Why Small Foundations Still Run Grants by Email — and What It Costs Everyone

Ask a small foundation how it runs its grant round and you will often get an apologetic tour: applications arrive by email, the tracking lives in a spreadsheet, and the award letters go out by post. It looks like a technology problem. It is mostly a pricing problem — and the bill for it lands on the nonprofits who can least afford to pay.

The software was priced for somebody else

Real grant management software exists, and some of it is good. The trouble is what it costs before a single grant is made. Foundant — one of the few vendors that publishes its prices — lists its Grant Lifecycle Manager at $6,500 to $13,900 a year, with implementation starting at $2,500. Foundant’s own comparison puts older mid-size systems at $15,000 to $50,000 a year, and large-foundation systems higher still.

Set that against the budget of a family foundation or a community fund that awards, say, $80,000 a year in grants. Spending a tenth of the grant budget on the software that administers the grants is a hard argument to win in a board meeting. So the round stays in the inbox — not because anyone loves the inbox, but because the inbox is already paid for.

The cost moves to the applicant

Running a grant round by email is cheap for the funder in exactly one way: the invoice goes somewhere else. Each applicant pays it in time. Because every funder runs its own process, every application starts from a blank page — a separate account, a separate password, a separate set of forms asking for the same organization in a slightly different order.

An analysis by GrantAdvisor and the Technology Association of Grantmakers — teams that read grant applications by the thousand — found that grant forms share 39 percent of their questions. The questions are the same; only the formatting changes. Reporting on the same work put the most common complaint from grantseekers as something simpler still: in many portals you cannot see the full application before you start it, so the work cannot even be planned.

The hours add up. Research behind Brevio, a British platform that tried to fix this with one standard application form, put the cost of grant applications to UK charities at £1.1 billion a year in staff time, with 66 percent of applications unsuccessful and a typical application taking some 19 hours. Brevio itself closed in 2024 — a reminder that the waste is real, but so is the difficulty of fixing it.

The burden is not shared evenly. A large nonprofit employs a grantwriter whose whole job is reformatting the same answers. A small one — a youth sports league, a food pantry, a two-person arts group — pays with the executive director’s evenings. The organizations with the least slack absorb the most friction, application after application, funder after funder.

Nor does it end with the application. The award letter, the reporting schedule, the check-in reminders — all of it travels by the same inbox and the same spreadsheet, one thread per funder, until nobody is sure which version of the budget was the final one.

Email hides the funder, too

The cost runs in the other direction as well. A foundation that takes applications by email is nearly invisible. Grant search tools build their listings from tax filings and published guidelines; a funder with neither a portal nor a guidelines page barely appears, so the applicants who would fit it best never find it. The tools that do the finding charge the seeker instead — Instrumentl, the best-known of them, runs $299 to $999 a month billed annually, by published comparisons. Between the funder’s software quote and the seeker’s subscription, the same friction is sold twice.

And because matching is inferred from old tax data rather than decided from a funder’s actual rules, nobody can honestly tell an applicant “you qualify” before they apply. The applicant guesses, writes, waits — and sometimes learns months later that a single published rule excluded them from the first day.

None of this is because the sector lacks money for software. Grand View Research puts the grant management software market at $2.9 billion in 2025, growing to $6.2 billion by 2033. The spending is real — it is simply concentrated where the budgets are: large foundations, universities, and governments buying systems built for their complexity. The long tail of small funders, whose grants are often the first ones a small nonprofit ever wins, is left to the spreadsheet.

What has to change

The fix is not mysterious; it is structural. A grant listing and its application should be the same object, so nothing is re-typed between finding a grant and applying to it. The facts every funder asks for — legal name, tax status, place, purpose, documents — should be verified once, against named sources like the IRS tax-exempt database and Candid, and then carried from application to application instead of being re-proved each time. Eligibility should be answered from the funder’s own published rules before anyone writes a word: you qualify, you don’t and here is the reason, or one thing is missing.

That is the product we are building. GrantTitan is a two-sided platform where funders publish grants with their rules in full, nonprofits keep one profile verified against the IRS and Candid, and eligibility is determined from that profile before an application starts. Funders browse posted needs — money, materials, volunteers — instead of waiting for the inbox to fill. Pricing is set for the funders email leaves behind: $349 for a single grant round, or $150 a month billed annually, and seekers pay $0 — to verify, to post a need, or to apply. GrantTitan is new, and in pilot; we would rather say that plainly than dress it up. But the arithmetic that keeps small foundations in the inbox is not a law of nature. It is a price tag, and price tags can change.