How to Evaluate the Success of Your Grant Program
In nonprofit fundraising, it’s been my experience that there’s often a significant focus on reporting for individual giving, especially at the board committee level. Grant reporting sometimes gets dropped to the backburner unless there’s a big win, like a new funder or a large gift. Or you might just report a total grant award goal (like: $100,000 from foundations, $150,000 from corporation grants, etc.), which – unless there’s a big win – can sometimes feel like you’re struggling to meet throughout the fiscal year. So, what other ways can we evaluate our grant program success, and why is it important?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for grants
Dollar amount requested, dollar amount awarded, and award ratio
Keep track of the total dollars your nonprofit requested over a given period, as well as the total dollars your nonprofit was awarded. Calculate the award ratio as the dollar awarded divided by the dollar requested.
As in the example in the intro, you can break down the dollars requested/awarded by the type of funder, even getting as granular as splitting foundations by national, regional, local, and community.
Disclaimer: with many grant timelines taking months (if not years), you might submit a request in a different fiscal year than you receive the notification. Depending on the period you’re reporting on, this might be a nuance you need to clarify with your board or fundraising committee.
Number of grants submitted, number of grants awarded, and win ratio
Track the number of grants you submit in a period, as well as the number of grant awards you receive. To calculate the win ratio, divide the number of awards received by the total submitted. Again, lags in notification timing could require some clarification in your reporting.
I would caution you not to use this KPI as an encouragement to “spray and pray” (i.e., submit a ton of proposals that you may or may not be eligible/competitive for). Do your homework, assess your team’s capacity, and set an achievable goal for the number of grants you think you’ll submit in a given period.
Number and type of funders in your grant pipeline
Count the number of active funders in your pipeline, from research through award, split by funder type (corporation, foundation, government, etc.).
You can probably rattle off your nonprofit’s major, recurring grant funders off the top of your head right now. But it’s also helpful to understand how many new funders you’ve approached for funding this year, how many funders you’re working to establish relationships with, and how many you’re currently researching for fit. This can be a great conversation starter with your fundraising committee, especially if you need a connection at a particular foundation. It can also lead you to track other related KPIs like retention and growth in a funder’s giving over time.
Dollar amount and percentage of program/project expenses covered
Based on your awarded grants in a certain period, what dollar amount and percentage of your program or project’s expenses are covered?
This is interesting in a few ways. You probably already have a sense for which of your programs are more fundable than others, based on your industry’s grant trends (for instance, in arts education, hands-on instruction gets prioritized by grant funders, but it’s also significantly more expensive). Comparing your expenses and grant awards will reinforce your suspicions. It’s also important to employ fund accounting for your grant awards so your programs aren’t overfunded and you’re not covering the same expenses with different grant awards.
Why is it important to track these indicators?
As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. Understanding and reporting your KPIs can help prevent burnout among your fundraising team, since you’ll be able to better predict your workload and set achievable goals. It can also help you plan for leadership transitions or changes in your programs, since you have historical data that leadership will use to be informed. You might also be able to better predict trends in grant funding if you have metrics at your fingertips.
Approaching KPIs as a freelance grant professional
I recently had a conversation with a client about my own win rate as a grant professional. My answer was that it’s not a very helpful metric to track. First, freelancers don’t always know the result of a grant proposal, particularly if we were only working with the client on a project (by-grant) basis or if we’re no longer working with that client. Second, and more importantly, as freelancers we don’t have control over the quality of the nonprofit’s programming or the funder relationships. In an industry where relationships can very well determine funding as much as (or more than) the quality of the grant proposal, that last point is critical.
How do you measure your grant program’s success?
So much of the grant process is out of our hands after we click “submit” that it’s helpful to have hard data to fall back on. I track these indicators and others for my clients. What systems do you already have in place to track the success of your grant program? What is your favorite grant KPI?
P.S. I highly recommend referencing GrantStation’s State of Grantseeking Report, which is published annually using self-reported data from nonprofits around the country. GrantStation’s 2024 survey just closed recently, but you can read the 2023 report and even use the report data with GrantStation’s Benchmarker tool to compare your nonprofit to others in the same budget size and category.
Cover photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash