Exercises — Chapter 33: Building a Sustainable Funding Strategy

Work these with your organization or career in mind. The aim is to stop thinking proposal-by-proposal and start building the funding system — pipeline, portfolio, relationships, track record — that produces reliable funding.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the chapter to concrete strategy decisions; Part C asks you to build real strategy tools (a pipeline, a calendar, a portfolio map); Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words. Why does a pipeline, not a proposal, produce reliable funding?

A2. Distinguish "a single grant is survival" from "a funding strategy is sustainability."

A3. What is a win rate, and how should it size your pipeline?

A4. ★ Why must a pipeline be both continuous and diversified? What's wrong with a full pipeline to one funder?

A5. Define: funding pipeline, diversification, grants calendar, cultivation, capacity investment, win rate, portfolio.

A6. What two compounding assets does a sustainable strategy deliberately build, and why do they compound?

A7. When should an organization invest in development capacity, and why is starving it a trap?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ Healthy pipeline? For each, decide whether the pipeline is healthy and how to fix it: - (a) Twelve proposals in various stages, all to the same federal program. - (b) One large proposal submitted; nothing else in the pipeline. - (c) Eight proposals across foundations, government, and earned-revenue plans, at every stage. - (d) A full pipeline, but the organization stopped adding proposals after winning a big grant.

B2. Size to the win rate. An organization needs three grants funded this year and has a one-in-four win rate. Roughly how many strong proposals should be in the pipeline, and why?

B3. ★ Break the boom-bust cycle. An organization just won a large two-year grant and feels secure. What should it do now to avoid a crisis when the grant ends?

B4. Balance the portfolio. An organization's grants all end in the same quarter. What's the risk, and how should it manage the portfolio differently?

B5. The capacity decision. A growing nonprofit's ED can no longer sustain the grant-writing alone. Make the case for investing in development capacity, addressing the starvation-cycle objection.

Part C — Analyze and Create

C1. ★ Draft your 12-month pipeline. Using the Section 33.4 checkpoint, draft one: a grants calendar (opportunities, deadlines, start dates), your pipeline mapped across stages (with gaps and concentration identified), diversification, and volume calibrated to your win rate. This goes in your "My Proposal" workspace.

C2. Build a pipeline tracker. Set up the Section 33.4 tracker for your real or planned proposals: stage, funder, amount, deadlines, status, relationship, decision date, reporting/renewal dates.

C3. ★ Map your portfolio. Map your current and pursued funding as a portfolio: sizes, durations, restrictions, end dates, sources. Identify over-concentration, cliffs (grants ending together), and gaps — and what to pursue to balance it.

C4. Plan small-to-large sequencing. Sketch how you'd sequence from smaller, winnable grants toward larger ones over the next few years, building the track record and relationships that make the larger ones attainable.

C5. Relationship and track-record plan. Design how you'll deliberately cultivate funder relationships and build/document a track record across your funding strategy — as compounding assets, not byproducts.

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 32 + 33) How does the toolkit (Chapter 32) make maintaining a continuous pipeline feasible? Connect the two Part VI syntheses.

M2. (Ch 28 + 33) How does the diversified-funding-stool become the diversified pipeline and portfolio of a funding strategy?

M3. ★ (Ch 27 + 33) How does the academic's perpetual-pipeline discipline generalize into this chapter's pipeline threshold concept?

M4. (Ch 26 + 33) How does "stewardship is the next application" become the compounding track record of a funding strategy?

M5. (Ch 3 + 33) How does the funder pipeline of prospecting (Chapter 3) scale into the strategic pipeline of this chapter?

M6. (Ch 22 + 33) How does pipeline-thinking change the emotional experience of rejection, connecting to the resubmission resilience of Chapter 22?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. Have you been living as a proposal-thinker (each grant a high-stakes gamble, each rejection a crisis) or a strategy-thinker (managing a continuous, diversified system from which funding steadily arrives)? The shift isn't just strategic but emotional — the strategy-thinker's steadier relationship to funding is what makes a career sustainable. Where, honestly, is your funding practice on that spectrum, and what's the first system-building move you'll make?