Grant-funded conservation work runs on dozens of open relationships at once — corals, coastal wetlands, mangroves, marine debris, each with its own funder, deadline, and reporting requirement. Keeping that portfolio straight requires a system that can absorb a grant no matter how it enters the pipeline, and answer a leadership question the moment it’s asked.
This organization’s monday.com setup wasn’t quite there yet. This is how OrangeDot rebuilt it.
What We’ll Cover
- About the client and how their grants portfolio works
- Challenge 1: Grant data trapped across broken mirror columns and manual workarounds
- Challenge 2: No way to answer a leadership question in five seconds
- How OrangeDot rebuilt the grants pipeline and dashboard
- The impact: a pipeline the team can trust and report from
About the Client
This client is a marine and coastal conservation nonprofit running programs across coral reef protection, coastal wetlands, mangrove restoration, and marine debris removal. Each program is funded by its own mix of grants, and grants move through the organization in two very different ways: some start as a proposal the team submits and tracks through a decision, while others arrive already active, inherited from long-standing funder relationships that predate any particular system.
Both paths needed to live in the same pipeline, roll up to the same dashboard, and answer the same question from leadership without anyone having to remember which path a given grant took to get there.
Two Problems Compounding Each Other
The organization’s original grants workspace worked well enough for grants that followed the proposal-to-funded path. It broke down for anything that didn’t, and the workarounds staff improvised to compensate created a second layer of noise on top of the original gap.
The Program field on the Active Grants board was a mirror column pulling from the Grant Proposals board. That worked for grants that went through a proposal first — but any grant added directly to Active Grants, including the many active grants that predated the workspace, had no editable Program field at all. The only fix was to manually create a shadow proposal entry and walk it through the entire pipeline just to populate one column.
Staff had also created a second, duplicate “project” column as a workaround for the mirror column’s editability problem, leaving redundant data that needed cleanup. Meanwhile, grant deliverable data — survey counts, participant numbers, report dates — was being logged in item updates and checklists rather than structured columns, which meant none of it could be reported on without manually scrolling through every item.
Sub-item statuses added a third layer of inconsistency: two separate statuses, “Submitted” and “Yes,” were being used for different things (a report submitted versus a contract signed), which complicated the logic behind every automated reminder built on top of them. Funded and not-funded grants were also still showing up as overdue in staff’s My Work views, because their statuses had never been marked as “done.”
When a board’s structure can’t account for how grants actually enter the pipeline, the workarounds people improvise to compensate become a second source of noise on top of the original gap — and that noise is what ends up undermining the reporting the system was built to produce.
The organization’s grants lead described the gap plainly: “My executive director all the time is like, ‘list all the grants we have for corals.’ And I’m like, okay, like five seconds — because we have so many open grants that I don’t remember what each of these things are for off the top of my head, but my ED expects an answer in five seconds.”
Quarterly reporting to the Executive Director was entirely manual: pulling data out of monday.com by hand into a Google Doc, then exporting it as a PDF. There was no dashboard showing submitted, funded, and rejected grant totals at a glance, so understanding the health of the overall grants portfolio meant reconstructing it from scratch every time.
A grants program can be technically well organized and still fail leadership if answering a basic “how much do we have in X” question takes longer than an executive is willing to wait for an answer.
The Solution
OrangeDot rebuilt this organization’s grants workspace around a two-board architecture that could absorb a grant regardless of how it entered the pipeline, with automation carrying the data forward instead of staff re-entering it by hand.
Program field converted from a mirror to an editable dropdown
Grants added directly to Active Grants can now have a program assigned manually instead of inheriting a locked mirror value. As the grants lead put it: “I like that [the dropdown approach] because sometimes the funders change the programs on us anyway, so we would need to manually be able to change it.”
A 7-step automated workflow from submission to funded
When a proposal’s status changes to “Funded,” the system automatically creates the corresponding item on the Active Grants board and maps over the name, grant manager, grant amount, program, grant website, and project folder — eliminating manual re-entry entirely.
Instant notification the moment something is funded
The grants lead and finance lead are notified automatically as soon as a proposal’s status changes to “Funded,” instead of finding out secondhand.
