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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Grant Funding in Crisis: Navigating the New Landscape
In 2025’s shifting nonprofit funding landscape, many organizations face steep federal grant cuts, prompting a pivot toward overlooked private foundations. In a timely discussion, Rachel Fidler Cannella of Instrumentl joins Megan Speer to share insights on navigating this challenge, highlighting examples like Second Harvest Food Bank. She debunks the myth of grants as “easy money,” noting most professionals spend 40+ hours per application with no guarantee of success. The conversation emphasizes how AI and cross-team collaboration are transforming the grant process, and Rachel offers practical strategies for strengthening grant efforts—urging leaders to focus on what’s working, set clear priorities, and adopt systems that foster visibility and sustainability.
Rachel Fidler Cannella is a skilled educator & nonprofit professional with over a decade in the Arts & Culture sector. She now leads educational programming as the Events & Community Manager at Instrumentl, the all-in-one grants platform for tracking, management, and prospecting.
Prior to Instrumentl, Rachel served as Senior Manager of School & Teacher Programs at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, leading all educational programming for 150,000+ annual school visitors at two county museum sites. She has also directed creative arts programming at Holocaust Museum LA and designed environmental education courses at the Portland Children’s Museum, in partnership with the Oregon Zoo.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
Drowning in spreadsheets and manual processes. Bonterra Apricot is the smarter, faster way for nonprofits to manage programs, track outcomes and actually show your impact. Find out how at BonterraTechcom slash Nonprofit Hub. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and along with me today from Instrumental is Rachel Fidler Cannella, who's the events and community manager. There at Instrumental, we are digging into a topic that I feel like is causing stress for so many in our nonprofit sector right now, looking at grants and all of the things that that entails. It's going to be a good conversation, hopefully with some really great takeaways for everyone. So, rachel, welcome in.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of your background in the nonprofit space that brought you here today.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I've been in the nonprofit world for a little over a decade.
Speaker 2:I came out of that right out of college, working mostly in museums, and informal education is really my passion.
Speaker 2:I started out working at children's museums both in San Diego and in Portland and then moved into developing educational content for our local Holocaust Museum here in Los Angeles. I had done my undergrad on Holocaust memorial spaces and essentially did a case study on staff who work in those spaces and their motivations for choosing that line of work how they compartmentalize traumatic material really interesting stuff and then eventually ended up working at that museum producing programming there. That was a really wonderful experience and after my time there I moved over towards the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. I oversaw the school and teacher programs team there where we served about 200,000 kiddos or so annually between NHM and the La Brea Tar Pits, which some folks might be familiar with in the center of LA. So I came from the educational experience, wrote grants as a part of my kind of educational programming piece at both of those museum locations and saw this gig instrumental and thought I'd try my hand at serving nonprofits in a different capacity in this way.
Speaker 1:I love it. So I think it's fair to say that anyone who works in nonprofit right now I mean not that nonprofit work is ever easy, right, frontlines, like you said, dealing with maybe some really traumatic information, some really hard situations it's never easy. We have certainly taken a hit over the last few months with both like the attitudes towards nonprofit as well as around grant funding especially. So let's talk. Let's start with, I guess, maybe the conversation. If somebody is maybe an organization that's super grant reliant, who's maybe feeling that stress? Where are we just in general, like the state of grants in 2025? Right, where are we? How nervous should people actually be? Is grant funding even something that should continue to focus on? Kind of talk to me about what you see from your seat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is a question that is on the brains of many folks right now and I'll speak from a couple of examples I can think of of nonprofits that I've been working with and just been hearing from across Instrumental, but also just my kind of general take on where things are going. I think it's a combination of factors. I think some folks maybe some of these larger organizations who have relied on federal funding for their more substantial grant programs are going to see, obviously, a huge hit, and have already. For example, we were just in Nashville last week for our company Offsite, which was a wonderful experience being all together. We're a remote team, so it was great to bring everyone together and visit some nonprofit customers while we were there, one of whom is Second Harvest. They're one of the largest food banks in middle Tennessee. They do incredible work.
Speaker 2:It was so cool seeing them in action and one of the things that they were lamenting on is that they had just lost federal funding.
Speaker 2:They had lost $3 million toward one of their Keystone projects and you could see the looks on their faces, just how demoralizing that process was for them and how you know this experience has been.
