Grant calendar: how a small nonprofit keeps every deadline

A grant calendar is the one place where every grant date your organization cares about lives: submission deadlines, the internal dates that make them possible, and the reports you owe on grants you already won. Small nonprofits usually have the dates somewhere, in a spreadsheet, an inbox or someone's head. The calendar's job is to put them where you already look every day, with enough warning to act.

If you were hoping for a list of grant deadlines for the year, it does not exist in one place: dates differ by funder and change from year to year. What you can build is a calendar of the deadlines that matter to you, and this guide shows how.

What goes on it

Put more than submission deadlines on the calendar. A deadline you only see on the day is not useful.

• Submission deadlines for the grants you are applying for, with the time and time zone if the funder gives one. Some portals close at a specific hour.
• Letter of intent (LOI) dates. Many foundations ask for a short LOI weeks before a full proposal.
• Internal deadlines worked back from each submission (below).
• Report due dates for grants you won: interim and final.
• Decision dates, so you know when to expect news and when to follow up.
• Recurring cycles. If your community foundation opens its youth cycle every spring, put a reminder a few weeks before it usually opens, and confirm the real dates on its site when they are published.
• Registrations that expire. If you apply for federal grants, your SAM.gov registration must be renewed every year; put the renewal on the calendar well before it lapses.

Only put grants on it that you have decided to pursue. A calendar crowded with every possibility stops being read. Prospects belong in your grant tracking spreadsheet until you decide.

Work backward from each deadline

For each grant you are applying for, add the steps that lead to it. A simple pattern for a mid-sized foundation proposal:

Adjust for the size of the application. A two-page community foundation form needs less; a federal application needs far more, and its registrations need to be in place first.

Where to keep it

Use the calendar your team already opens every day, usually Google Calendar or Outlook. A separate grants calendar inside that app works well: everyone can turn it on or off, and you can share it with your board chair or a consultant.

• Create a shared calendar named for grants, and give edit access to whoever adds dates.
• Make each deadline an all-day event on the due date, titled with the funder and program (for example, "Community foundation: youth cycle due"), with the source link and the owner in the description.
• Add the internal steps as separate events owned by the people doing them.
• Use the calendar app's notifications on deadline events, two weeks and a few days before.

If your grants already live in a spreadsheet or a tool that publishes a calendar feed (an .ics address), subscribe to that feed instead of retyping dates. Google Calendar's "From URL" option and Outlook's subscribe-from-web option both take a feed address. A subscribed calendar updates when the source changes, which a copied date never does.

Reminders that get seen

Reminders fail when they arrive too late to act or so often they are ignored. A pattern that works for most small teams:

• Two weeks before: enough time to finish a draft or decide to pass.
• A few days before: enough time to fix a missing attachment.
• Stop reminding once it is marked submitted or passed, so the next reminder means something.

Send reminders to the person who owns the application, not a shared inbox nobody watches.

A weekly look ahead

Once a week, when you review your grant work, look at the next four weeks of the calendar:

1. Is every deadline in the next four weeks owned by someone, with internal steps scheduled?
2. Are any reports due? They are easy to forget once the grant feels finished.
3. Has anything been decided that should come off? Mark grants you passed on, and delete their internal steps.
4. Are new deadlines from this week's prospecting on the calendar?

Common mistakes

• Only the final deadline. Without internal steps, the deadline arrives as a surprise.
• Every prospect on the calendar. Only grants you decided to pursue.
• Dates without sources. Funders change deadlines; keep the link in the event so anyone can check.
• Forgetting the time zone. A 5pm Eastern close is 2pm in California.
• No reports. Report dates belong on the same calendar as deadlines.

Grant Weekly keeps a running deadline calendar for the grants you track. Track a grant from your Monday list or its email and its deadline goes on the calendar, with a status of interested, applying, submitted or passed. A private calendar feed works with Google Calendar and Outlook, and reminder emails go out 14 and 3 days before each deadline until you mark it submitted or passed. Our guide to grant alerts covers where the grants on that list come from.