Grant Readiness Services

Grant readiness services check whether an organization can apply for, win and manage a grant before it spends time on proposals. Our readiness assessment reviews your registrations, governance documents, financial systems and program design against what your target funders require, scores each area, and gives you a prioritized plan to close the gaps, which we can then help you work through.

The problem readiness work solves

Most organizations that lose grants assume they lost on the writing. Often they lost earlier than that.

Federal and large foundation applications are screened before they are scored. A lapsed SAM.gov registration, a missing determination letter, an accounting system that cannot separate restricted funds, or a program described in activities rather than outcomes, any of these can end an application without a reviewer ever forming an opinion about the narrative.

Worse, these failures are invisible from the inside. An organization that has never been asked for a conflict of interest policy does not know it needs one until the question appears in an application it has three days left to submit.

What the assessment covers

We work through five areas and score each.

Registrations and eligibility. Your Unique Entity ID, active SAM.gov registration and its expiry date (registration must be renewed every year), Grants.gov roles including a designated Authorized Organization Representative, IRS determination letter, state charitable registrations, and industry classification (NAICS) codes where relevant. This area produces the most time-critical findings, because registration problems take weeks to fix.

Governance. Bylaws, current board roster with terms, conflict of interest policy, whistleblower and document retention policies, board meeting minutes, and the delegation of authority establishing who can actually bind the organization. This last one matters more than it sounds: the assurances and certifications made at registration and submission are signed by someone certifying they have that authority.

Financial systems. Whether your accounting can track costs by budget category, segregate restricted from unrestricted funds, and support the documentation an audit requires. We check your most recent audit or review, your indirect cost position (a negotiated rate, the 15 percent de minimis rate, or neither) and whether you are approaching the single audit threshold, now $1,000,000 in federal expenditures a year.

Program design and evidence. Whether your program has measurable outcomes rather than described activities, whether you can evidence need with local data, and whether you collect the outcome data you would have to report. A program that cannot be evaluated cannot be funded by most serious funders.

Reusable assets. A need statement with sourced local data, a program logic model you can reuse, an evaluation plan, a capability statement for federal work, standard budget templates, and current boilerplate. Organizations without these rebuild them under deadline pressure every time, which is expensive and the main source of inconsistency between applications.

What you receive

A scored assessment across the five areas, with each finding rated by severity and by how long it takes to fix; those are different things, and sequencing depends on the second.

Alongside it, a prioritized action plan: what to do, in what order, who owns it, and how long it takes. Items that gate everything else, like a SAM.gov renewal, come first regardless of how minor they look.

The assessment itself usually takes two to three weeks from the start of the engagement, which begins after payment; most of that time is gathering documents. Closing the gaps takes longer, and registration items alone can take several weeks.

Where the assessment finds you ready, it says so plainly and identifies which funder types you are ready for. Readiness is not a single state; an organization can be entirely ready for foundation grants and not ready for federal ones.

Federal readiness and compliance

Federal funding raises the bar considerably, and organizations moving from foundation to federal work are the most common case we see.

The additional surface includes the Uniform Guidance cost principles at 2 CFR 200, an indirect cost position you can defend, procurement standards, subrecipient monitoring if you plan to make subawards, time and effort documentation supporting level of effort commitments, and the record retention obligations you certify to in the assurances.

We assess against this explicitly where federal funding is the target, because a readiness report written for foundation work will pass an organization that federal reviewers would decline.

Who this is for

• Organizations that keep applying and keep losing without clear feedback on why.
• Nonprofits moving from foundation to federal funding, where the requirements change substantially.
• Newly formed organizations wanting the groundwork right before spending on proposals.
• Small businesses entering SBIR or federal contracting, where the registration and documentation surface is unfamiliar.
• Boards that want an independent read on whether the organization can absorb a large award.

If you would like to run a first pass yourself, our free grant readiness checklist covers the most common items and will tell you fairly quickly whether a full assessment is worth commissioning.

After the assessment

We can carry out the plan with you: drafting missing policies, building the reusable proposal assets, and preparing the registration steps. Once you are ready, the natural next steps are grant research to identify the right funders and nonprofit grant writing or federal grant writing to pursue them.