Speaker 2:So just seeing that, I think you know there are going to be some organizations that are going to get hit hard right now. They their approach from they were sharing is that they are revisiting some of their grants that maybe they have not applied for in the past, and now they're considering more private foundations. Private foundations are going to step up to the plate. That being said, I think some foundations are being a little bit hesitant, waiting to see what's going to happen. So this is a bit of a waiting game. Foundations are getting a sense of where is the administration going with some of these future cuts that are happening and how much do private foundations need to step up to fill the gap. But there is this belief in the next six months or so, that private foundation funding is going to be a big driver for folks, so they're going to reallocate some energy towards some of those grants.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I think one of the things that, at least from my perspective, for grants that I've had to write, or any of those pieces, it can be such a tedious process right, the application, but the tracking and the reporting and all of the pieces I'm curious about. You know there's tons of conversation around AI right now, so I'd love to dig into that a little bit. You know, chat GPT is good for a lot of things. Is it good for writing grant proposals? Probably not, but are there ways that you're seeing emerge right now that are easier to like make it where AI is making the grant process easier for folks?
Speaker 2:Yes, I would say unequivocally yes, there are many ways. I think people are trying to save themselves time and that's like what you were saying with the grants process it's a timely, tedious process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so time consuming. It is Especially for organizations, you know, because you have a ripple effect right Absolutely when all of a sudden they might be down some funding, so some staff get eliminated, and now, instead of having a full-time grant writer, we have somebody who's supposed to be doing grants on top of all of their other things 100%, which makes that even more challenging and we say at Instrumental Grant Seeking it's a team sport.
Speaker 2:I mean, you may be the individual at your organization who's responsible for grants, or you might be responsible for grants as one of your components of your job, but it's not just one person that's making the grant come to life. Right, you have to have the program staff who are going to implement the grant. You need your finance team or whoever's doing like budget, pulling together your QuickBooks reports, right? So I think, in the sense of where can tools and maybe AI specifically help folks save time so that they're not chasing people down the hall or, you know, have these long email threads of who's on first for each thing, right? I think where we see grant seekers really succeed is that they have systems in place. I think that's the bottom line, and sometimes those systems take time and effort and maybe money to implement. So maybe the ones that are able to return their investment on some sort of platform or some sort of system in place, they are able to not be kind of in this survival mode of like we're constantly just seeking the next thing right, they're actually a grant strategy With AI.
Speaker 2:I have seen not only the grant writing piece but, I think evaluation of funders is a way that AI can support you. If you think, for example, like grant seekers looking out there for grants, they have a list of I don't know 100 potential funders right, and not everyone is going to be their best match, like you might like swipe right or swipe left right On some of these, like you're kind of matchmaking this process and you're seeing if your mission alignment and your you know visions and your objectives that you have for your programs align with the funder. So some folks have been using things like chat GPT to upload in okay, here's my organization's profile, here's this funder. Can you assess which ones would be most aligned? And then you're not wasting time on applications where the funder alignment isn't even there from the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, that's really interesting. But also I'm just I have this mental image in my head right now of like the Tinder, of grants you get to swipe both sides, and I think that that would be hysterical, right, I can just envision it right now and I think that's yeah, everybody gets their like, the foundations and the people all get their profile and we just get to swipe on each other hilarious yeah.
Speaker 2:So the funder matchmaking piece. I think that's a useful a use case for ai I. I think the way we've been using it and instrumental is both with the writing application. So you know you might have written a million proposals like a lot of grand seekers, like they have their templates, but they've also like written these nuanced proposals and maybe they have these really great tidbits that they don't get to use for another application. We've seen that folks can take their like their words. They've written these already and use AI to craft new responses that are related to the funder that they're applying for.
Speaker 2:So again, just like heading down on some of the hours that it might take for someone to restart and refresh an application. Yeah, on the post-award side, one other thing I'll add is being able to review your award letter and ensure you're complying. This is like a huge topic. I think that doesn't get a lot of attention. But once you've won the grant, how do you make sure that you're going to align with all the needs that the Thunder has? And sometimes it can be really nuanced and specific.
