Grant Pipeline Tracker Worksheet

A grant pipeline is a short list of fields that every opportunity shares, kept in one place and reviewed on a schedule. This worksheet gives you that structure without software: one row per opportunity, one stage per row, one named owner, and a next action with a date attached. The example rows below show what a small nonprofit's pipeline looks like across every stage, from a program still being researched to a grant that has closed. The funder descriptions are generic placeholders; replace them with your own funders and figures.

Use it in a spreadsheet or on paper, but keep only one copy. Owners update their rows before the weekly review, not during it, and the review asks four questions: what is due in the next thirty days, what has stalled with no next action date, what was won or declined since last week, and what needs a decision from leadership. When the sheet grows past a couple of dozen active rows, or more than one person is editing it at once, that is the signal to move these same columns into a shared calendar or a dedicated tracker.