The award letter arrives.
The dollar amount is huge.
Leadership sends an all-staff celebratory email.
The board chair gives a round of applause.
Then, Monday morning arrives.
And the silence sets in.
The executive director assumes the program staff will handle it.
The program staff assumes the finance director knows the reporting rules.
The finance director doesn’t even know the grant was awarded.
And everyone assumes the grant writer will magically produce the outcome data when the report is due in eleven months.
This is the Post-Award Ghost Town. And it is where nonprofit reputations go to die.
Related: Are grant writers responsible for post-award activities?
A grant proposal is not a creative writing sample.
It is a binding operational contract.
When you win an award, the clock starts immediately:
Who is tracking participant intake?
Are program expenses being coded to the correct restricted ledger?
Have the milestones promised on page 14 of the narrative been scheduled on the program calendar?
Is the data being collected in real time, or are you going to guess at it two days before the report deadline?
If your organization does not hold a mandatory post-award kickoff meeting within two weeks of receiving an award letter, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Do not wait until the final report to find out that nobody delivered on the promises you made in the narrative.
Until next time,
Write Epic Grants