Speaker 1:And I think the word you and I were talking a little bit before the show that you used was life cycle, and I think I thought it was so interesting because I think that's not, that's not necessarily the framework in which we tend to think about it, but realistically, once you get that award letter, that's not where it stops. From a grant writer perspective, that can feel like the finish line, but from an organizational perspective, that is the start of all of the next hoops and hurdles that have to continue to be maintained 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of our partners, rachel Werner. She always uses this great line of that you should be looking at every grant application with a post-award lens and that's really stuck with me. Oh, interesting. Yeah Right, you know a lot of folks are they're just looking at the application as like, okay, where's the quickest way we can kind of fund these programs or cover staff time, whatever it may be. But what they really should be thinking about and for some of these starter organizations that haven't won a ton of grants yet, you know you should be really thinking about can we actually follow the grant terms? Can we comply with what's being requested? You know you want to build on. You're getting these wins by winning the grant right. So making sure you can actually hold up your end of the bargain is really valuable and important.
Speaker 1:So I mean, obviously your lens is going to be instrumental and there's a lot of tools I know with to to track that. But I think it's interesting to think about, just outside of the tools perspective, the staffing perspective within that right, because I feel like, especially in this grants world and because of all of the tracking that has to happen, this is one of those areas where the silos within organizations have got to come down, because tracking those outcomes has to involve program staff, it has to involve leadership, it has to involve finance. And I think that's where a lot of folks get hung up is that we, like I would just look at my little lane instead of that big picture. Organizationally Right, but it just it can't be just one person's job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like to say that the grant seeker in an organization is like the quarterback, you know, they're the ones that are going to help set the course for how grant seeking happens at their organization right. Not just application process, the entire implementation of the grants lifecycle. There were so many examples where we would not, as program staff, be aware that maybe someone in a different department had applied for a grant and then we had requirements to in our programming, right, and we're like, wait, we didn't even apply for the grant or that we want it right, and now we're being asked to do these things. So I think your point is super valuable, just like making sure folks are aware and transparent and have clear expectations on their role in the grant seeking process is going to help with that whole like life cycle, from grant birth all the way to the conclusion of the grant.
Speaker 1:Ever feel like you're stuck managing programs in spreadsheets and scattered systems? Apricot by Bonterra is a smarter, faster way for nonprofits to track outcomes, simplify reporting and unlock more funding. With tools built for real nonprofit workflows and trusted by over 3,400 organizations, it helps your team grow your impact and better serve your community. You can meet us at bonterratechcom slash nonprofit hub today. Let's talk for a second, specifically to. Maybe we're going to. We're going to hone in on the executive director for a second. Yeah, sure're going to. We're going to hone in on the executive director for a second. Or maybe the development director, something someone in leadership. As someone who has been in the program side right but also understands that grant side, are there things that those leaders can do to help facilitate that process? How do we like, as leaders, what can we do to make our organizations better about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a couple of things come to mind, I think. First off, having clear priorities of when and why we pursue grants is really key, and that is sometimes directed by leadership. Sometimes it's, you know, driven by the development director or the grant seeker that maybe is kind of operating on their own, the in-house grant writer. I think having the go or no-go evaluation understanding within the organization is super valuable. Sometimes there's this perception that grants not are easy. But this like low hanging fruit, like why haven't we gone for this Mackenzie Scott grant, like it's seen in our news, like I think we should just go for it. And there is this yeah, I think incorrect perception that it's pretty quick to turn around. You can get a grant in and then it's done Right, but as we know, it's it's a long process.
Speaker 2:So I think having leadership have clear goals of like here's the type of funding we want to pursue and when it's aligned, like we say yes, we don't do X, y, z, right, maybe we don't have the capacity to turn around a grant in 24 hours, like that's generally just not going to be a thing we do.
Speaker 2:Or we only want to apply to funders who are funding, let's say, you know, more than 30 or 40% of their funders or fundees I'm sorry, are new grantees right?
Speaker 2:Like maybe we have like some qualifiers to make sure that we're not going after people who aren't even funding new grantees. So, like that's one thing, I think, the prioritization of when we go for grants. And then I think the second is, I think just my thought process here is just the visibility across teams, like if leadership can help implement systems and then adhere to the systems. That could be as simple as an Asana board or having a shared calendar where there's visibility across the organization at a leadership level all the way down to program staff of like here's where the grant life cycle is happening. If the board is involved in grant processes, making sure there's a standing meeting where whoever is grant seeking on behalf of the organization can regularly meet with the board or pitch them on. Here's an update, a snapshot of what we're doing with grant seeking. Those were the, I think, the key parts where leadership can support.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great. So talk to us a little bit about kind of again as we look at the total overall grant strategy, which can feel a little overwhelming on a good day, let alone at the moment. Talk to me a little bit about the diversification of like. If somebody has statistically or historically more donor or corporate giving is now even a good time to dip your toe in and start a grants program.
Speaker 2:Gosh, this is a really good question. I mean, this one is tough. I'm just thinking about all the different types of organizations we work with and I think it varies. It depends on your internal capacity. I mean, it's no small ask to start a giving drive right, Like it's like okay, focus all our energy on individual giving. That's a whole different playbook than grants. So, like it's hard for me to say which way an organization should go, but I I do see more organizations this year, in 2025, focusing on diversification of funding and be that across grants, the types of grants they're diversifying with. Maybe some folks already have a strong, like individual giving program, or they're looking more into donor advised funds, like maybe there's ways they can expand on what they're already working on and doing well. That's where I probably would put my faith in is let's like 2x or 3x the things that you think are doing well in your organization, rather than just kind of going down a whole different path and starting something new.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good point. So I think that's interesting. Earlier you had called grants low-hanging fruit and I've been like that's the perception. I know, and that is the perception, but it's so funny to me. I've been kind of noodling that since you said it. It's so funny to me that that is the perception, right, as if grants are going to be this be all and end all, easy fix to life, when it's literally one of the hardest ways to go about funding. It's just funny that the perception of that.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious is there something we can do to change that? Like, as you and I sit here as people who serve the non-profit space, right to help non-profits grow their impact, yeah, are there things that we can be doing to help change that perspective? Or like, what do we need, what messages need to get out there to help change that idea? Because I don't, I, I hear it, I agree, but I don't. I hear it, I agree, but I don't love, especially for some of our, like the folks who work in grant full time. I don't love how that kind of minimizes their impact or whatever. How do we change that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, gosh, that's such a great question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the more I think about it, the less I like it.
Speaker 2:I know, yeah, and I same here hearing you say it again. I'm thinking about all the folks I know who are working so hard, right? So it's a couple things I guess I'll share what's coming top of mind. The thing that again I'll come back to, which feels repetitive but is about expectations around grants. I think, like setting expectations on what is a good fit grant and what is a good fit funder, I think that piece sometimes is misunderstood by a board or you know, maybe in leadership who's not touching grants as regularly.
Speaker 2:This idea of, like there's money out there, why aren't we assessing it? And I think that's where some of this misperception lies. Right, Like, yes, of course there is funding out there and you should apply to grants that are good fits for you, but our time is valuable and if you are a small organization or you're a grant seeker who's maybe one person shop, you've got to decide when it makes the most sense to spend time on a grant. When we surveyed grant writers about how long one application takes, I'm trying to remember the data here and I'll send it to you afterwards just to make sure this is correct but if I remember correctly, almost 75% of folks we surveyed said it took upwards of 40 hours for a grant application.
Speaker 2:One grant application For one application. So think about that. That's like a full work week, yes, on one. So that's, I think, where some of this misperception lies is like, why aren't we going for this funding? It's because we have to be precious with our time and I think you know, in the nonprofit world, this is often something we come up against. We are passionate folks who are really inspired by the work our organization is doing and we want to give it 110%. But advocating for your time and saying here's where I think practically our resources should lie, here's where I think we yes, I agree, and I think it's interesting because man 40 hours is so many hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, you know, I think it varies Federal grants, for example, gosh, they take longer Absolutely, and I think part of it, at least in some of my experiences in that, in that space and in that world um is that you get folks who don't understand the limitations right because it does like, yeah, there's funding out there and we should be able to access it, but the funding isn't going to pay for maybe the things we think that we need funding for right yeah I sat in a board meeting one time where we were talking about the fact that the air conditioner needed to be replaced in the building.
Speaker 1:Right, it's a need, it has to happen. Your staff can't be like sweltering all summer. This has to get done. But these are. That's not as much as maybe I wish there were. There's not a lot of people that are really passionate about funding HVAC work. I wish that that was true. But I sat in the board meeting and they were like well, we just need to go get a grant for it.
Speaker 2:That's classic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for what? Unless there's, like, maybe, some sort of energy efficiency upgrade that you're going to do as part of this process that might then fall under this like an energy type grant, right? Um, but for the most part and I think maybe that's the misconception is not understanding what early part of it is. Not understanding what grants are actually for and how driven they are by outcomes yes, and being able to prove those outcomes, yes, because it would be lovely to think that there's a society where you just knock on a foundation's door and say, excuse me, my heater broke. Yeah, you'd be willing to just give me 10 grand to go fix that Right. That is not the process, right, and it really has to align with their outcomes. And I think that's the piece that a lot of folks don't understand the depth of.
Speaker 2:Right, well, and if you're an expert grant seeker and there's probably folks that are listening that you know have more experience kind of diving deep on how you evaluate if a funder is willing to give you $10,000 for HVAC, right, some of that, yeah, I mean there are ways you can look back at Form 990s, like I know in Instrumental we synthesize that information for you. But you can actually go on the IRS's website and look at a funder's 990 and look at past grantees and what the funding specifically funded. Because that again is going back to your point of like okay, are we looking for general operating? That is very specific. You know surprisingly specific, narrow amount of funders will do just general operating. So you can do that research and actually that's something that you know tools can help you do. I've mentioned instrumental. You can also ask AI to support you in that so that you can cut down on some of the research time there. But yeah, that is such a good point of like. These grants are often pretty darn specific.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think that's the general population consensus. That would not be understood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Wouldn't it be great if we could just get the money and spend it how we wanted? But often it's a little bit more specific. So specific yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we just have a couple minutes left. If somebody wanted to learn more about instrumental or connect with you, what would be the best way to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can go onto our website, instrumental, and that's with an S.
Speaker 2:It's I N S T R U M E N T L, that's instrumentalcom, and you'll be able to take a look at some of the systems that we have in place to support full life cycle grant seeking.
Speaker 2:I mean, coming from the nonprofit world, the first time I got into the Instrumental platform I was pretty blown away, I think. As of this morning I looked before I hopped on our call and there's about 24,000 funding opportunities that are listed in the Instrumentl database that you can have access to right away. So check it out. I highly encourage people to just explore. It's no strings attached so you can look and see if there's things even good for your organization in there before you commit to anything. And also we provide a bunch of free educational programming and that's where you'll see me and my colleague Nia a lot. If you go to our events page, you can join any of our workshops. We talk about a lot of different grant seeking topics, but we'd love to see some folks in the room that can learn a little bit more and get kind of that professional development edge on taking their grants seeking to the next level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. Yes, instrumental, but with no extra E, it's exactly right. Yeah, it's funny because, yeah, I do. It's funny Cause I feel like I'm on a, on a trend right now. I recorded an episode just a couple of days ago with Kim bottom from feather, who also yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know what. All of a sudden, we have a trend of tech platforms leaving that extra vowel at the end out. It's classic. Yeah, oh, funny, yeah. Vowel at the end out it's classic, yeah, so funny, yeah, fantastic, okay. So something I like to do to close the show would be if you were talking to maybe someone who is a grant professional or for whom grants has landed on their plate because of all of the things, what is one piece of maybe wisdom or encouragement or advice that you would give to them at this particular point in time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is a great question. I have thought about this since the start of our program because I do feel like grant seekers often are they're responsible for so much and yet they often don't have a ton of support in the organization. So my one big piece of advice is advocating for your time. Your time is extremely valuable. It's something that can easily fall by the wayside and can be really hard to do. As I mentioned earlier, we always kind of put a lot on ourselves to support, maybe the jobs of more than one person two, three people and just making sure that you value your time and advocate for yourself. If there's things that would help you get organized, if there's things that would help you save time, support other team members, advocate for that.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yes, it's so easy to just think, oh, we work for a nonprofit and I need to just give and give and give, but your time is valuable, so I really yeah, I appreciate that call out a lot. Awesome, Rachel. Thank you so much. This has been a really interesting conversation. I appreciate all the insight and wisdom. Thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 2:Oh, of course, Thanks again for having me. It was really great talking with you for having me.
Speaker 1:It was really great talking with you. My pleasure Again. So our guest today has been Rachel Fidler Cannella, who's the Events and Community Manager at Instrumental. You can find out more at their website, instrumentalcom. We'll link that in the show notes as well. But thanks for joining us. My name is Megan Spear and I'm your host and we'll see you next time you.