Welcome to the first in our series of deep dives into the Grants Program Canvas! Today, we’re exploring the “Define” stage, the crucial first step in building a successful grants program. This stage sets the foundation for everything that follows, so let’s dive in and see what it entails.
The Define stage focuses on clearly establishing the foundational elements of your grants program. It involves forming your program’s mission, setting clear objectives, and determining the scope, grant selection approach, and budget constraints. You’ll learn how to align your grants program with your broader organizational vision, ensuring that your efforts have a meaningful and measurable impact.
The Define stage is designed to provide clarity and direction. It ensures that your program has a strong foundation and that all team members are aligned with the program’s mission and objectives. This stage is also for clarifying the difference between objectives and your mission, the roadmap for your program’s financial journey, and the direction and focus areas of your grants program.
There is sometimes confusion between a grant program's mission and its objective. While your mission (your “what”) speaks to the essence of the program, your objective (your “how”) will get specific about how your grants program funds will be spent. By aligning the grants program’s mission with your org’s vision, resources are directed towards activities that contribute to the organization's desired future.
Objectives are the specific, measurable outcomes you want to achieve. They should align with your mission and provide a roadmap for success. Objectives can include things like “Increase the number of active developers in our community” or “Fund 20 new projects by the end of the year.”
The first question to answer in setting an objective is: what do you want to fund? Clearly, you want to fund projects that grow your ecosystem, your network, your community, your impact. But let’s get more specific.
Do you want to fund:
Then ask yourself whether you want to award funding proactively or retroactively.
Define the Scope of Your Program
Scoping is all about defining the direction and focus area(s) of your grants program. You can think of scoping like a spectrum: on one end, you have broad, and on the other you have narrow.
Budget Constraints:
Budgets act as the roadmap for your program's financial journey, dictating the scope and reach of your objectives. Larger budgets allow for broader scopes and potentially looser eligibility criteria. A couple strategies to consider when trying to allocate budget to your objectives/outcomes:
For the Objective Setting Worksheet, download the Grants Program Design Playbook.
Measurement and objectives go hand-in-hand. Revisit your objectives and ask yourself: what are you trying to grow? Your ecosystem? Your community? Your development team? And then: what is the best way to measure this growth?
There are two key concepts that will help you to accomplish this: key results and leading indicators.
For a list of common measurements, dive into page 33 of the Grants Program Canvas.
Defining your audience is an important step of the grants program design process because it will help you set a foundation for your engagement plan. You can break your audience down into two different, and important, sub-groups:
*Funders: When using QF, there is one more audience to keep in mind when designing your grants program: funders.
In the simplest situation, this will mainly be a question of how much money your organization is willing to commit to the program, and how you’re going to commit it. You may need to raise the funds that you will be distributing through your grants program. If this is the case, then you need to plan your fundraising activities.
There have been a plethora of advancements in the blockchain space that have enabled novel ways of raising funds. For a list of mechanisms to consider, and to get your hands on a Funding Allocation Strategy Worksheet, download the Grants Program Design Playbook.
By the end of the Define stage, you should have:
With these elements in place, you’ll be well-prepared to move on to the next stage of the Grants Canvas: Design.
Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we’ll explore how to design a high-impact grants program!
If you haven’t gotten your hands on the Grants Program Canvas yet, get it now and use the downloadable templates, worksheets and step-by-step walk-thrus that it contains.
Dive into the next stage of creating a successful grants program
Download your free copy of the Grants Program Design playbook