Behind every inspiring mission statement and visionary grantmaking initiative are the dedicated teams bringing them to life, often expending invaluable time and energy on navigating fragmented systems, outdated processes, and operational complexities.

The two client perspectives we encounter most at Grantbook are exemplified in the stories of Skylar and Morgan:

Skylar

"I spend a lot of time gathering information that no one reviews and I’ve realized that there is no official version of the process. It depends on who you ask." Skylar, like many Grants Managers, works within a "frankensystem," a patchwork of spreadsheets, manual emails, different versions of the process, unspoken rules, and siloed data.

• Every new staff member must learn through word-of-mouth, not documentation
• Process steps multiply unnecessarily, creating more points of friction for grantees and internal teams 
• Efforts to suggest improvements often stall because no one has a fully accurate picture of how the system actually operates

Morgan

"I’m drowning in complexity, craving time for more strategic thinking but I spend my days fighting operational fires." Morgan is a Chief Operations Officer at a growing foundation. But growth—more grants, larger portfolios, bigger endowments—without operational clarity, only means:

• Outdated processes buckling under the greater volume
• Leadership frustrations are mounting due to stalled initiatives or escalating compliance risks
• The daily grind of administrative overload perpetually eclipses any hope of strategic planning

Enter Process Redesign

Given the collective administrative debt of all the “Skylars” and “Morgans” in your foundation, streamlining your grantmaking processes isn’t just about efficiencies; it’s a strategic investment in greater impact, trust, and the sustainability of your organization.

The truth is, while many foundations intuitively believe investing in new technology, like a new grants management system, will fix operational challenges, technology alone is rarely enough. Without redesigning the underlying processes — the people, practices, and operational habits that shape daily work — even the best new system will simply inherit the old problems.

Process redesign is, therefore, not mere operational housekeeping. It's a strategic investment in freeing staff and grantees from administrative overload, unlocking leadership capacity to focus on mission-critical priorities, and building deeper, trust-based relationships with grantees.

In fact, we’ve seen investments in process redesign yield 20%+ or more time and capacity for grantees and staff, creating space for greater impact at every level.

Putting Values Into Action via Process Redesign 

Not only is an investment in process redesign highly strategic, it is also a powerful way for funders to put values into action.This is especially true if you are pursuing any version of trust-based philanthropy, a reimagining of the role funders can have in building a more just and equitable society.

One of the grantmaking practices of the trust-based philanthropy movement is to simplify and streamline paperwork. As the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project explains, “Nonprofits spend an inordinate amount of time on reports and applications. A more relational approach saves time and helps funders gain a deeper understanding of the work.”

This practice invites grantmakers to question every section of their application process to determine whether all pieces of information are really worth collecting. Does this information play a critical role in funding decisions? 

Streamlining Does Not Mean Losing Rigor

A common fear among funders is that streamlining might sacrifice important due diligence or transparency. Streamlining isn’t about removing oversight, it’s about making oversight smarter and more human-centered.

For example:

• Instead of having four individuals approve a grant, create clear guidelines and delegate authority to have only one approver. 
• Instead of requiring a 10-page final report that few or no stakeholders review, a foundation could replace it with a 10-minute phone check-in to gather meaningful reflections and outcomes directly.
• Instead of asking grantees for the same organizational documents at multiple stages, a foundation could verify eligibility once through a trusted data source like GuideStar. Done thoughtfully, streamlining enhances diligence because it focuses staff and grantees' time on the information that truly matters.

Designing With People, Not Just For Them

Successful process redesign isn’t just about streamlining steps, it’s about designing solutions people will adopt and champion. That’s where Human-Centered Design makes all the difference.

Human-Centered Design is an approach rooted in empathy and co-creation. Rather than imposing top-down solutions, it focuses on understanding the real experiences of the people doing the work, collaboratively identifying pain points and designing practical improvements that reflect actual needs and constraints.

At its heart, Human-Centered Design recognizes that people, not just processes or systems, are at the core of successful grantmaking operations. Many traditional process improvement efforts fall short because they:

• Ignore real workflows: They assume processes happen exactly as written in manuals, not as they unfold in the real world.
• Overlook staff emotions: They treat inefficiencies as purely technical problems, forgetting that people have habits, attachments, and concerns.
• Create resistant cultures: When staff feel sidelined or misunderstood, even the best-designed changes are quietly resisted or worked around.

In short, when people aren’t part of the solution, they often become unintentional barriers to change.

Grantbook’s Approach: Using Service Blueprinting to Centre the Changemaker Experience 

While Grantbook works with Skylars and Morgans around the world, we are, like you, dedicated to the end users of all our collective efforts—the changemakers or grantees we ultimately serve. 

While our main contacts are often Grants Managers and your mighty operations teams, we keep grantees at the centre of any process redesign effort. They often feel, “I spend over a week writing a grant application for funding I might not get, taking time away from working with the community members we serve." Administrative debt for grantees doesn’t disappear on its own. In fact, it often grows unless organizations pause to audit and review what has become the status quo. 

Service Blueprinting vs. Process Maps

At Grantbook, we use service blueprinting to center the grantee experience, not just to streamline steps for efficiency’s sake, but to strengthen impact. While both service blueprinting and process mapping are tools for understanding workflows, they serve very different purposes.

A service blueprint is a detailed visual diagram that maps out the entire process of delivering a service, from the front stage (the customer's perspective) to the backstage (the in-house activities that support it). Service blueprints help organizations understand how their service is experienced and delivered, capturing all touchpoints, processes, and roles involved. By inviting foundations to frame their grantmaking as the service rendered to grantees, we are able to center the changemaker experience and design processes that optimize for that experience and maximize the impact of you and your grantees.

Process maps are flowcharts that document the sequence of tasks in a process. They are incredibly useful for understanding what happens, but not necessarily for identifying how the “service” is experienced by key stakeholders. Service blueprinting helps us hold the purpose of any business processes in mind at all times. 

Equipped with clear process maps and illuminating service blueprints, Grantbook clients and their grantees often feel lighter, heard, and energized to create new service plans that unlock time, capacity, and impact for their teams and changemakers. 

Client Project: Challenges and Solutions

At one foundation, service blueprinting uncovered more than just process inefficiencies. It gave staff the space to finally express the weight of their daily work. 

During a current state mapping session, a staff member shared her experience of managing data across three separate spreadsheets. Each time information changed in one, she had to manually update the other two and hoped nothing slipped through the cracks. Before that blueprinting session, she had no real forum to share how broken the workflow had become. 

Through service blueprinting, we were able to surface this hidden burden and design a better way forward. This included:

• Streamlining the workflow
• Eliminating the need for all three spreadsheets
• Simplifying data entry through system automation

The organization reduced 15% of the overall process time, freeing up valuable hours and significantly lightening the load for the team. 

Think You Don’t Have Time for Process Redesign? You Might Want to Think Again

After implementing hundreds of grants management systems for grantmakers of various types and sizes, the reality we’ve seen time and again is this: organizations spend significant time and budget on new technology, only to recreate the same problems in new systems: 

• If your current process involves calling a grantee 10 times after they’ve already submitted their application because of missing or unclear requirements, a new system won’t magically eliminate those calls. 
• If you currently have five layers of internal approvals for a simple grant decision when only one is truly necessary, your new system will simply automate that same inefficient hierarchy.

A new GMS may guide you towards better processes and grantmaking best practices, but it can’t fix broken ones.

Something else we often hear is, “We don’t have time to redesign our process; we need to move fast.” We understand that time feels scarce, but imagine your team is adding just 3 hours of unnecessary work per grantee and you're granting roughly 200 grants per year. That’s 600 hours of wasted staff time annually (75 full working days!) on inefficiencies that could be designed out. And that’s just one year. Multiply that over time, and the cost of not doing process redesign becomes far greater than the cost of doing it right, once.

By investing in process redesign before or alongside system implementation, you avoid automating bad processes and reduce grantee and staff burden at the root.

How Working With Grantbook Can Recuperate More Time for Mission

So many grantmaking processes weren’t intentionally designed, they simply evolved over time. We help you break the “we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” cycle and design leaner, more intuitive workflows, help build clearer alignment between teams, and free up time for strategy and relationship-building.

Equipped with a crystal clear snapshot of your current state, you can identify and eliminate redundant, manual, or low-value steps and restore simplicity, clarity, and resilience to your operations before administrative burden becomes a full-blown crisis.

Service blueprinting isn’t risky. Staying stuck in outdated processes is. If your foundation is ready for greater organizational relevance and resilience, empowered and energized teams, and reconnection to mission, let's have a conversation about mitigating the risks of outdated processes so you and your grantees can maximize your impact. 

Contact us today to schedule a consultation.