If you lead a small nonprofit, chances are you’ve heard some version of these statements in a Board meeting:
- “We should be getting more grants.”
- “There must be foundations that would fund this work.”
- “Can’t we just apply for more grants?”
- “We only need to find a few $25,000 grants to close the gap.”
And with those few words, you suddenly find yourself responsible for finding, writing, and securing grants for your organization. Oftentimes, Board members of small nonprofits (here we are defining “small” as organizations with less than a $1 million annual budget) are coming to the table having worked at — or served on the Boards of — larger, more well-resourced nonprofit organizations. With that experience, they may rightly view grants work as a fairly run-of-the-mill practice. Find, apply, secure, repeat.
But in these moments, you — the nonprofit leader — may have an entirely different perspective on grants, one that centers on a core feeling: overwhelm.
Your Board has now identified grants as a source of revenue that you are responsible for securing. You have to figure out how to manage the grants process from soup to nuts, usually with little to no additional staff or volunteer support, and the expectation is that you will secure substantial dollars.
Is anyone else’s blood pressure already on the rise?
The truth is, your Board isn’t wrong to see grants as an opportunity, or to encourage you to pursue them. Foundation funding can become an important and sustainable source of revenue for a small nonprofit.
But the single best thing you can do as a leader is to come in prepared for these conversations, and to be able to educate your Board on grants — as they relate to small nonprofits like yours — and to set reasonable expectations for your own time and ultimately for revenue.
Give Your Board Some Context
One of the most useful things you can do off the bat is help your Board understand that small nonprofits are not competing for foundation dollars on an even playing field.
According to Candid’s 2025 “invisible majority” analysis, small nonprofits represent roughly 92% of the nonprofit sector but receive only about 8% of foundation revenue. Very small nonprofits (those under $50,000) fare even worse, receiving less than .5% of all foundation funding. Furthermore, according to Cause IQ’s analysis, most small nonprofits do not receive their first grant for several years.
That does not mean small organizations cannot succeed with grants. They absolutely can! But it does help explain why the process can be harder than Board members sometimes expect, and why patience, focus, and a realistic understanding of foundation fundraising matter.
Foundations operate differently from individual donors. They have their own priorities, formal application processes, financial and administrative requirements, deadlines, and often very long decision-making timelines. They are evaluating whether your organization is aligned with their interests, financially stable, ready to manage funding, and capable of demonstrating meaningful impact. And they are generally not designed to solve an urgent revenue problem simply because your organization needs the money.
In an ideal world, here are a few things I would want every Board member of a small nonprofit to understand:
- Applying for more grants is not automatically a strategy. A smaller number of well-aligned prospects is usually a much better use of your time than submitting applications everywhere you can find one.
- You are going to get declined. A lot. This is especially true when you are new to a foundation or just beginning to build a grants program. A decline does not necessarily mean you pursued the wrong funder or submitted a bad proposal. In many cases, the first “no” is a key step forward on your path to “yes”.
- The application is only one piece of the work. Research, relationship building, outreach, follow-up, reporting, and stewardship all take time, and all contribute to whether your organization is ultimately successful.
- Your capacity matters. If one person has five hours a month to devote to grants, your plan needs to be built around five hours a month, not around an arbitrary revenue target someone added to the budget. For most small nonprofits without any professional development staff, one grant per month is sufficient (and perhaps even on the high end).
Then Tell Them What You Are Going to Do
The goal of having an honest conversation with your Board about grants is not to convince them that grants are too hard or that you should stop pursuing them. The goal is to replace “we should get more grants” with a plan that fits your capacity and where your organization is in its life cycle.
You might say something like:
“Here is what I believe we can reasonably accomplish with our current capacity. We are going to identify a manageable group of foundations that are genuinely aligned with our work, get clear about what we are asking them to support, build relationships where we can, submit a realistic number of strong applications, and put systems in place so we can track what we learn.”
Set Realistic Expectations for Your First Year of Grant Seeking
We encourage our small nonprofit partners to think of their first committed year of grant seeking (this doesn’t count those years in which you submitted an ad-hoc grant or two) as the “getting to know you” year. You are introducing the organization, learning what resonates, establishing contacts, following up on declines, improving your materials, and figuring out where your strongest opportunities really are. All of that is productive fundraising work, even when it does not immediately result in a check.
One example is the Boston Bulldogs Running Club. They began pursuing grants in March 2025 and submitted 16 applications over a six month period. All 16 applications were declined. Then, in August 2025, their first $5,000 grant came in. In the months that followed, several additional awards (including a multi-year grant of $75,000) landed.
I share this example a lot because those first 16 declines could very easily have been interpreted as evidence that grants weren’t working. But the Bulldogs kept their focus and stayed in the game long enough to win. They were committed to building a grants program, not to winning a random grant or two.
So if your Board is asking what your grants strategy is, give them one. Set a reasonable goal based on your organization’s capacity. Explain that your first year will include rejection. Further down the road, show them your prospect list, the outreach plan, the Case for Support (your core fundraising narrative), and the systems you are putting in place.
About Page Consulting Group
Page Consulting Group helps nonprofits secure foundation funding through a proven three-phase process grounded in research, strategy, and execution.
We bring senior-level expertise and real client experience to help small and mid-sized nonprofits build grant approaches that are clear, focused, and sustainable.
As always, we love to hear from you! Feel free to email me directly at [email protected] with any questions or sign up for a free 30-minute strategy session.