The federal government sent $1.26 trillion to state and local governments in FY2022, primarily through grants. States distributed $662 billion to local governments, while nonprofits received $294 billion in government grants that year.
Grantmaking is essential to turning public policy into local action. Today, state agencies use grants to equip organizations to do everything from improving rural health and preventing homelessness to expanding broadband access and spurring economic development.
Most agencies already have a system for the transactional side of moving funds. There’s software for tracking the applications, awards, drawdowns, and procurement. The financial machinery of a grant is mature. But it wasn’t built to answer the question that matters most: Is the money working?
Beyond transactions and compliance, that’s a question about grantee needs and performance.
TODAY’S SYSTEMS SUPPORT THE GRANT
The answers to whether grants are working are scattered across spreadsheets, inaccessible shared drives, and a handful of annual reports.
But grantees are people, often working at community organizations, faith-based organizations, and other nonprofits, ranging from three employees to thousands. Today’s grant management systems don’t connect with those doing the work.
Does the executive director who inherits a grant midstream have what she needs? Can a frontline public servant get an answer in two days? When federal guidance shifts, is there any mechanism to broadcast the change to everyone who needs to know? Does the grantee have the organizational capacity to do this again, or is it being held together by one person who could leave?
We call the work of supporting grantees after an award “post-award delivery.” It exists to answer the question: Did it work?
GRANTEE SUPPORT IS AD HOC
A program officer’s actual job involves collecting the required documents, chasing outcome data on a cycle, and keeping some record of what was said to whom. The tools at their disposal weren’t built for the work. Contacts live in spreadsheets. Guidance goes out as an email attachment. And there’s no communication trail, just an inbox and whatever the last person remembers telling someone.
The cost isn’t evenly distributed. The best-resourced grantee asks the most questions, because someone there has “call the state” in their job description. The three-person nonprofit asks none because it doesn’t have the bandwidth to know what it doesn’t know, and it suspects admitting confusion won’t help next year’s application.
Tighter oversight doesn’t help here. Recipients need support. A grantee who can find an answer without waiting, who knows the agency is trying to make the job easier, is a grantee who trusts the process enough to ask for help before something breaks.
A COMPLEX CHAIN OF GRANTORS AND GRANTEES
State agencies are simultaneously grantees and grantors, often from the same desk in the same week. They receive federal funds with requirements attached, then distribute them to their partners with a layer of state requirements added.
Every fracture repeats at every tier. The state waiting on federal clarification has subrecipients waiting on it. Questions travel up the chain slowly and answers come back slower, and the organization at the bottom absorbs the accumulated latency of the entire structure.
BETTER METRICS TO UNDERSTAND GRANT EFFICACY
Today’s metrics measure the money’s movement. They’re process-oriented. We believe there are three metrics worth adding to understand grantee performance and improve program effectiveness.
- Agency throughput. How much time passes between appropriation and dollars doing work in the field, measured at the agency level across years rather than grant by grant?
- Capacity. Can this recipient run the program next cycle with less support than it needed this cycle?
- Cohort variance. The average grantee doesn’t exist. A cohort where 15 organizations are thriving and 20 are underwater reports the same average as one where everyone is merely muddling through. Aggregate numbers can’t tell you about the specific challenges.
With the right infrastructure, struggling grantee organizations can be clustered by size, region, or prior grant experience. Patterns emerge. Operations improve.
THE QUESTIONS ARE THE DATA
Recipients generate a continuous stream of intelligence that grantors currently discard.
Question volume and sophistication reveal a lot. If everyone is still asking foundational questions six months in, the program design has a problem. A cluster of questions from one region is an early warning. A recurring question is a documentation gap.
But today this data is functionally inaccessible. It’s scattered across inboxes, call notes, and untranscribed office hours. Structure it, and two things become possible:
- Routine questions get answered instantly against cited, approved guidance.
- Clustering surfaces emerging implementation problems while there’s still time to act.
The same infrastructure that lets grantors capture data also gives grantees a well-run program: a living repository of guidance, peers they can find, and one place to ask questions and see what others have already asked. Recipients who can see each other reduce the load on the agency.
It’s a shift from one-to-one to many-to-many. One answer, given once, available to every current and future recipient. Knowledge survives turnover, lasting beyond the period of performance.
BETTER GOVERNMENT FOR ALL
State agencies don’t want to be compliance enforcers. They want grantees to succeed and already invest enormous effort in helping them do so.
What’s missing is infrastructure that lets their guidance, expertise, and support reach every recipient when it matters. When agencies can identify challenges early, share answers once, and build capacity across a cohort, grantees perform better. Grants, in turn, deliver more for the communities they were designed to serve. Concretely, that means more veterans connected to housing and benefits, more communities connected to broadband, and more rural patients reached.
Getting post-award delivery right is the critical last mile between public funding and visible impact.
Madeleine Smith is cofounder and CEO of Civic Roundtable.