A one-time cleanup for grants that predated the system
Existing active grants without proposal records were backfilled by temporarily pausing the automations, creating and connecting proposal entries retroactively, and then restoring the workflow — a process the grants lead was confident handling: “I think I know how to do that because I’ll only need to do this once.”
One status instead of two overlapping ones
Sub-item statuses were consolidated from “Submitted” and “Yes” into a single status, simplifying every downstream automation rule built on top of them.
Report reminders that only fire when a deadline actually exists
The reminder automation now only triggers on deliverables that have a date in the deadline column, so contract or funding sub-items without dates never generate a false alert.
Completed grants no longer clutter staff’s work views
Funded, Not Funded, and Submitted are now marked as “done” statuses, so finished grants stop appearing as overdue in My Work.
A dashboard that answers the five-second question
A stacked bar chart shows submitted, funded, and rejected grant amounts, filterable by submission date and benchmarked against quarterly goals — with required-field validation ensuring a grant can’t be marked “Funded” until the amount received is actually entered.
Automating the quarterly report itself
The next phase in progress is replacing the fully manual Google Doc-to-PDF quarterly report with a monday.com Doc template that pulls live from the grants board, so the numbers populate automatically while graphics stay in Canva for visual polish. The target is having it ready for the Q2 2026 report.
The Impact
The grants workspace went from a broken mirror-column setup with no coverage for retroactive data to a structured, two-board system with automated handoffs, validated data entry, and a dashboard built for exactly the question leadership actually asks.
Any Grant, Any Program, Answered on the Spot
The team can now filter the dashboard to answer “how many grants do we have for corals” in the time it takes to apply a filter, instead of relying on memory under pressure.
A Program Field That Can Actually Change
When a funder shifts which program a grant supports, the team can update it directly instead of working around a locked mirror column.
Reminders Staff Can Trust
Report reminders now only fire on deliverables that are genuinely due, and completed grants no longer show up as overdue — removing the noise that made the system easy to tune out.
A Dashboard Built for the Portfolio, Not Just One Grant
Submitted, funded, and rejected totals are now visible at a glance and benchmarked against quarterly goals, with the next milestone — a fully automated quarterly report — already in motion.
2 connected boards spanning proposal to funded to active · 7-step automated workflow from submission to funded · required-field validation before a grant can be marked funded · a stacked bar dashboard for submitted vs. funded vs. rejected
“We’d be dead without her. I’ve told the whole team — just book some time with her. You can word vomit to her, and she’ll turn it into something magic.”Operations Lead, Marine Conservation Nonprofit
FAQs
How do you handle grants that were already active before the tracking system existed?
We treat it as a one-time migration rather than trying to force retroactive data through the live automation. The item-creation and notification automations are paused temporarily, proposal records are created and connected for the existing active grants, statuses are walked through to “Funded” and then “Active,” and the automations are turned back on. It’s extra work up front, but it means every grant, old or new, lives in the same structure going forward.
How do you keep a category field like “Program” editable without breaking the automations built on top of it?
The fix is usually converting the field from a mirror column to a dropdown or label column that the system populates on creation but leaves editable afterward. That gives you the automation benefit of pre-filling the value without locking staff out when a funder changes how a grant should be categorized.
How do you stop completed items from cluttering staff’s overdue work views?
Every status a grant can land in needs to be explicitly marked as a “done” type status if it represents a finished state, whether that’s Funded, Not Funded, or Submitted. Once that’s configured, monday.com stops surfacing those items as outstanding work automatically.
Can the quarterly report to an Executive Director be fully automated?
Largely, yes. The data itself, totals, statuses, filtered breakdowns, can populate a monday.com Doc template automatically from the underlying boards. Most teams still keep visual design work like charts or branded layouts in a separate tool, so the automation handles the numbers while a human handles the polish.
Final Thoughts
A grants portfolio doesn’t stay organized just because it’s in a system — it stays organized when the system can absorb every way a grant actually arrives, and when the data underneath is structured enough to answer a real question on the spot. This organization’s original setup could do the first part some of the time. The rebuild was about making sure it could do both, every time.
If your nonprofit is tracking grants across proposals, legacy funder relationships, and manual quarterly reports, we can help you build something that holds up under all three. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →