A lot of grant programs are designed by people who have applied to very few of them. And that is completely fine.

Some of the most thoughtful and effective grant programs I have seen were built by people who came in with little to no experience on the applicant side of the application. What they had was curiosity, humility, and a willingness to be guided until they felt ready to fly.

There is just one thing worth knowing going in.

Designing a grant program without that lived experience on the receiving end creates blind spots that are hard to see from where you sit, and the cost of those blind spots tends to be higher than most funders realize. It is not just your time on the line. It is the time, hope, and energy of every organization that follows your process.

You build something that makes sense from where you sit. The application fields feel logical. The timeline feels reasonable. The budget template feels straightforward. And then dozens or hundreds of organizations spend weeks trying to navigate something that requires more time and resources than needed. Thousands of collective hours can be wasted by well meaning grant programs.

When a process is designed in isolation, with only the input of board members, CPAs, lawyers, etc., it starts selecting for things you never intended. The organizations best at storytelling win, not the ones doing the best work. The ones with the most polished financials win, including organizations sitting on significant cash reserves who simply did not need the money. Meanwhile the organizations closest to the problem quietly stop applying because the process asks more of them than they have.

This is why I have had funders tell me they feel something is adrift with their giving. The funded work looks good on paper but they are not sure it is landing the way they hoped. That feeling is information. Most funders just do not have anyone around them honest enough to name it.

That changed for one foundation I had the privilege of working with.

I once worked with a newly minted executive director of a family foundation with around $50M in assets who felt terrified. The board selected her for her mind, but nobody had prepared her for what it meant to steward a corpus of that size. With no grant experience, she did not want people to know how much she was doubting herself, which is why I am not naming her.

Over the course of a year we met regularly, worked through how grant systems function, what makes them fair, what makes them extractive, and what the organizations on the receiving end experience. She went from fear to fully owning it. Their grant process today is one of the most streamlined and thoughtful I have seen across over a hundred grant processes I have been part of. Their grantees, as well as some of the nonprofits they do not fund, say the same thing.

What made the difference was having someone in her corner who had been on both sides, who could tell her the truth, and who could help her build something her foundation and communities were proud of.

Every cycle you run shapes what organizations in your community believe is possible. The sooner you move through the learning curve the better.

If you are sitting on significant resources and quietly wondering whether your grant process is doing what you think it is, for the sake of your impact, grantees, and community that question is worth exploring together.