by Rachel Ayotte | Sep 23, 2025 | Article
The grant cycle serves as the backbone of all successful grantmaking—but what are all the stages and why should grantmakers understand them?
From the planning and pre-award phase to closeout and impact assessment, each stage requires a thoughtful strategy. Together, success at each step creates grant programs that are more effective and impactful for everyone.
In this article, we’ll cover the entire grants management life cycle—including the duties and responsibilities of funders within each phase—and how grantmakers can master each one.
A grant cycle is the journey a grant takes from start to finish—starting when a funder announces that money is available and ending once grantees have wrapped up their projects and reported back on how the funds were used.
In essence, full grant life cycle success helps ensure consistency, transparency and accountability throughout the grant, while also making it easier to track impact across different rounds of funding.
The grant management cycle stages are:
To better understand the entire grant cycle in totality, let’s dig into each phase.
Before you receive a single application, successful grantmaking begins with thorough strategic planning—a phase that sets the stage for the rest of the program to follow.
While every grant is different, at this stage, grantmakers will typically clearly define program goals, identify target populations or issue areas, establish funding priorities and set preliminary budget allocations—all of which are mission aligned.
Likewise, organisations will prepare internally, too. They’ll define program guidelines, prepare staff and define an outreach and engagement plan for connecting with the right applicants.
Once the foundation of the grant program is set, it’s time to receive applications.
For most organisations, this goes beyond hitting the “publish” button on the grant itself and typically includes offering technical support and feedback, monitoring application data (volume, progress, etc.), sending out updates and ensuring overall application quality.
This is where grants management software comes in handy. With the right platform, funders can easily watch as applications roll in and quickly make adjustments to facilitate simple and seamless submissions from potential grantees—and avoid turning anyone away.
Once applications are submitted and the deadline is over, it’s time for one of the most important parts of the grant program: making decisions around funding.
For most organisations, this process includes an initial screening to ensure applicants meet basic eligibility requirements as well as a more detailed evaluation of eligible applicants against stated criteria.With the right grants management software, funders can use one or multiple review modes in combination—from crowd voting and qualifying to scoring, top pick and galleries.
At this stage, grantmaking organisations finally award and disburse funds to the top applicant(s). While every phase should ensure thoughtful relationship building, this phase really sets the tone for a successful ongoing grantee-funder collaboration.
Practically speaking, this phase typically includes:
A grant agreement: This is formal and legal documentation of your funding decision that defines deliverables, timelines, reporting requirements and procedures.
Financial processing: This often includes verifying banking information, coordinating with accounting systems, ensuring compliance with any legal or regulatory requirements and maintaining accurate records for audit purposes.
Onboarding support: This might include orientation sessions for new grantees and an introduction to relevant program officers or support staff, or even resources that will aid in the successful stewardship of the grant.
This stage is all about staying connected with grantees once the grant is underway. While monitoring and reporting, of course, ensures that projects are on track, this stage is also about strengthening relationships with grantees and establishing mutual trust.
In practice, this often involves regular check-ins, progress reports and site visits. Beyond the formal requirements, it’s also a chance for funders to offer feedback, share resources and help troubleshoot challenges, all of which help to build real trust and partnership.
While closeout is typically considered the time to tie up loose ends, it’s often much more than that. In fact, the final stage of a grant is a crucial opportunity to learn, solidify relationships and plan for the next cycle of grantmaking.
Administratively speaking, at this stage, grantees typically submit final reports which include both quantitative results and qualitative reflections on what worked, what didn’t and why. Likewise, this stage includes financial reconciliation to ensure compliance and accuracy— reviewing final expense reports, processing any grant modifications or returns of unused funds and updating financial systems to mark the grant as complete.
Handled thoughtfully, closeout not only ensures accountability but also provides lessons that can improve future funding decisions.
The most effective foundations treat their grant cycle as a dynamic system that improves over time rather than a fixed process that runs on autopilot.
With the right insight into your grant cycle—like outcomes, grantee feedback, fund allocation and more, grantmaking foundations can consistently optimise and improve their grant cycle management so everyone can succeed.
With grantmaking software like Good Grants, foundations can streamline every stage of the grant cycle to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or opportunities for improvement. From collecting and assessing user and fund data to streamlining the application process, Good Grants helps the most successful grantmaking foundations optimise every phase of the grant cycle—and make more impact than ever before.
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