With the 2025 financial year now firmly in the rear-view mirror, here are our top five recommended actions to complete before year-end to set your organisation up for grant-seeking success.
- Ensure all acquittals and accountability reports for your 2025 financial year funders are complete.
Saying thank you and meeting – or ideally exceeding – your funders’ reporting requirements is essential, but excellence in funder stewardship goes beyond this.
To ensure you’re making the time to meaningfully steward your funders, you must plan to do so. By being strategic and intentional with your stewardship activities you demonstrate to the funder how vital their support is and how important the relationship is to your organisation and those you serve. Be sure to check out our top tips for funder stewardship here.
And remember to always respect the funder’s communication preferences. As an example – do not send them your Annual Report or add them to your monthly impact newsletter list if they expressly asked not to receive these types of communications.
- Complete the Strategic Grants Best Practice Tracker.
Our Best Practice Tracker (BPT) can be found in your GEMS Knowledge Centre if you’re a GEMS subscriber, or available free of charge on the Strategic Grants website.
Use this dynamic tool to assess your organisation’s capacity and readiness to seek grants, and areas to work on to optimise your results. Assessing your organisational processes and systems against each of the seven key critical success factors for grant-seeking success will help determine where you need to focus attention and potentially seek additional resourcing and support.
Some of the most effective teams review performance with the Strategic Grants BPT on a quarterly or half-yearly basis to ensure continuous improvement and success. Consider embedding it into your own organisation’s review processes.
- Undertake a key priorities review.
With a new budget and revenue targets for the 2026 financial year endorsed by your board, now is the time to ensure you have agreed, confirmed and compiled all the necessary information relating to your organisation’s priority funding needs, ready to identify grant opportunities to meet them.
This foundational step will ensure you are spending your time efficiently and effectively when researching grant opportunities, as well as ensuring that grants identified and applied for are aligned with your organisation’s purpose and meet the organisation’s short, medium, and long-term needs.
- Undertake systematic prospect research.
Set aside time each week or fortnight to research prospective funding opportunities to meet your agreed funding priorities.
To be effective in your research, you should apply an efficient, regular, and systematic approach to finding the right funding and grant opportunities for each of your projects. Consider different types of funders, looking at open grant rounds, funders who accept Expressions of Interest at any time, and By Invitation funders (often PAFs and PuAFs).
If you’re a GEMS subscriber, be sure to utilise your comprehensive GEMS Grants Calendar; it provides a rolling list of grant and funding opportunities tailored to your organisation’s scope and geographic areas of operation.
Then go deeper. Where available, look at each prospective funder’s website, social media, previous grant recipients and ACNC information.
Once you have conducted your research on a funder and confirmed your eligibility to apply or present a proposal, email or call the funder to discuss and determine their interest in supporting your project. This is an important step. If you’re hesitant about making a call, take a look at our top telephone tips for engaging with funders.
- Start mapping out your FY26 applications plan.
Now you know what your FY26 funding needs are, and you have identified strongly aligned funding prospects for those needs, start mapping out your planned grant applications for the coming 6-12 months. Look at open grant round closing dates, and plan your approaches to others around them, considering when funders will be reviewing their giving, and making decisions. (Pro tip: if you’re a GEMS subscriber, use your Application Tracker to ensure you never miss a deadline, or lose a prospect record.)
Forward planning will ensure you have sufficient time to develop project information templates for each of your priority funding needs, effectively engage your key stakeholders (including CEO and leadership, and all relevant program delivery and finance staff) and allow yourself enough time to develop compelling grant applications and proposals.
If you’re a GEMS subscriber, be sure to head to your GEMS Knowledge Centre to access a range of resources (included with your subscription), like our Project Planning Templates, Budget Template and Writing Checklist, to set you up for success in FY26. Or, explore our online Webinar Library to refresh and re-set on the fundamentals of Measurement & Evaluation, demonstrating Evidence of Need, preparing a Case for Support, and the fundamentals of good grant writing.
Remember, grant success isn’t about luck or last-minute applications. It’s about strategic planning, relationship building, and maintaining the organisational systems that support sustainable funding growth.
Start with just one of these actions this week. Your future self – and the communities you serve – will thank you for taking the time to build these strong foundations now.
Need support implementing these strategies? Our team of grant specialists is here to help your organisation achieve its funding goals. Contact us today to discuss how we can support your grant success journey.