Setting up a grant program? Here’s what grant managers wish they’d known sooner

If you’re setting up a grant program, you know firsthand there are lots of decisions you’ll need to make. From the application form to the reviewing process, the grant lifecycle can vary widely based on your organisation’s desired outcomes.

At Good Grants, we power thousands of grant programs to help them run smoothly with one central platform. In the last year alone, more than €250 million in funding was distributed through grantmakers on our platform, more than 1.25 million reviewing decisions were made, and hundreds of thousands of communications were sent to grantees, reviewers and program participants. 

We see firsthand how programs run smoothly, and we also help our grantmakers when they face challenges.

Looking to set up your own grant program? Here are some common issues that grant managers face, and what they’d wish they’d known from the start.

“We asked for a lot of detail. Then we had to read it all.”

You’ll be tempted when you create your application form to be thorough, to ask for every possible piece of information you might need. Sure, you might need that information later, and you don’t want to miss anything important. 

The problem isn’t just that long forms put people off applying (though they do). It’s that every field you add creates downstream work for your team. Someone has to read those answers. Someone has to assess and compare them. Someone has to make sense of a free-text response that could mean almost anything.

What experienced grant managers learn is that the form should be built backwards from the review decision. What information do you actually need in order to choose between applications? Start there, and your outcomes will improve from it.

Good Grants’ application form builder is designed to be flexible, supporting everything from short-answer fields to budget tables and file uploads. That flexibility can be most powerful when used thoughtfully. For example, conditional logic lets you show or hide questions based on earlier answers, which means applicants only see what’s relevant to them. The form can be as focused as you make it.

“We had no idea how much time reviewing would take.”

Reviewer burnout is one of the least-discussed challenges in grantmaking, and one of the most common. Programs launch, applications come in, and then someone has to actually assess or evaluate them. Reviewers are often volunteers, subject matter experts or board members who have their own jobs, their own calendars and their own tolerance for unclear instructions.

If reviewers aren’t sure what they’re supposed to evaluate, if they can’t easily see what’s left in their queue, or if they have to chase someone to ask a basic question, they can quickly disengage. And when reviewers disengage, the quality of decision-making suffers.

One fix is to assign fewer applications per reviewer. But the more important strategy is to design a review process that’s easy to navigate from the reviewer’s side. That means clear criteria, visible progress and a system that surfaces what needs attention without requiring a spreadsheet of its own.

Good Grants’ reviewing dashboard was built with this in mind. Program managers can see at a glance who has reviewed what, what’s still outstanding and where bottlenecks are forming, without having to chase down information. Reviewers get a clean, focused interface and know exactly what’s expected of them. 

“We didn’t check whether applicants were actually eligible.”

This one feels obvious, but is overlooked. Ineligible applications make it through the process, consuming review time and creating awkward conversations at the decision stage.

Sometimes it’s because eligibility criteria weren’t clearly communicated upfront. Sometimes it’s because the form didn’t screen for them. Sometimes it’s both.

An eligibility quiz, such as a short set of yes/no questions at the very start of the application process, is one of the simplest, most effective things you can add to a grant program. It takes applicants less than a minute to complete and saves your team hours in reviewing submissions that were never going to proceed. It also protects applicants from investing significant time in an application they weren’t eligible for, which matters if you care about the experience you’re creating.

Good Grants supports eligibility screening as part of the application flow, letting you set disqualifying criteria that redirect ineligible applicants before they get any further. It’s a small configuration step that pays for itself in the first cycle.

“We launched without testing it as an applicant.”

This might be the most universal piece of wisdom shared by experienced grant managers: before you go live, submit a test application yourself. Not as an administrator, but as an applicant.

It’s a different experience. The form reads differently when you’re not the one who wrote it. Instructions that seemed clear in the builder can be confusing in context. A field label that made perfect sense to your team might prompt a dozen emails from confused applicants on day one.

Testing the applicant journey end-to-end, including any confirmation emails, any auto-responses and the portal login experience, can be the single most effective quality check available to you. It doesn’t require special tools or a technical background. It just requires the discipline to do it before you hit publish.

Good Grants makes this straightforward with a test mode that lets you run through the applicant experience in full before your program goes live. It’s worth setting aside an hour, looping in someone who wasn’t involved in building the form, and writing down everything that confuses them.

And on top of that, our client success team at Good Grants also offers a free pre-launch check for grant managers, which includes a technical check of your program configuration and a submission from our team of a test application. 

“We didn’t plan post-award.”

Setting up a grant program tends to focus attention on the application phase, and this is understandable, because this is where the visible action is in the beginning. But what happens after applications close is just as important, and programs that don’t plan for it end up improvising at a less-than-ideal time.

Reporting is one of the most important considerations. What information will you need to collect from grant recipients? When? In what format? If the answer is “we’ll figure that out after we’ve made decisions,” you might find yourself retrofitting a reporting process that doesn’t quite fit the data you collected.

Post-award management, which includes milestone tracking, payment scheduling, acquittal forms, can all benefit enormously from being considered at the design stage. Even if you don’t build out every element before launch, knowing where you’re headed means you set up your program in a way that makes those later steps much easier.

It’s important to balance collecting the information you need without overwhelming your grantee (and your team). 

Each phase, thoughtfully planned

While the specifics of every program vary, the themes above are often the same for most grantmakers. Simplify before you complicate, design for the reviewer’s experience as well as the applicant’s, test everything before it goes live, and think beyond the application form to the full program lifecycle.

The good news is that most of these learnings can be quick adjustments for your program, and all of them are made easy with software that’s designed to be configured to fit your specific program. 

If you’re setting up a grant program and want to see how Good Grants supports each of these stages, this recent program setup guide walks through the configuration process in detail.

The learning curve is shorter than you think, especially when you know what to watch for.