Preventing post-award panic: Eight strategies to keep your cool when your grant goes awry
Picture this: You’re a grant professional with a report coming due. The project director sent a programmatic crisis update that spiked your blood pressure into the stratosphere.
Maybe someone “forgot” to purchase a big-ticket piece of equipment in your grant budget. Or perhaps a key staff member quit and the position went unfilled… for nine months. Perhaps, much to your dismay, a main referral partner dropped out, crushing your participant numbers. Maybe no community members attended your project’s promised resources fairs, despite heroic marketing and outreach efforts.
Or hey, maybe a global pandemic wreaked utter havoc on every plan your agency had for 2020-2021.
Been there. Done that. Already donated the t-shirt because it was triggering trauma.
The good news: Several good strategies exist to keep such situations from spiraling.
1. Avoid panic paralysis
First thing: DON’T PANIC. Funders have seen grants go awry in every way you can possibly imagine. Your situation likely won’t be the story they tell over their cool-kid program officer cocktail hour (you know they have them). Also, in a year as unprecedented as 2020, plans going off the rails was the norm—not the exception. Even if you’re on the Titanic of grants, you have plenty of company this year.
2. Be honest and communicate
A natural reaction when we foresee trouble is to want to hide—or hide from—the problem. Ask my dog; he loves to “bury” chewed shoes and half-shredded notebooks under my bed. Pets notwithstanding, avoidance is a short-term stress solution that almost always leads to more issues later. We know this. But organizationally, when we’re busy and stressed, we may fail to act on this knowledge. When a grant hits trouble, you should immediately admit there is a situation and let those affected know.
If you are someone up the supervision chain on the project, also recognize that even if someone missed a major opportunity, only in rare circumstances is immediate punitive action helpful at this stage. That coaching moment may need to happen soon, but a knee-jerk reaction won’t help during problem identification.
3. Devise (enough of) a plan
When you need to share iffy news, first consider and offer a few initial solutions. If nothing else, this keeps the person you communicate with from feeling their own panic by sensing that you already have ideas. When you’re having internal conversations with leadership or stakeholders, you rarely need a final answer up front. Having up to three ideas for tackling the situation is enough to give people choices, a place to brainstorm from, and an alternative to feeling alarmed.
This same concept goes for funders and is mentioned below. When it’s time to communicate to the funder that there is an issue, having up to three recommendations for where to go next will position you as prepared, solutions-oriented, and thoughtful.
4. Tap into your team
One of the best aspects of nonprofit life is the tapestry of diverse people working in the sector. Our colleagues represent every background, career path, worldview, and Zodiac sign. If the problem is tricky, pull your posse together. This can include the program staff, project director, agency leadership, fundraising team, or possibly your grant peer network. With the latter, you will need to keep the details confidential, but in most cases, you can ask colleagues how they have or would deal with such an instance. Again, “everyone’s been there” before, and in recent months, everyone’s been there more than usual.
5. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
This one is common, particularly when it comes to writing reports for grants that didn’t go as planned. We humans tend to have a negative bias. The parts of life that are not going well receive far more attention than the parts going beautifully. We tend to mirror this when we write reports, and often we should work against that instinct.
For example, picture a grant with five primary outcomes: two were exceeded, two were met, and one tanked big time. Our natural instinct is to spend undue page space explaining why that single one failed. We often burn through a thousand characters at the expense of the project elements that went right! DON’T DO THIS. Just because your project wasn’t PERFECT doesn’t mean it didn’t achieve something GOOD. Celebrate what went well with the project, as well as what did not.
The main caveat here regards scale. If your entire plan was to hold 20 community outreach events, and you only held one, but the people who came to the one were VERY satisfied, the scale of the success might not offset the scale of the shortfall. However, if you were supposed to hold 10 events, each serving 20 people, and instead you held one event serving 225, then that result MAY WELL merit a strengths-focused narrative. Why? Because the elements of scale are comparable to what you set out to do, albeit differently realized.
6. Prioritize lessons and pivots
Tying to the point above, a failed project may teach crucial lessons about what DOES work. If you have learned lessons, course corrected, or tried new strategies as a result of issues that came up during the grant, share those with funders. At their core, your funding partners made their investment because they wanted you to succeed. They did this because they care about the people you serve and the mission you seek to achieve. If you learned something valuable, there is a good chance it will interest them, and potentially be a knowledge nugget they can share with other grantees. A good example for 2020–2021 involves telecommuting. Whether you are a service provider, school, or health care agency, your year likely skewed far from your original plans. Funders are fascinated by what your learned about remote services and staffing, even more so if those lessons have implications for access innovations in the future.
Also, don’t forget. The state of humanity is constantly striving, sometimes succeeding, often stumbling. We only reach our goals by figuring things out and persisting. Nonprofit agencies and programs are no different, and funders generally DO get this. Making a grant investment is a calculated risk on their part—and receiving it is yours. If something went wrong due to gross mismanagement, that could turn a funder off. But if you made an educated, programmatic guess based on solid projections and it didn’t pan out, but you gained knowledge that helps you succeed in the future, most grantors are comfortable supporting that process. But you have to TELL them about it.
7. Partner with your funders
To fully ascend my soap box—PARTNER with your funders on your program or project. Philanthropy is a relational arena. Again, funders are here because they want to see good done in our world. Celebrate what went well and call them out as part of that success. If things fell short, but you built new skills and made lemonade out of lemons, thank them for their contributions and let them know the plans you made in response to new knowledge. Harkening back to communication above, if you need to modify your budget, outcomes, or project plan, communicate that to them. Tell them clearly, succinctly, and go in with up to three ideas for what you want to change and why those ideas are logical. Most funders will appreciate this. Taking them thoughtful ideas gives them an opportunity to be part of the pivot without putting them in the role of telling you what to do (which is not their preferred role).
8. Going forward: Build a better check-in system
If you didn’t know that we here at Encore partner often in healthcare, this should clue you in. We think it’s a cliché for a reason: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
One of the best things you can do to avoid the report panic scenario is to build a system that checks on grant progress several times throughout the year. We routinely work with clients to set up check-ins on major grants at least quarterly. We examine outputs, outcomes, and expenditures. When we see variances, we work with program teams to problem-solve and communicate to funders. Nothing makes an agency look more organized than recognizing the trajectory of their grant early, making appropriate changes, and communicating those changes clearly.
You can build a system with your grant team and colleagues that identifies important awards as they come in, launches them with key players, and pulls together those same teammates regularly to examine the grant’s progress. You’ll be amazed how many heart-racing surprises can be avoided through these occasional touchpoints. If you’re not sure how to get from today to that level of organization, reach out. The Encore team does this all the time, and we’re here to help you set it up—and take your blood pressure down a few points.
Catherine Hooper, Director of Strategy & Engagement