We’ve been using Asana for a while for tasks, but would love to move our full grant management there (right now it’s a mix of excel, asana, and our donor database). Can anyone share what that looks like for you? Is each grant it’s own project and if so, how do you get a big picture view? Or do you keep all grants in one project and if so, how are you moving it along?
Thanks!
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Hi @Jehan_Seirafi! I am not on my org’s development team, but I am happy to share what I know about how they are using Asana for grants management. For us all grants are contained in the same project(s) depending on the status (basically if the funding is secured or not). Tasks are created for each grant opportunity, then assigned to the relevant team member and managed from there. The team makes use of custom fields and subtasks to manage the grant process.
They use 3 main projects to manage proposals, ongoing cultivation of potential new donors, and existing funder relationships. Here’s what it looks like:
1. Proposals - this project is organized into sections for proposals under consideration, working proposals, and submitted proposals with additional custom fields to track the program the funding is for, the amount, and any notes.
2. Cultivation – for funding opportunities that the team is exploring and have not yet been identified as an opportunity to submit a proposal for.
3. Stewardship – for tracking relationships with current funders. Here all of the grant details are stored, including the award size, end date, renewal status, program, etc.
I hope this helps! I’m curious to see how others are managing fundraising in Asana as well.
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@Mia_Velasco, this setup is a dream!
And nearly aligns with the vision I had when creating the grant tracking template that’s available in Asana, so seeing this made my day! I might add a few of the following recommendations based on the current setup you have.
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For your Cultivation project, I recommending that you leverage our forms feature, and add a form to this project. This would allow you to decentralize the grant opportunity sourcing process. Whenever someone who is a supporter or employee that comes across a grant opportunity can easily submit it for your team to consider pursuing.
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For the Stewardship project, I would add start & end dates to each current funder task, so that you can easily spot see any upcoming gaps in funding when viewing this project in timeline view. We cant see any subtasks right now, but if there is a grant-reapplication window that begins before your current funding period comes to an end, then add that info as a subtask that’s assigned to the grant “owner”.
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If your nonprofit has a business account, create a single portfolio with all these trackig projects as well as individual grants currently in process. If you’re using the grant tracking template in Asana ,then each grant opportunity you are pursuing can be converted into a project, and the start & due dates, dependencies, custom fields (etc) can appear in timeline view and have status updates on their progress appear in this portfolio!
Just my two cents from the outside looking in, but I’d love to hear what else the community here has cooked up as well! Thanks for sharing @Mia_Velasco, this is fantastic! 
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This is so great @Mia_Velasco. Thank you so much for sharing.
One follow-up question: how does the team track total annual grant revenue goals against grants awarded? I see the fields for proposed award amount, but do you just pull those amounts and track the totals elsewhere (in a spreadsheet)? I’d love to figure out how we move completely away from our grant tracking spreadsheet, but right now it totals up amounts for grants in progress, submitted, and awarded so we have a birdseye view of how we’re tracking.
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hey @Jehan_Seirafi I checked with our dev team and they still use a spreadsheet and Salesforce, in addition to Asana, to track total grant revenue against grants awarded. It seems like you could use additional number custom fields to calculate totals for grants in progress, submitted, and awarded. If you create a section for each of these stages, then Asana will automatically calculate a subtotal for each section.
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@Michael_A can you share if/how you envisioned your grant tracking template to include reporting deadlines for active grants? We are exploring using this template for our grants management tracking but can’t seem to find the right way to integrate reporting deadlines as subtasks in a way that would allow us to track/see those deadlines in Calendar view. Any thoughts/tips you have would be greatly appreciated!
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Hi @Lily_Bukshpan
This is a great question. Our team is working on maing subtasks appear in timeline view so while we can’t support this now, there are a few workarounds available.
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If you have a central project for all awarded grants (like @Mia_Velasco’s stewardship project) you could create sections for each grant and assign a new task for your 3-6-9 month check-ins depending on your cadence.
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Or, if you want to help organize things by using subtasks(instead of tasks), once your subtasks have been created, manually add them subtask into the project for it to appear as a task in whichever calendar you’re looking to have this visibility. To do so, click the subtask then use the Tab+P shortcut and add it to the project, then move it to whichever section you’d like in that project.
I personally use option #2 to track subtasks that build up to a milestone so that subtasks take on Task capabilities while helping folks see how those ladder up to the fulfillment of their respective milestones.
Hope this helps!
Hi @Lily_Bukshpan I am wondering what your organization ended up doing for grant reporting deadlines? Our nonprofit is trying to launch Asana for our grants management and we’ve hit the exact same roadblock. @Michael_A I like the idea of pulling out report deadlines as their own task to see it on the timeline view but wish they could still be connected somehow to their Grant-Task. I’m hesitant to make every grant a project because we have 150+ grants each year and I fear that would be too disjointed to manage. Any advice or suggestions are welcomed, thank you!
Hi @Courtney_Porte - not sure we’ve figured out the best solution for this just yet but as of right now, we are keeping each grant opportunity as a ‘task’, and then assigning reporting requirements/deadlines as subtasks. Then, you have to manually ensure that each reporting subtask is assigned to the parent project (ours is called ‘Grants Management’).
This way, when you view the Grants Management Calendar, you can see all proposal + reporting deadlines. You can also add tags to tasks like ‘Proposal Deadline’ or ‘Reporting Deadline’ if you want to filter to only view proposal/reporting deadlines (Tasks) on your calendar.
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Thank you, @Lily_Bukshpan that is really helpful. That is making more sense now, appreciate it! I think we’ll try that route (parent project + utilizing tags) as well. Thanks for the quick reply!
Hi @Michael_A ,
Thank you so much for creating the grant tracking template!
I am a grant manager but on the opposite side of grants in non-profits - I oversee a fund and award grants to grassroots organizations. As such, I am in dire need of some sort of grantee project tracking tool primarily to keep track of which progress reports we have received from which grantees, and which grantees are not on track in their reporting.
I see an opportunity to adapt this template to serve my purposes but I’m not quite seeing it as clearly as I’d like to. For example, in the Excel document I have been using to track grantees, I have set up a SUM line to add up their payment requests to date in order to see how much they have spent towards their total grant amount. I’m wondering if capabilities like this can be replicated in Asana? Ideally I’d like all of my grantees (which further break down by cohorts based on deadlines of Requests for Proposals) to be in a singular project where I can easily see how each grantee is doing in terms of funds and reporting. To be clear, this would be for awarded grantees - in other words, managing the projects of selected grantees.
Please let me know if you have any insight as to how I could manipulate the current board to reflect these needs, or if you have plans to create a grants management project tracker for those of us who are disbursing funds in the form of grants.
Thank you in advance!
Best,
Stephanie
just to add - I wonder if the Portfolio feature would be of use for my circumstances. Thoughts?
Welcome, @Stephanie_Borcea,
Until the excellent @Michael_A replies, I’ll chime in briefly…
You can do some simple summing of amounts in Asana project in list view that looks like this, which is an image from a Forum Leaders tips of mine. It’s topic is Invoices/Payments, but if you think about it, it perfectly aligns with the accounting you mention in Grants Amounts/Payment Requests:
You could go a different route and use Portfolios > Export > [Sync to] Google Sheets but I think that’s more effort and would only be worthwhile if you had more related requirements besides what you mentioned here.
Hope that helps,
Larry