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NEW GRANTMAKER TRAINING ALERT! Previously all our training events have been in person (and you're still welcome to join us in London this October). However, this November we'll be launching our new Online Intro to Modern Grantmaking. It is delivered via two live sessions across a fortnight, with activities in-between. For more information and to buy tickets, see here.

Until the day that money starts growing on magical money trees, most grantseeking organisations will need ongoing grants to keep operating.

“But that’s not true!” you may be thinking, remembering back to that grant you made in 1948 that helped cure polio. And, yes, you are right - there are certain goal-oriented grantees who can potentially achieve what they set out to do, before wrapping up, mission accomplished. But unfortunately, and basically because The World Sucks, there are a lot of grantees that work on problems that have no forseeable end.

This means that as a grantmaker, no matter how long you do the job, you’re always going to get messages from your granteees asking if there’s any chance of getting more money. So, what should you do when this happens?

The primary answer is that you should refer to your funding organisation’s grant renewals policy. Because you do have a written grant renewals policy…. right?

Now at this point some of you will be thinking “Yes of course, I read it before going to sleep each night”, whereas others might be thinking “Ohhhh, do other funders have an actual, written renewals policy? Maybe we should get one of those.”  

Whether you currently have one or not, here's some tips about what a good grant renewals policy looks like:

1 - Your renewals policy should contain a process that describes how and when requests for renewal will be handled. We sometimes say that normal grantmaking is like a conveyor belt - funding proposals go in one end, and money comes out the other - the challenge is getting all the stages along the conveyor belt working nicely. Grant renewals should be thought of the same way: funding organisations should have a process into which a request for renewal is dropped, and after assessing, a decision should be shared with the grantee. In other words, your policy should contain a description of a step-by-step process for handling renewals, it should not just be a set of assessment criteria, or ‘things to look for’. 

2 - Your renewals policy should tell you what to tell grantees about renewals, and when to tell them. It’s easy to think of a policy on renewals as fundamentally an internal document, about how you and your colleagues handle renewal requests. But grantees really need to know how your process for deciding on renewals request is going to work. They need plenty of notice to help them with hiring or redundancy decisions, and to help them handle relationships with other funding organisations. A good renewals policy will tell you to contact grantees a minimum of 12 months before a grant expires to tell them what the deal is with renewals. Ideally you’d tell each grantee about your renewals policy on the same day you sign your original grant with them, but we know this is just a dream (we have odd dreams at Modern Grantmaking).

3 - Your renewals policy should be timed around your organisation’s budget and strategy cycle. The wrong time to be attempting to make a decision about a grant renewal is at the moment in the year when you don’t know how much money there is in the budget, and you don’t know if the current strategy is about to change. The right time is the opposite - when you have a clear view of both money and strategic direction. This means that your renewals process should be written with your organisation’s budgetary and strategy cycles in mind. If you’re thinking “But my organisation doesn’t have a predictable budget cycle!” then you now have a reason to make the case for establishing one (i.e to help you manage renewals requests clearly and fairly, as well as about a million other reasons).

4 - Your renewals policy should have scoring criteria that align with your organisational strategy, and your programme goals. By the time you are asked for a grant renewal, you might very well have become close to (and loyal to) your grantee. A personal bond is vital for high trust, relational grantmaking, but can also make it very hard to say ‘no’ to renewal requests from organisations which you know - deep down - perhaps no longer fit your organisation's funding strategy. By implementing a renewals scoring system that a) uses scoring criteria, b) uses multiple people to score and c) always scores and compares multiple renewal requests at the same time (for comparison of requests with each other), you can tackle these biases.

This list just scratches the surfface. There are several more things you need to keep in mind when writing a renewals policy, especially if you’re worried about the overall balance of grants across your whole portfolio (not too much of this, not too little of that). At Modern Grantmaking we’ve helped various funders to create or improve their grant renewals processes, so if you’d like to talk about improving your own grant renewals process, please just get in touch.