What We Saw in 2025 & Questions to Ponder as You Refine Your 2026 Operational Strategy

Resilient Foundations Ground in the Longview

A key goal of Grantbook’s Change Readiness practice is to encourage organizations to embrace change as neutral and inevitable instead of cause for grief and handwringing. If ever there were a year one might rationalize some handwringing, 2025 was it. Yet, so many of our clients prioritized curiosity over control and agility over anxiety and won twofold — less angst along the way and a more efficient path to desired outcomes. Sam Caplan, VP Social Impact at Submittable, captured this posture of the resilient foundations in our ecosystems when he reflected on the sector conferences he’d been attending in 2025:  

“But once the mainstage discussions end, hundreds of attendees gather in smaller rooms where practitioners, consultants, and those focused on the day-to-day work lead sessions on topics that feel more grounded and immediate. … There’s little discussion of “moments for courage” or sweeping calls to action. Instead, they dig into the more practical mechanics of how to do our work better. ” 

These are our people—the steadfast doers who chip away at progress. In the face of the political upheaval and economic uncertainty of 2025, where did they point their operational energy and ambitions, and how might we integrate many of the same steadfast, values-based approaches into our own strategic plans as we enter 2026?

1. Values Prevail—Equity Shows Up In System Configuration & Grantmaking Process, Not Just Strategy

In 2025, DEI commitments challenged by Executive Orders were increasingly under the microscope. While grantmakers may have made pragmatic decisions to protect their sustainability, the values themselves prevailed with equity, trust, transparency, and high accountability continuing to shape grantmaking practices.

What we saw:

• Interrogating demographic data collection (with care)
• Questions about equitable workflows and applicant experience
• Thoughtful navigation of the tension between compliance, privacy, and transparency
  

Why it matters for your 2026 operational plan: Truly transformational grantmaking can only happen with grantmakers walking their talk and ensuring strong alignment between the values they espouse and HOW they partner with their grantees. This means keeping values front and centre regardless of any political or sociocultural debates dominating the news. In 2025, Grantbook followed through on its own equity commitments, increasing its B Corp score and successfully launching as Canada’s first Employee Ownership Trust.

Where do your systems, processes, and relationships actively reflect your values, and where are they quietly misaligned?

2. Grappling With Scarce Operational Capacity

Staff turnover, role compression, and stretched teams continued to challenge foundations in 2025, to the point where being resource-poor became a strategic risk.

What we saw:

• Operational risk created by critical system knowledge being concentrated with one or two staff
• Grant managers spread too thin, carrying ops, reporting, and vendor coordination
• Leadership underestimating the operational lift required to implement theory of change, resulting in stretched teams, burnout, and turnover
• Growing recognition that undocumented or outdated processes create unnecessary administrative burden and operational risk

Why it matters for your 2026 operational plan: Foundations are getting creative about how they engage their teams in a way that’s realistic and sustainable without overwhelming already stretched staff. Leaders are increasingly focused on phasing work, right-sizing initiatives, and structuring projects in manageable stages, allowing teams to stay engaged while making steady, sustainable progress.

What would it take to design your work around the capacity you actually have, not the capacity you wish you had?

3. Moving From Go-Live To Getting Real Value

By 2025, many organizations were operating on newly selected or recently implemented technology. For those with the core platforms in place, attention turned to making those systems truly work — refining configuration, strengthening workflows, improving reporting, and driving adoption as strategies evolved and teams changed.

What we saw:

• Increased demand for post-implementation optimization and integrations
• More emphasis on configuration, reporting, and workflow design
• Growing preference for going beyond out-of-the-box functionality
• A rise in evaluations and audits of long-standing systems

Why it matters for your 2026 operational plan: Foundations are realizing ROI comes from governance, process clarity, and change management — not just software. Many are shifting toward ongoing, right-sized support models that provide continuous optimization, advisory, and hands-on delivery without the overhead of large, one-time projects.

Are your systems configured to support how you work today, or how you thought you would work years ago?

4. Staring Down Poor Data—Data Quality Takes Centre Stage

2025 marked a shift from broad proclamations about a need for better data to a realization that data quality can actively limit decision-making and a foundation’s ability to generate critical insights

What we saw:

• Data immaturity emerged as a major constraint
• Legacy data slowing down migrations and integrations
• Reporting expectations outpacing data readiness
• Increased demand for data audits and data cleansing before system changes
• AI interest grew, but implementation lagged

Why it matters for your 2026 operational plan: Clean, well-governed data is paramount and a prerequisite for forecasting and AI-enabled insights.

What decisions are you unable to make today because you don’t yet trust your data?

Grab Onto Alignment As Your Watchword For 2026

Grantbook has the privilege of looking into and across so many funder cultures. Those that have strong alignment of values and practices, strategy and operational plans, and of what they say and what they actually do, are the ones that win twice — low emotional burden and stress when executing (more human-centric fun!) AND greater, faster progress. So, I invite you to grab onto “alignment” as a watchword or 2026. Name and diagnose your areas of misalignment and build your operational priorities from there.

Closing Question for the Year: Where are you most misaligned, and what would change if you made that your top operational priority?

At Grantbook, we help foundations diagnose misalignment across strategy, operations, and systems, and turn it into clear, practical action plans that teams can actually execute. If alignment is your watchword for 2026, let’s start the conversation.