to go (especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed right out the gate), take a moment to reframe your thinking around the grant calendar.
Just like an organization’s budget communicates its strategies to outside parties, a grant calendar outlines the strategies of the development function. By setting your calendar for the year, you’re intentionally deciding how your grant program will be structured: how many and what mix of grants you’re working on in a year.
Moreover, a grant calendar is a capacity-building tool, not just a list of deadlines. It is a planning tool that reflects how much grant work your team can realistically handle at any given time. How can you expect to grow your program (you know your contributed revenue goal will always increase next year, right?) without knowing whether you have the capacity to take on another grant?
Having a solid understanding of your workflow will also help you identify times to squeeze in those rolling deadline grants that always seem to get shoved for urgent deadlines, and to avoid forgetting that blasted city report that always sneaks up on you. A strong grant calendar helps leadership see the full scope of grant work, including preparation, internal review, reporting, and follow-up, not just submission dates.
Used well, a grant calendar becomes a shared reference point that supports decision-making, prioritization, and long-term sustainability.
The most common grant calendar mistakes nonprofits make
Treating every grant the same
I’m a sucker for a good timeline, and your grant calendar is the perfect place to initiate this system. Just don’t make the mistake of treating all grants as equal in time and effort, because they’re not.
I recently went through four years of time-tracking data for my business and found that, on a median basis, most government grants take me twice as many hours to prepare as corporate or foundation grants (and the more local they get, the more complex they seem to be). Your calendar system should allow for flexibility when you need more hours and weeks to prepare an application or report.
Just as I did, if you have tracked your time per grant (or even per phase of each grant, like I do), evaluate the data to see how much time you need to complete each grant well.
Adding deadlines to your personal calendar… and that’s it
Although some folks treat grant seeking as a solo sport, it’s not. You need a whole team of people to have a successful grant program. When deadlines and processes live in a silo, your processes will suffer. Important context gets lost, assumptions go unspoken, and people are forced to react instead of plan. Over time, this siloed approach makes grants feel more stressful than strategic.
Considering the rate of nonprofit turnover, it is crucial to create a system that the entire team can use and understand—not one that lives only on a single person’s calendar, inbox, or to-do list. A shared grant calendar reduces silos by making deadlines, responsibilities, and expectations visible to everyone involved, which is especially important when staff roles shift or someone is unexpectedly out.
Ignoring what happens after the grant application is submitted
Award management, reporting, and compliance can be just as complicated as the application itself, or sometimes even more complicated! Post-award work often spans months or years, involves multiple departments, and carries real financial and reputational risk if something is missed. If your grant calendar doesn’t allow you to prepare for post-application tasks, errors will inevitably creep in.
A strong grant calendar helps your team plan for award setup, reporting deadlines, and ongoing funder communication in advance, so grant management is proactive and predictable rather than reactive and stressful.
How to build a realistic grant calendar that works all year
In the last few years, I’ve built and maintained numerous grant calendars in various systems. In my “before” life in artist administration, I also built and deployed several production databases. So I understand the importance of having a system that matches your realities. If your system can’t keep up with what you need, that system will end up on the same dusty shelf as your strategic plan.
Decide on your grant calendar system
Start by understanding who is involved in your grant process. Who owns which part of the process? Each stage of the process touches different members of the team (program staff, finance, leadership, and development). And, how much time can those individuals actually devote to grant work each week or month? If you know that a certain part of your team has internal or external deadlines in a period, you’ll need to have a way to plan around that in your calendar. For instance, if your program team has a huge concert series in December, asking them to provide you outcomes for a report due in January might be a stretch.
Next, determine what metrics you want to track. Let me tell you your newest superpower as you plan your timelines: the start date. This helps you build timelines (or even Gantt charts, if you’re fancy!) so you can see where your work on different applications and reports overlaps. Besides the obvious things like deadlines, other helpful metrics to consider tracking include:
Goal submission date (ideally at least two business days before the deadline)
Funder type
Relationship management reminders
And, if your CRM can’t handle it for you, all your financial KPIs (dollar amount requested/awarded, number of grants submitted/awarded, etc.).
Ideally, you’ll map the full grant lifecycle for each opportunity, from early preparation through final reporting, so your calendar reflects real effort (not just wishful thinking).
Only when you’ve determined the first two elements should you decide on the technical system in which to track your grant calendar. Ask yourself what systems your organization already has and actually use? Options might include:
A spreadsheet - best if you have a small grant program (fewer than 8-10 grants per year, and no complex award or relationship management)
A non-specific database (personally, I love the flexibility and options of Airtable)
Specific grant database systems like GrantFrog, GEMS, or Instrumentl (*referral link)
Your existing donor CRM (although these are often better for donor history than grant tracking, so you’d need to do some research about the capabilities of your current system)
Build out your grant calendar
Gather the information you already know about your grant program: current deadlines for applications and reports, prospects you’ve identified, and so on. Draft the structure of the calendar outside of the technical system to be sure you’re collecting all the information you need, then stress-test it by adding just the first few months of applications and reports. This way, you can make sure the process will work for you and the entire grant team before you spend time adding an entire year’s worth of opportunities. Are the deadlines you’ve set for yourself achievable? What last-minute scrambles still happened and how can you avoid them in the future?
Once you know the system works, block out a few days of focused work to get all your details entered (or transferred, if you have this info in an exportable format). I like building grant calendars for entire fiscal years based on grant history, so I know I’m not forgetting any funders and I can report on KPIs for a distinct fiscal period. If your system allows for it, intentionally build in time (maybe quarterly) for prospecting, and for opportunities you haven’t identified yet that might come up throughout the year.
My biggest tip: once your system is ready and you’ve completed your first year, don’t ever build future fiscal years at once. As you’re completing the process for an application or report, go ahead and add that same application or report to next year’s grant calendar. Then, once a month, check for updated guidelines from funders whose deadlines are four months out on your calendar. This should give you enough time to catch changes if they’re not in your favor, like when a funder changes their due date from January 31 to January 10, and all of a sudden, you’re working over the holidays.
How a capacity-based grant calendar helps you increase your mileage
Having done this myself many times, I realize how much work it is. I also love putting timelines on paper and then stressing when the timeline shifts. But guess what? In this work, we’ve got to be flexible. What you’re setting up here gives you the understanding of your capacity so that you can be flexible. A realistic grant calendar balances what you know with what is possible, rather than assuming the year can be planned perfectly in advance. When we do assume the year can be planned perfectly in advance, or we don’t have a grasp on our own capacity, the hidden costs can add up quickly. Poor grant planning drains staff time and morale, even when a nonprofit is technically meeting its deadlines.
In other words: A capacity-based system also allows you to focus on fewer, better-aligned opportunities that your team can realistically pursue well, rather than stretching staff thin to meet every possible deadline. Planning in this way reduces the likelihood of missed deadlines, incomplete applications, or having to walk away from strong opportunities simply because your team lacks the bandwidth at the moment. Over time, this approach leads to more consistent funding, stronger funder relationships, and better internal communication: because grant work is paced intentionally instead of driven by “oh crap!!”
Cover photo by ChatGPT.