Instrumentl is the best place to discover new grant opportunities and track their upcoming deadlines. But what if you want to track your progress with grants through multiple fiscal years? What if you want to manage your grant history in one place?

Today we launched big improvements to solve these challenges. You can now track grants through multiple fiscal years, manage and access your grant history, and easily track grants you’ve found outside of Instrumentl. Here are the improvements:

1. Organize your Tracker by the year. Go to your Master Tracker or a project’s Tracker and select to view a specific year from the dropdown. That year’s grants will show based on your Submission Goal (when you plan to apply) or the Submission Date (when you have applied). The Instrumentl team automatically placed your grants into the correct years. Review your Tracker and let us know if anything looks out of place hello@instrumentl.com.

2. See your history with a grant or funder. Click on any saved grant and then the new “Saved history” tab.

3. Apply again next year. Did you win a grant in 2019 and want to apply again in 2020? Perhaps you lost a grant in the past but the funder invited you to reapply this year? Click on any grant saved in your Tracker, navigate to the “Saved History” tab then click “+ Save to another project or year” to apply again.

4. Add a Submission Goal when saving a grant. When you find a grant you’d like to save, click the Save button as usual. Then from the new modal you can select the project you want to save the grant to and set your own Submission Goal (optional). You can pick a Submission Goal from our list of the funder’s deadlines or choose your own custom date. This applies to grants with rolling deadlines as well so you can organize them by your desired Submission Goal in your Tracker.

5. Track your grant history to plan a better future. If you find grants in Instrumentl that you’ve already won or lost you can keep track of them in your Tracker too. Just add the grants to the year they were won or lost when saving. Or, click on any grant from your Grant Tracker and visit the “Saved History” tab to add a historical record.

6. Track your outside grants on Instrumentl. To keep track of grants you’ve found outside of Instrumentl, add them by clicking on the green “Add a grant” button at the top of your Master or project Tracker. You can add one grant at a time, or even upload an entire spreadsheet (particularly useful if you have a long list of historical records to add). Our Grant Data Specialists will work closely with you to ensure the grants from your spreadsheet are added accurately. If you’re adding a single grant, we recommend searching for the grant or funder using our “Quick find” at the top left of your screen first.

7. Share your grants in a report. Create a report from your Master Tracker or a project’s Tracker and choose the projects, statuses, and years you’d like to include. You can create a pdf report or a live report by sharing the report’s url with anyone. Sharing a live report will allow the recipient to click into the grants to read the full grant details without needing to have a login!

We hope our new improvements help you become even more effective and efficient at winning and tracking grants.

Don’t have an account yet? Start your 14-day free trial here and give it a go for yourself or email us at hello@instrumentl.com and we’ll give you a personal tour.

New on Instrumentl: Track Your Grants Through Multiple Fiscal Years, Add Outside Grants, & More was originally published in Instrumentl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s your reaction when you come across a $1,000 grant? If you’re like many nonprofits, you might think it’s not a smart investment of your time. Grant proposals take hours to prepare and spending five hours to win $1,000 means that you’re making $200 an hour. When you compare that return on your time with winning a large grant, it seems like pursuing a large grant would be the best bet.

If you’re doing ROI assessments like the one above you’re on the right track, but you may be missing out. Pursuing small grants ranging from $1,000 — $5,000 can have surprisingly high ROI.

Read on to learn how you can turn small grants into a long-term sustainable revenue source for your nonprofit. We’ll cover why winning a small grant makes it:

1. easier to win that grant again next cycle
2. easier to win larger grants
3. easier to win more grants from other foundations

It’s much easier to win that grant again

The majority of foundations like to award the same grantees year after year. If you think about a foundation like an investor, it’s easy to see why. Foundations don’t like risk. In an ideal world, every investment they make would result in impressive impact but unfortunately that’s not the case. Nonprofits can’t always deliver the impact they promised in the grant application. In those scenarios, the foundation won’t make their return. By re-investing in nonprofits who consistently deliver impact, the foundation reduces their risk.

What does this mean for you? It means that once you win a grant from a foundation, you’re much more likely to win that grant again when you re-apply next cycle. $1,000 in the bank in 2020 can grow into a cumulative $10,000 in the bank by 2030 if you win every year. Plus, that funding is more stable, making your job much less stressful. Just make sure you’re submitting your reports on time and delivering on the impact you originally promised. Keep the foundation up-to-date if something about your strategy changes. Most foundations want to be kept in the loop and don’t mind if you need to change plans as long as you tell them about it first.

It makes it easier to win large grants

Winning a small grant can be an easy way to get your foot-in-the-door with a foundation. It positions you well to grow the partnership and win a larger grant in the future. Like the advice above, make sure you’re investing in your relationship with the foundation. Deliver impact and submit your reports on time. A foundation who sees you doing amazing work will not only want to fund you again the next year, they’ll trust you with a much larger amount.

But not all foundations will take this approach so before you set off on this strategy, make sure you’re pursuing a foundation that will consider granting you a larger amount in the future. You can find these foundations by comparing a foundation’s 990-PFs across the years. Foundations are required by US law to list the grants they award on their 990-PF. Look for patterns where you can see a grantee’s award amount grow over time. If you don’t want to page through dozens of pages of scanned tax documents to do this, you can also compare past grantees and other key information about the foundation easily on Instrumentl.

It makes it easier to win grants from other foundations

A brutal truth about foundations is that they don’t want to be the “first money in” to a nonprofit and so winning your first grant can be surprisingly difficult. It can take months and sometimes even years of consistent effort. There are a few ways to get over this challenge, including gaining community support first. Another approach is to win a small grant from a reputable foundation. Small grants are often much easier to win since the foundation is taking a smaller risk.

Take the Walmart Local Community Grants for example. Walmart awards 2,000 grants every year to nonprofits ranging from $250 to $5,000. For a lot of 501c3s this is the first grant they’ve ever received. Having this win under their belt will make it a lot easier to win grants from other foundations.

There are hundreds of thousands of small grants given out by foundations per year in the US. A few foundations you should check out include:

• Home Depot Community Impact Grants
• 3M Community Grants
• Your local Wells Fargo foundation branch
• Your local community foundation

Ultimately winning grants is about running successful, impactful programs. Before your nonprofit applies for any grant, small or large, make sure you’re “grant ready”. Investing in making sure you’re grant ready will save you hours of time and money wasted down the road because it will make your “first money in” easier to acquire in addition to those larger grants in the future.

The team at Instrumentl is here to help make grants painless. Start a 14 day free trial to discover new funders, research their 990s and keep track of your awards and reports.