How to Run a Modern Grants Programme

If you are a funder still managing grants through email, Word documents, and spreadsheets, you are not alone — but you are almost certainly making life harder for yourself and for the organisations you fund. Plinth research found that 46% of grants cost more to administer than they are actually worth once the full burden on both funder and grantee is accounted for. That is not an efficiency problem. It is a systemic failure that diverts charitable resources away from the people they are meant to reach.

The sector is beginning to acknowledge this. The Charity Commission's 2024 annual report highlighted the need for "proportionate and purposeful" oversight, while the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) has been advocating for lighter-touch, trust-based approaches for several years. But good intentions are not enough. Without the right processes and tools, even well-meaning funders default to heavyweight application forms, duplicative reporting requirements, and assessment processes that rely on institutional memory rather than structured data.

This guide is written specifically for funders — grant-makers, trusts, foundations, and statutory bodies — who want to modernise their grants programme. It covers the full lifecycle from application design through assessment, award, monitoring, and evaluation, with practical steps you can take regardless of your organisation's size.

What you will learn:

• Why traditional grant processes impose disproportionate costs on applicants and funders alike
• How to design application forms that collect the right information without creating barriers
• What a structured, fair assessment process actually looks like in practice
• How to move from compliance-driven monitoring to learning-focused reporting
• Where technology fits — and where it does not — in the modern grants lifecycle

Who this is for: Grant programme managers, foundation directors, trust administrators, statutory funders, and anyone responsible for designing or improving a grants programme. This guide assumes you are a funder, not an applicant.

Why Do Traditional Grants Programmes Cost So Much to Run?

The cost of running a grants programme is almost always higher than funders realise, because the most significant costs are borne by applicants, not by the funder. Plinth research estimates that UK charities collectively spend 15.8 million hours per year on funder reporting alone — not including applications, monitoring, or relationship management.

For funders, the hidden costs sit in three places:

Administrative overhead. When applications arrive as email attachments, staff spend time downloading, filing, chasing missing information, and manually entering data. Programme officers at mid-sized trusts routinely report that a large proportion of their time is consumed by administrative tasks that could be automated, leaving less capacity for relationship management and strategic thinking.

Inconsistent decision-making. Without structured scoring, panel discussions tend to favour articulate applicants and penalise smaller organisations that lack professional bid writers. Research on assessment practices consistently shows that unstructured assessments produce significantly more variable outcomes than scored frameworks, even when the same panel reviews the same applications.

Poor learning. If your monitoring data lives in Word documents and email attachments, you cannot easily answer basic portfolio questions: which types of intervention produce the best outcomes? Which grantees are struggling? Where should you invest more? The data exists, but it is trapped in unstructured formats.

What Should a Modern Application Process Look Like?

The application is the first interaction most organisations have with your programme. It sets the tone for the entire relationship. A well-designed application process achieves three things: it collects the information you genuinely need, it does not exclude good organisations through unnecessary complexity, and it provides a consistent dataset for assessment.

Design for the applicant, not the assessor

Start by listing every question on your current application form. For each question, ask: will the answer directly inform our funding decision? If not, remove it. IVAR's work on open and trusting grant-making has consistently highlighted that many application forms collect far more information than assessors actually use when making their decision. Much of what is asked for is either duplicative, historical, or collected "just in case."

Use structured forms, not free text

Free-text fields ("Tell us about your organisation in no more than 2,000 words") favour applicants with access to professional writers. Structured fields — drop-downs, checkboxes, short-answer questions with word limits — level the playing field and produce data you can actually compare across applications.

Funders that have gone through this exercise consistently report the same finding: when they cut their application forms dramatically — from 12 pages to 3, for example — the quality of applications goes up, not down. Many of the questions in lengthy forms are there because they make the funder feel thorough, not because they help the funder make better decisions.

Plinth's grant applications module lets you build structured application forms with built-in eligibility checking, guidance text, and auto-save — reducing the burden on applicants while giving your team clean, comparable data from the start.

How Should You Structure the Assessment Process?

Fair assessment requires three things: a clear framework, consistent application, and documented reasoning. Most funders have one or two of these; few have all three.

Build a scoring framework before you open applications

Your scoring criteria should be published alongside the application — applicants should know what you are looking for and how you will assess them. A typical framework might score across four dimensions: need (is the problem real and evidenced?), approach (is the proposed solution credible?), capacity (can this organisation deliver?), and value (is the budget reasonable?).

Use independent scoring before panel discussion

Research from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) peer review evidence base shows that pre-discussion independent scoring reduces groupthink and anchoring effects. Each assessor scores independently, then the panel discusses divergences rather than forming opinions collectively from the start.

Record reasons, not just decisions

Every decision — funded, rejected, or deferred — should have a recorded rationale. This is not just good governance (the Charity Commission expects it). It also builds institutional knowledge and protects against challenge. Structured feedback for unsuccessful applicants is a hallmark of well-run programmes.

Plinth's AI-assisted assessment tools support independent scoring, automatic conflict-of-interest flagging, and AI-drafted feedback based on the scoring rationale — ensuring every applicant receives a substantive response.

What Does Proportionate Monitoring Actually Look Like?

Monitoring is where the greatest mismatch between funder intent and grantee experience typically occurs. Many funders believe their reporting requirements are reasonable. Most grantees disagree. Research by the Lloyds Bank Foundation on small charities consistently finds that the majority describe funder reporting as "burdensome" or "very burdensome," while only a small minority of funders consider their own requirements excessive.

The solution is to match your monitoring requirements to three factors: the size of the grant, the risk profile, and the information you will actually use.

Collect outcomes, not just activities

Many reporting templates ask grantees to describe what they did, not what changed as a result. Activity data (number of sessions delivered, people reached) is useful for context but tells you nothing about impact. Design your monitoring forms around outcomes: what changed for the people or communities involved?

Plinth's monitoring and reporting tools let you design proportionate reporting templates for different grant sizes, automate reminders, and collect structured outcome data that feeds directly into your portfolio analysis.

How Can You Use Data to Improve Your Programme?

Running a modern grants programme means treating data as a strategic asset, not a compliance exercise. If you cannot answer basic questions about your portfolio — where is the money going, what is it achieving, which grantees need support — then your data collection is not working for you.

Build a portfolio view

Individual grant reports are useful for managing relationships, but the real value emerges when you aggregate data across your portfolio. Which geographic areas are you reaching? Which outcome domains are strongest? Where are grantees consistently struggling to achieve their targets?

In practice, very few UK funders regularly analyse outcome data at portfolio level. Most rely on annual narrative summaries produced by programme staff — which are subjective and time-consuming to compile.

Close the feedback loop

The best grant programmes use monitoring data to inform future strategy. If your domestic abuse grantees are consistently achieving strong outcomes in peer support but struggling with housing outcomes, that tells you something about where to direct future funding or what additional support grantees might need.

Before digital tools, programme teams would read hundreds of individual reports and try to spot patterns manually. With portfolio-level dashboards, that same analysis takes minutes — showing which grantees are hitting targets, which need a conversation, and where the theory of change needs updating.

Plinth's impact reporting automatically aggregates outcome data from grantee reports into portfolio-level dashboards, giving you real-time insight into what your funding is achieving without requiring additional work from grantees.

What Technology Do You Actually Need?

Not every funder needs enterprise grant management software. But every funder — regardless of size — needs to move beyond email and spreadsheets for anything more than a handful of grants per year.

The right technology for your programme depends on three factors:

Volume. If you award fewer than 20 grants per year, a well-designed online form and a structured spreadsheet may suffice. Above that, the administrative overhead of manual processes grows rapidly.

Complexity. Multi-stage programmes with interim reporting, milestone payments, and co-funding require workflow management that spreadsheets cannot reliably provide.

Accountability. If you are spending public money or are accountable to trustees who expect structured governance, you need an audit trail that email does not provide.

What to look for in a platform

The grant-making technology market has grown significantly in recent years, but not all platforms are built equally. Key features to evaluate:

• End-to-end coverage: Does it handle applications, assessment, award, monitoring, and reporting — or just one stage?
• Configurability without code: Can your team adjust forms, workflows, and templates without developer involvement?
• Grantee experience: Is the applicant-facing side as well-designed as the admin side?
• Data and reporting: Can you aggregate outcomes across your portfolio without exporting to Excel?
• Proportionality: Can you set different monitoring requirements for different grant sizes?

Plinth is designed as an end-to-end platform that covers the full grants lifecycle — from application through assessment to monitoring and impact reporting — with AI assistance that reduces administrative burden on both funders and grantees.

How Do You Reduce Burden on Applicants Without Losing Rigour?

The tension between thoroughness and accessibility is the central challenge of grant design. Reduce requirements too far and you risk poor decisions. Maintain heavyweight processes and you exclude the organisations most in need of funding.

The evidence suggests that most funders are significantly over-collecting. Sector research consistently finds that grant applications take a significant amount of time to complete — often the equivalent of one or more full-time weeks for a charity worker. For organisations with one or two staff members, that is a significant proportion of their capacity.

Practical steps to reduce burden without losing information quality:

1. Publish clear eligibility criteria so ineligible organisations self-select out before investing time
2. Offer an expression of interest stage for competitive programmes — a short form (30 minutes) before inviting full applications
3. Pre-populate fields from registered charity data (Charity Commission number lookup)
4. Use "tell us once" approaches where returning applicants do not re-enter unchanging information
5. Provide worked examples for every narrative question
6. Set realistic word limits — 300 words per question, not 2,000
7. Accept budgets in your template rather than asking applicants to create bespoke financial documents

These approaches do not reduce rigour — they focus it. You are still collecting the information you need; you are simply not collecting the information you do not need.

How Should You Handle the Transition From Legacy Processes?

Moving from email-and-spreadsheet grants management to a dedicated platform does not need to be disruptive. The most successful transitions follow a phased approach.

Phase 1: Map your current process (2–4 weeks)

Document every step in your current grants cycle. Identify which steps add genuine value and which exist through habit. Most funders find that 20–30% of their process steps can be eliminated without any loss of quality or governance.

Phase 2: Start with one programme (1–2 months)

Run a single grant round through the new system while maintaining existing processes for other programmes. This limits risk and gives your team time to learn.

Phase 3: Migrate and consolidate (3–6 months)

Once the first programme is running smoothly, migrate other programmes. Import historical data where needed — most platforms can ingest data from spreadsheets.

Phase 4: Iterate based on data (ongoing)

Use data from your first few rounds to refine forms, scoring criteria, and monitoring templates. A modern platform makes this easy because changes are configuration, not development.

What Are the Governance Implications?

Trustees have a legal duty to ensure charitable funds are distributed effectively and in line with the charity's objects. The Charity Commission's guidance on decision-making (CC27) requires that trustees can demonstrate how decisions were made, what information was considered, and how conflicts of interest were managed.

A structured grants platform directly supports these requirements:

• Decision audit trail: Every score, comment, and decision is recorded and timestamped
• Conflict management: Conflicts are declared and logged; affected assessors are excluded from relevant decisions
• Consistent criteria: All applications are assessed against the same published framework
• Portfolio oversight: Trustees can see aggregate data on funding distribution, outcomes, and risk

For funders distributing public money, the requirements are even more stringent. The National Audit Office's principles for grant management explicitly require structured record-keeping, consistent assessment, and outcome monitoring — all difficult to evidence when records are spread across inboxes and spreadsheets.

How Do You Measure Whether Your Programme Is Working?

Programme evaluation is the step most funders acknowledge is important but few do well. The challenge is that evaluation requires structured data — and if your monitoring process collects unstructured narratives, you have nothing to evaluate against.

Effective programme evaluation answers three questions:

1. Reach: Are you funding the organisations and communities you intended to?
2. Outcomes: Are grantees achieving the changes you hoped to see?
3. Learning: What should you do differently next time?

For reach, you need demographic and geographic data on your grantees and their beneficiaries. For outcomes, you need structured reporting against agreed indicators. For learning, you need the ability to compare across your portfolio and over time.

Research by New Philanthropy Capital has found that funders using structured digital monitoring data are significantly more likely to make evidence-based changes to their programmes than those relying on narrative reports alone.

Plinth's impact reporting tools make programme evaluation practical by automatically aggregating grantee outcome data, generating portfolio-level summaries, and highlighting trends and outliers — turning raw monitoring data into actionable intelligence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it worth investing in a grants platform if we only award 30–40 grants per year?

Yes. The break-even point is lower than most funders assume. At 30 grants per year, the administrative time saved on application management, chasing monitoring reports, and compiling portfolio data typically exceeds the cost of a platform within the first year. More importantly, the improvement in consistency and governance is valuable regardless of volume.

How do we convince trustees to invest in technology?

Focus on governance and outcomes, not efficiency. Trustees care about whether charitable funds are being distributed effectively and whether the charity can demonstrate this. A structured platform provides the audit trail and portfolio data that trustees need for oversight — and that the Charity Commission increasingly expects.

Will applicants find it harder to apply through an online system?

No — if the system is well-designed. The vast majority of UK charities now have reliable internet access, and most prefer online applications to email-based processes. The key is to ensure forms are mobile-friendly, offer auto-save, and include clear guidance. For applicants with accessibility needs, provide alternative submission routes.

What about data protection and GDPR?

Any grants platform handling personal data must comply with UK GDPR. Key requirements: a clear privacy notice for applicants, data processing agreements with the platform provider, appropriate security measures (encryption, access controls), and defined retention periods. Reputable platforms are designed with these requirements built in.

How do we handle the transition period when some programmes are on the new system and some are not?

This is normal and manageable. Run new grant rounds through the platform while existing grants continue to be managed through your current process until they close. Most funders operate in parallel for 6–12 months. The key is not to migrate mid-grant — wait for natural programme boundaries.

Can a platform handle bespoke programmes with unusual requirements?

Modern platforms are highly configurable. Different programmes can have different application forms, scoring criteria, monitoring templates, and reporting schedules. The question to ask any vendor is whether configuration is done by your team (good) or requires their developers (risky and expensive).

How do we maintain the relational aspect of grant-making when using a digital platform?

Technology handles the administrative work so programme officers have more time for relationships, not less. Staff spend less time on data entry, chasing, and filing, and more time on conversations, site visits, and strategic support. A platform is infrastructure, not a replacement for human judgement.

What is the cost of not modernising?

The real cost is borne by grantees, not by funders. Every hour a charity spends on a disproportionate application or reporting requirement is an hour not spent on frontline delivery. With 15.8 million hours spent on funder reporting across the sector each year, the collective cost of not modernising is enormous — and it falls hardest on the smallest organisations with the least capacity to absorb it.

Recommended Next Pages

• Grant Management Best Practices for Nonprofits and Foundations — Operational checklists for every stage of the grants lifecycle
• What Is AI for Charities? — How AI is being used across the charity sector, including in grant-making
• Essential Features to Look for in Grant Software — A detailed feature comparison for funders evaluating platforms
• How to Prove Charity Impact to Funders — The grantee perspective on demonstrating outcomes
• Why Charities Struggle to Collect Impact Data — Understanding the burden your reporting places on grantees

Last updated: February 2026