TLDR
Executive directors don't have time to learn another platform. This guide covers exactly what to set up in GrantPipe in your first 30 days - and what you can skip - so you have real visibility into grant status, donor pipeline, and restricted fund balances without becoming a power user.
This guide is for executive directors, not for your development director or operations manager. It’s written assuming you have 3-5 hours to invest in the first month, not 30. Your goal is to reach a state where the dashboard tells you what you need to know before your Monday morning board check-in - without opening a spreadsheet.
Here’s what to do each week.
Before You Start: One Question to Answer
What’s the biggest thing you need to see? This determines your import priority.
Most EDs at nonprofits in the $1M-$5M range need one of these three things most urgently:
- Grant status and compliance - you’re behind on a federal report and worried about more
- Donor pipeline - you’re in a capital campaign or major gift push and need visibility
- Restricted fund balances - you have restricted dollars and aren’t sure how much has been spent against which grant
If you know which one is the burning issue, do that week first.
Days 1-7: Get Your Core Data In
What to do:
Import your active grants and your top donors. That’s it. Don’t try to migrate everything in week one.
For grants: Pull a list of every grant currently open - meaning awarded but not yet closed out. For each one, you need:
- Funder name and primary contact
- Award amount
- Award start and end date
- Next report due date
- Outstanding deliverables (if you know them)
If your development director has this in a spreadsheet, ask them to clean it up and import it using the grant bulk import. If you’re the one doing it, GrantPipe’s import template walks through each field.
Target: every active grant in the system by end of day 7.
For donors: Import your top 50-100 donors. These are the people you’d call in a crisis. You don’t need your full database in week one - you need the relationships that matter for major decisions visible to you.
Pull from whatever CRM or spreadsheet you’re using: name, email, organization (if applicable), total giving history, last gift date.
What you can skip this week: Your full donor database, historical donations older than 3 years, inactive grants that closed out more than 12 months ago, custom fields beyond the basics.
By end of week 1, you should see: A grants dashboard showing every active grant, who it’s from, when it expires, and when the next report is due. A donor list of your most important relationships.
Days 8-14: Set Up Restricted Fund Tracking
If your grants come with restrictions - and federal and most foundation grants do - this is the week that creates real operational value.
What to do:
For each active grant, set up its restricted fund in GrantPipe with:
- The total award amount
- The budget categories (personnel, direct program, admin overhead - whatever the grant budget specifies)
- The grant period start and end dates
Then, for any grants with expenses already incurred against them, enter the current spend by budget category. Your CFO or bookkeeper has this - it’s in your accounting system coded by grant.
This doesn’t replace your fund accounting software. GrantPipe is tracking the grant management side of restricted funds - how much has been spent against each grant, whether you’re on pace with the budget, what’s at risk of lapsing. Your accounting software still holds the canonical financial records.
Why this matters: Before this exists, answering “how much is left on the XYZ Foundation grant?” requires calling your bookkeeper, waiting for them to pull a fund accounting report, and reconciling it against the grant budget manually. After this setup, you see the current balance in real time.
What to skip this week: Historical grants that are already closed. Unrestricted funds don’t need this setup. Anything related to temporarily restricted net assets in your audit - that’s your auditor’s domain, not GrantPipe’s.
By end of week 2, you should see: Restricted fund balances for every active grant, with a clear picture of what’s been spent, what remains, and when the grant period ends.
Days 15-21: Configure Reporting Cadences
You have active grants. They have deadlines. Set up the reminders now so you’re not discovering a report was due yesterday.
What to do:
For every active grant, enter:
- Report due dates (interim and final)
- Any deliverable deadlines (site visits, match documentation, subrecipient reports)
- Funder contact preferences (some program officers want a call before report submission)
GrantPipe will flag upcoming deadlines in your dashboard and send email reminders 30 days and 7 days before each due date by default. Adjust the lead times for high-stakes reports - federal reports with tight deadlines should flag earlier.
Configure your board dashboard: EDs use GrantPipe’s dashboard differently than development staff. Set your home view to show:
- Grants with reports due in the next 60 days
- Restricted fund balances below 20% remaining
- Donor meetings or follow-ups due this week (if you added your top donors)
This is a 20-minute configuration that determines what you see every morning.
Set up your team’s access: If you haven’t already, add your development director as an Editor and your CFO or bookkeeper as a Viewer. The Viewer role is appropriate for financial oversight - they can see everything but can’t make changes. Your program staff can be added as Viewers or Editors depending on their compliance documentation responsibilities.
What to skip this week: Deep donor segmentation, email marketing configuration, custom report building. Those are second-month activities.
By end of week 3, you should see: A compliance calendar that shows every upcoming deadline. You should be able to answer “what’s due in the next 30 days?” without asking anyone.
Days 22-30: Review, Tighten, and Delegate
What to do:
Do a single walkthrough of everything you’ve set up. Check:
- Is every active grant in the system with accurate information?
- Do the restricted fund balances match what your bookkeeper has?
- Are the report deadlines correct?
- Does your dashboard show what you actually need to see?
Fix anything that’s off. Then hand off day-to-day GrantPipe management to your development director or operations manager. Your role as ED is dashboard consumer, not data entry.
Brief your development director on what you’ve set up and what you want them to maintain:
- Keeping grant records current as status changes
- Adding new grants when awarded
- Logging compliance documentation as it’s completed
- Updating donor records after significant conversations
Schedule a recurring check-in with yourself: Put a 15-minute block on your calendar every Monday to review the GrantPipe dashboard before any meetings. The whole point of the setup work you’ve done is that this 15 minutes replaces 2 hours of scattered information-gathering.
What to do in month 2 (not month 1): Full donor database import, giving history analysis, major gift prospect list building, grant pipeline for prospective grants, reporting to your board via GrantPipe’s report exports.
What You Don’t Need to Become
GrantPipe is designed so that executive directors can use the dashboard view without understanding the full system. You don’t need to know how to build reports. You don’t need to understand the import format. You don’t need to configure integrations.
Your development director should own the platform day-to-day. Your job is to have clear visibility into the three numbers that matter: how many active grants you have, what compliance obligations are coming due, and whether restricted fund balances are on track.
If you’re not seeing those three things clearly on your dashboard after 30 days, something is set up wrong - and that’s fixable in a 30-minute session.
Resources for the Work
- Grant management feature walkthrough - what the system does in detail
- Donor management feature overview - for the donor import work in week 1
- Grant compliance checklist - use this to verify you’ve set up all the compliance tracking your federal grants require
The first 30 days take more effort than a typical Monday morning. After that, the platform runs in the background and surfaces what you need without you hunting for it.
Free resource
Get the Nonprofit Grant Compliance Checklist
A practical checklist for post-award grant compliance: restricted funds, reporting cadence, audit prep, and common failure points. Delivered by email.