Grant strategy: which grants to skip

Your grants manager already has six open proposals, a renewal due in three weeks, and a stack of new funder alerts nobody has screened. The instinct is to write more. The strategy is to write fewer, and better, and the screen below is how you decide which.

This is a fundraising strategy decision, not a fundraising tactic, because it changes what your grants manager does with every hour this quarter. A grants manager already at capacity should be applying for fewer grants, not more, and the case for skipping a grant has to be as disciplined as the case for pursuing one.

Twenty questions, three verdicts: apply, wait, or skip

Score a prospective grant against twenty yes or no questions split across four categories: organizational readiness, program readiness, financial readiness, and capacity. This is the grant readiness assessment, one point per yes, twenty points possible. Fifteen or more and the verdict is apply. Nine to fourteen is wait, meaning the gaps are fixable and worth fixing before the deadline, not after. Eight or below is skip, and the grants manager does not open the application.

The scorecard replaces the two questions most shops actually ask: does the mission fit the guidelines, and is the deadline far enough away. Both are real questions, and neither predicts whether the grant is worth the hours or will cost more to administer than it is worth. The twenty questions do.

Four categories, and what a no in each one is telling you

Each category catches a different way a grant goes wrong. Organizational readiness catches mismatches the guidelines will not save you from, including whether the board has actually approved pursuing this size and type of award. Program readiness catches grants written for a program that does not exist yet, and asks whether it survives if this grant does not come through next year. Financial readiness catches the money problems that show up after the award letter, including whether the organization can front the cost if reimbursement is slow. Capacity readiness catches the question everyone skips under deadline pressure: does a named person have hours this week that were not borrowed from a proposal already in progress.

A no in organizational or program readiness is usually a skip, because it points at a structural mismatch that one strong proposal cannot write around. A no in financial or capacity readiness is more often a wait, because the fix, closing a cash gap or freeing up staff hours, is inside the organization’s control before the next deadline. Read the pattern of the no answers, not just the total.

The math that beats a gut feeling: expected value per application

A verdict of apply tells you the grant is worth pursuing. It does not tell you which apply-scored grant to write first when three land in the same month. That decision needs one number: expected value per hour, the amount times your honest win probability, divided by the hours the application will take.

A grants manager already at capacity should be applying for fewer grants, not more.

Set win probability from what you actually know: a funder who has already told your program officer they are interested sits higher than a cold competitive fund. Here is the math for a hypothetical $6M organization whose grants manager is weighing three applications due the same week. Every figure is invented and carries no source.

Funder B looks like the prize on paper, a quarter million dollars, and it is the worst use of the week. Fifteen percent odds on sixty hours returns $625 an hour, a third of what the renewal returns and a quarter of the small relationship-backed grant. Write A first, then C, and treat B as a wait unless a program officer conversation moves the odds up before the deadline.

This is also the number that answers “which grants to apply for” when three deadlines collide and only one person can write. Rank by expected value per hour, not by dollar amount, and the grants manager’s calendar stops being decided by whichever deadline is loudest this week.

Four rules that skip a grant before anyone scores it

Some grants never reach the scorecard because a rule already answered the question. Four rules do that work, so nobody has to relitigate them under deadline pressure.

Skip anything below a size you name in advance. A $5,000 grant with a ten-page application and a mid-year report costs the same hours as a $75,000 grant with the same paperwork. Set a floor, in dollars, and skip below it without a scorecard.

Skip a first-time funder with no relationship, unless the amount clears a bar high enough to justify writing cold. A cold application competes against every applicant who has already had the program officer conversation, and it usually loses.

Skip a grant with a reporting burden above a threshold you set, measured in hours per year of the award’s value, not in pages. A grant that pays $20,000 and requires quarterly narrative reports, a site visit, and a custom outcomes dashboard can cost more in staff hours to administer than it is worth, and that cost does not show up until after the award letter.

Skip a restricted grant that funds less than the program’s full cost, unless the organization can name where the rest comes from before it signs the award letter. That fourth rule is common enough, and expensive enough, to need its own math.

The full cost question: does this grant pay for itself

Full cost is the direct cost of running the program plus a fair share of finance, human resources, information technology, and the leadership time a program cannot function without. A grant that pays only the direct cost is not free money. The gap comes out of unrestricted revenue, so accepting a restricted grant without asking this question is a decision to subsidize that funder.

