If fundraising is essential to your mission, your calendar should reflect that reality. For many nonprofit leaders, it doesn’t, and it’s understandable. You’re navigating staffing challenges, growing community needs, board dynamics, and those fun operational surprises that appear before your first cup of coffee. In that environment, grant work often gets pushed into the “important but not urgent” category until a deadline appears and everyone scrambles.
Your calendar is a value statement
I used to have a boss who said, “Show me your calendar and your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value most.” He wasn’t wrong (thanks, Larry!). Nonprofit leaders don’t intentionally deprioritize fundraising. It happens gradually: a zombie meeting that never disappears because no one remembers why it exists, a partnership or a community event that drains staff time and produces little impact.
Collectively, these commitments consume the time and mental bandwidth that grant work requires. Winning and keeping grants is not just about writing proposals. It takes relationship-building, internal coordination, and thoughtful funder stewardship. It takes leaders who have enough space to think strategically about where funding opportunities align with the mission and where they don’t. That work rarely feels as urgent as today’s operational issue, but it’s often far more important to your long-term sustainability.
Where to find the time? Remember how to subtract.
Organizations get stuck when they add without ever removing. Programs accumulate. Traditions continue past their usefulness. Opportunities get accepted because saying no feels uncomfortable. Over time, this creates organizational clutter. That’s not sustainability; it’s giving “junk drawer with a mission statement.” A useful question to ask yourself: Are we saying yes because this is strategic, or because saying no feels uncomfortable? That question tends to clarify things quickly.
Bring in help, but stay in the room
Leaders sometimes hope they can hand over years of organizational materials and trust someone else to find the money. If only it worked like that. Someone would have nominated me for a Nobel Prize by now.
Strong grant professionals can identify opportunities, advise on strategy, and write compelling proposals. What we cannot do is substitute for you, especially your organizational knowledge and your vision. Relationship-building with funders is not something you can outsource. It has to come from you. Neither can we think through strategy without you. The best grant outcomes come from a real partnership: we both bring subject-matter expertise, and one without the other is incomplete. When leaders don’t have the capacity to show up as partners, success becomes much harder, no matter how good the proposal is.
Focus is responsible leadership
Organizations that build sustainable funding are rarely the ones doing the most, programmatically. They’re the ones making disciplined choices about where their time goes. If fundraising is mission-critical, it cannot survive on leftover time, even with a grant professional on board. Your calendar should reflect that reality before your cash flow forces the conversation.