Most boards classify grants under fundraising. The grants officer reports to the head of fundraising, sits inside the fundraising team, and is measured on grants secured. The annual plan treats grant income as a target alongside donor income, sponsorship income, and event income. From an organisational chart perspective, this is tidy. From a strategic perspective, it quietly undermines the work.

Grants are not a fundraising activity. They are a strategic asset. The difference matters because the work that wins grants and the work that builds a serious grants program are not the same work, and treating them as the same work is the reason most NFPs sit at submission success rates of around 20 to 30 per cent rather than the 50 to 60 per cent that disciplined grant programs consistently achieve.

A serious grants program does three things a fundraising-driven approach rarely does. First, it treats funder selection as a strategic decision rather than a reactive one. The strongest NFP grant programs map the funding landscape carefully, prioritise funders whose stated priorities genuinely align with the organisation’s work, and refuse to apply to funders whose priorities require the organisation to stretch its mission. Most NFPs do the opposite. They apply to whichever funding round is open, regardless of fit, and waste enormous staff time on applications that were never going to succeed.

Second, a serious grants program treats the application as a senior task rather than a delegated one. A strong submission requires the head of program, the CEO, and often the board chair to be genuinely involved in shaping the problem statement, the program logic, and the outcomes framework. Most unsuccessful applications fail because they have been written entirely at the staff level without senior input, which produces applications that describe the organisation accurately but fail to make the strategic case for the program. The funder does not need a description. They need a reason to allocate scarce funds to your application rather than to the seventeen others sitting beside it.

Third, a serious grants program treats the discipline of submission writing as a capability the organisation builds over time, not a one-off task. The board is involved in approving the funder priority list. The senior team is involved in shaping each major submission. The grant writing function is resourced properly, with time to do funder research, problem statement development, and pre-submission review rather than just rapid drafting under deadline pressure. Year on year, the organisation’s success rate climbs because the discipline compounds.

The boards that take this seriously do not see the work as an additional governance burden. They see it as protection for the organisation’s funding base. A 50 per cent success rate on five strategically chosen submissions delivers more revenue than a 20 per cent success rate on twenty reactive ones, with dramatically less staff time consumed in the process. The arithmetic alone justifies the discipline. The strategic clarity that comes with it is the real prize.

If the grants program at your organisation is sitting inside fundraising rather than alongside strategy, the structural question is usually more useful than the tactical one. We would welcome the conversation.

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If you would prefer a self-guided diagnostic first, the Croí Grant Writer’s Toolkit is a free guide covering funder research, problem statement frameworks, outcomes development, budget narrative, and pre-submission review. It is the toolkit we use with our own NFP clients.

[Download the Grant Writer’s Toolkit →]