The federal government has its own answer for what counts as a fair share, and it moved recently. Under 2 CFR 200.414, an organization without a negotiated indirect cost rate may charge a de minimis rate of up to 15% of modified total direct costs, and a federal agency or a pass-through funder regranting federal money may not require an organization to accept a rate lower than the one it has negotiated. That 15% floor replaced a 10% floor in the 2024 revision of the federal Uniform Guidance, published 22 April 2024. Verify the current text at ecfr.gov before citing it in a funder conversation, because the regulation is amended on its own schedule.

Practice has not caught up with the rule. Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey of 2,206 organizations found that 70% of respondents with government funding said they could charge an indirect cost rate of 10% or less, the rate the 2024 revision was meant to raise. The same survey found that among organizations with government funding, 55% reported being paid late. A grant paid late and capped at 10% overhead is not two problems. It is one: the grant is not paying its own way, and the organization is financing the difference.

Your own Form 990 already sorts this, even though it was not built for the purpose. Part IX splits every expense into program services, management and general, and fundraising, and management and general is the closest thing the IRS has to an indirect cost figure. The instructions allow “any reasonable method of allocation” where the accounting system does not split expenses automatically, so your own indirect rate is only as reliable as that allocation. Know your organization’s management and general share, allocated the same way every year, before you decide a grant covers its full cost.

Apply the skip rule this way. If a restricted grant’s indirect allowance sits well under your own management and general share and the funder will not negotiate it up, name the source that covers the gap, a board-designated fund, an unrestricted campaign, or a second funder, before you accept the award. If no source exists, skip it, whatever the mission fit. How much should a nonprofit spend on fundraising? carries the cost-per-dollar math for the rest of the portfolio, and the same standards apply once you count the hours a grant costs to administer, not just to write.

The pipeline the board never sees

Keep one grant pipeline table, updated as prospects move, not rebuilt from memory before a board meeting. One row per prospective grant, seven columns: funder, amount, a fit score from 1 to 5 the grants manager and executive director set together, win probability, hours to apply, expected value per hour, and a decision, apply, wait, or skip.

The fit score is the only subjective column, and it exists to keep the win probability honest. A funder who is a 5 fit, meaning the guidelines describe your program without editing, earns a higher win probability than a 2 fit that required stretching the proposal to match. When the two disagree by more than a point or two, that mismatch is worth a conversation before the hours go in.

The executive director reviews this table monthly, not the board. The board’s fundraising role sits in the annual fundraising plan, where foundation grants already carry a target and an owner, the grants manager, and where board members contribute counts for personal gifts and introductions, not line items. Board members who know a program officer personally are the one place the two documents meet: board member fundraising expectations covers how that introduction gets made without asking a board member to write or manage a proposal.

The relationship work that comes before the application

The scorecard’s capacity category asks whether a relationship with the funder already exists, because that answer changes the win probability more than any other single fact. A cold application competes on the proposal alone. A proposal that follows a program officer conversation, a site visit, or an invited letter of inquiry competes on a track record the program officer already believes.

That work is calendar time, not writing time, and it belongs to whoever the funder already knows, often the executive director, not the grants manager. One call before a letter of inquiry, asking what the funder is prioritizing this cycle, routinely changes whether an application is worth writing at all. A funder who says the priority has shifted just saved you the sixty hours Funder B would have cost.

Where a board member already knows a program officer, that introduction is the fastest way to warm a cold funder, and it is exactly what board member fundraising expectations asks board members to make and log, separate from a personal gift. Log every touch, the call, the site visit, the letter of inquiry, against the funder’s row in the pipeline table, so the next grants manager inherits the history instead of starting cold.

When not to do this

Do not run the scorecard on a grant you have already been invited to apply for by name, where a program officer solicited the proposal directly. The relationship and fit are already established, and scoring it formally wastes the hours the scorecard exists to protect.

Do not apply the size floor to a grant that unlocks a larger relationship, a first small award from a funder that typically grows its gifts over several years. Note the exception in writing so the next grants manager does not read it as the rule.

Do not use expected value per hour as the only test when cash, not staff time, is the binding constraint. A low-hours grant arriving in four months does nothing for a cash gap that closes in six weeks. Rank by how soon the money arrives instead, and say so out loud.

And do not build any of this if one person runs the organization and writes the grants alone. The four skip rules still apply, quickly, from memory. The scorecard, the pipeline table, and the monthly review are overhead until there is a second person to review with.