$10 Million in Grants. Nearly 250 Applications. Nine Weeks from a Standing Start.
A new science and health foundation needed to launch its first competitive grant program with one program manager, a small administrative team, and no grantmaking infrastructure in place. Nine weeks later, it had received 248 applications and funded 12 projects totaling over $10 million. We built the Request for Proposals (RFP) and the grants management system simultaneously — compressing a process that typically takes 6–12 months. This is what it looks like when grantmaking infrastructure is designed as an integrated system rather than a sequence of phases.
9 weeks
From scoping
to RFP launch
248
Applications
received
$10M+
Awarded across 12 Projects
The Situation
The foundation was moving from a small number of informal, asynchronous grants to a structured, competitive grant program and this meant building the operational infrastructure to run one from scratch.
That infrastructure needed several components: an application process, eligibility screening, review criteria, scoring rubrics, reviewer workflows, and a technology platform capable of receiving applications, managing reviews, and organizing information for decision-makers. The administrative staff were experienced in financial compliance, not grantmaking operations. There was no grants management system and no system administrator.
The conventional approach treats these components as sequential: design the RFP first, then configure the system to support it. That sequence typically takes 6 to 12 months. The foundation needed to move faster without cutting corners that would create problems later.
What We Did
We ran the RFP design and system configuration in parallel rather than in sequence.
In practice, this meant treating the application form, eligibility questions, review criteria, scoring rubrics, and reviewer workflows as one integrated design problem — not a series of handoffs between phases. As we developed the application questions, we configured the system to receive and organize them. As we built the review criteria, we established the corresponding scoring workflows. Each design decision informed the system configuration in real time, and each configuration constraint shaped the design.
This approach works only if the practitioners running it understand how professional grants management platforms behave under configuration — specifically, which design choices create downstream technical constraints and which ones create flexibility. Without that knowledge, parallel development generates rework. With it, the two tracks reinforce each other and neither produces decisions the other has to undo.
We also designed with the foundation's actual team capacity in mind. The program manager needed to be able to run reviews and access decision-ready information without relying on a dedicated system administrator. That requirement shaped every configuration choice, from how reviewer assignments were structured to how application data was organized for the decision stage.
The Result
Nine weeks from initial scoping to RFP launch — against a typical sequential timeline of 6 to 12 months.
248 applications received. 12 projects funded. $10M+ in total grants awarded.
The foundation launched its first competitive grant cycle with a fully operational system, a documented process it could repeat, and no temporary workarounds built into the infrastructure. What went live is what it operates with now.
Why It Worked
Platform expertise drove the timeline.
Knowing how grants management systems behave under configuration meant constraints were identified before they became problems — not after a phase had been completed and handed off.
The system was built for the team that would actually use it.
Configuration decisions accounted for the foundation's lean staffing model from the start. The result was a system the program manager could operate independently from day one, without interim support structures that would need to be dismantled later.
Nothing was built to be replaced.
There were no placeholder processes, no temporary workarounds, no first-version infrastructure standing in for something better. The foundation launched with durable infrastructure.
The takeaway
New foundations often assume that building grantmaking infrastructure takes the better part of a year. With a sequential approach, it does — but the 6-to-12-month timeline is a product of how the work is typically organized, not an inherent feature of the work itself.
When RFP design and system configuration are treated as separate phases, each phase proceeds without full visibility into the other. Decisions made in the design phase create constraints the configuration phase has to work around — and vice versa. The handoff between phases is where months get added and where the most expensive rework tends to originate.
Integrated design removes that cost. For a foundation launching its first formal grant program, the right infrastructure and implementation can vastly increase efficiency and impact.