So, you’ve successfully secured fresh funding; however, this is just the beginning.
Once the funding agreement is signed, it’s time to start delivering the projects promised in your grant application. This stage of the grant management lifecycle is called “post-award”.
Good post-award grant management is critical for transforming your prospective grant funding into meaningful community impact, without driving your team mad. For local governments, nonprofits, and community organisations, understanding how to get the post-award process right is essential to delivering successful projects, maintaining ongoing funding cash flow, and keeping your funders happy.
What Does Post-Award Grant Management Involve?
Post-award grant management encompasses everything an organisation does to track and report on how grant money is spent after being awarded funding.
This is much more than just writing emails or creating spreadsheets. Many nonprofits and local councils rely heavily on grant funding, often managing up to 90 grants at different stages, which makes juggling competing priorities and differing timelines one of the hardest parts of post-award grant management.
When post-award grant management is done poorly, your organisation risks not meeting its funding requirements and could face serious questions about how you use public and philanthropic money.
Post-award grant management involves any of (but is not limited to) the following tasks and responsibilities:
- Coordination between infrastructure project teams and finance to meet funding milestones
- Regular milestone reporting of project progress
- Budget management of funding remaining against funding allocated
- Proof of project progress (such as photos or receipts)
- Timely submission of variations for additional funding or timeline extensions
- Acquitting the grant at the end of the grant period
Why Post-Award Management Matters for Organisations
Effective grant management does more than satisfy bureaucratic requirements. It’s a strategic approach that:
- Builds credibility with funders and grantmakers
- Demonstrates financial responsibility, which increases the likelihood of future funding
- Maximises the impact of grant-funded projects and gains community support
- Ensures compliance with complex regulatory frameworks if your organisation must follow one
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How Australian LGAs Can Attract and Sustain More Grant Funding
Grant funding is the lifeblood of many councils, especially outside of metro LGAs. The need to attract and sustain continuous and growing grant funding is a critical one.
What Does Good Post-Award Grant Management Look Like?
Precise Financial Tracking and Reporting
Financial management is the cornerstone of successful post-award grant management.
When your organisation cannot ensure every dollar aligns with the original budget and funding conditions, it creates a domino effect where the more grants you win the harder it will become for your internal team to manage the post-award tasks.
Having robust processes, skilled people, and the right systems are key to helping you meticulously track project expenditure, submit variations on time, and avoid damaging your reputation with funders.
Purpose-built grant management software specialises in giving local government and nonprofit teams real-time financial dashboards that can link with their finance systems to enable live monitoring of grant funding that’s been spent, allocated, and remaining, allowing for quick strategic decisions during meetings and reducing workloads during milestone reporting time.
Strong Grant-funded Project Management
Proactive monitoring of your grant-funded projects transforms your post-award grant management from an administrative task to a strategic process. It’s about continuously assessing project progress, identifying potential risks, addressing them before cost blowouts occur, and ensuring that the funding agreement’s objectives are met.
This involves:
- Establishing live, up-to-date dashboards and reporting of exactly how much budget is remaining and allocated from your grant portfolio
- Using that data to complete milestone reporting on time
- Staying on top of contractor delivery timelines and flagging delays early
- Maintaining open communication with your grantmaking funders and raising timely variations
- Showing evidence of progress in your communications with the community
Known Challenges in Post-award Grant Management
Meeting Funding Agreement Obligations
If you only have a handful of grants to manage, this all feels pretty straightforward. But, what we’ve seen is that many rural councils and nonprofits are juggling a large grant portfolio with over 90 grants on different timelines.
Because many grants, especially those finding critical infrastructure projects in government, are multi-year, this makes staying on top of the admin, reporting, and budget difficult — and this is all at the risk of not meeting your funding agreement obligations.
Without a focus from the organisation to resource and support the grant management function, particularly for post-award rather than just applying for and winning grants, the proceeding tasks tend to be poorly managed, which leads to variations being submitted late and heightening the risk of funding delays or even clawbacks from the funder for not fulfilling the funding agreement.
Issues with Linking Your Grants with Projects
Modern grant teams are leveraging grant management software to boost efficiency and transparency in their grant lifecycle.
When it comes to post-award grant management, local councils like Edward River Council are using SurePact to help track $11M of flood recovery efforts funded by the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA). For the council to get an up-to-date view of project progress and budget allocation, as well as report on multiple grants they were awarded for flood recovery, it would be difficult without a grant management solution that links back to ongoing project execution.
SurePact allowed Edward River Council and its project management consultants to work together with contractors on the ground, and have their delivery and tasks feed directly back into the dashboard to create that unifying link back to their grant budget.
Easily link Grants and Projects inside SurePact and create an up-to-date view of budget allocated vs remaining
Next Steps: Your Checklist for Improving Post-Award Grant Management in Your Organisation
To ensure that public money delivers maximum value through grant-funded projects, post-award grant management can’t just be an administrative requirement — it needs to be treated as a strategic focus.
Here are a few things you can start doing tomorrow to audit your team’s post-award grant management process.
Project Setup and Initial Tracking
- Look at what your team is doing each time you are awarded funding in terms of understanding the funding agreement (and ensuring they are referring back to it)
- Think about setting up a central tracking system for your grants (budget, timeline, milestones) — is a spreadsheet enough, or is there a need for purpose-built grant software?
- Review the key team members responsible for post-award grant management and do a gap analysis
Compliance and Governance
- Understand all regulatory requirements
- Maintain accurate and up-to-date project documentation
- Prepare for potential audits
- Ensure timely submission of all required reports
- Track and document the community impact of the project
Technology and Tools
- Consider grant management software for:
- Real-time financial dashboards
- Project progress tracking
- Milestone reporting
- Integrating financial systems with grant tracking
- Ensure data security and backup of all grant-related information
Continuous Improvement
- Conduct regular internal reviews of the grant management process
- Gather feedback from team members
- Document lessons learned for future grant applications
- Update processes based on experience and feedback
Improving your grant management is an ongoing journey. Start small, be consistent, and continuously refine your processes. By investing time and resources into post-award grant management now, you’ll build a more robust, transparent, and impactful organisation that funders will be eager to support in the future.
