Instrumentl is committed to keep your grant prospecting & tracking organized. End-to-end, our platform optimizes your grant management success through projects.

Each of our plans comes with a certain number of projects. When you choose a plan, you'll certainly want to know what a project is to gauge how your organization will benefit, and how many total projects makes sense for your particular grant management needs.

Instrumentl successfully works off the concept of a project, which is a unique "workspace" with two components: a saved grant search for prospecting (your resulting matches) and a grant tracker.

An Instrumentl project is akin to a dedicated “saved search": Each project holds your "saved search results" - your matches and the saved grants you'd like to track.

Projects typically map to ongoing program areas at an organization. For example:

You'll access your project workspaces on the lefthand project navigation bar of your Instrumentl account:

Based on the various criteria you specify for a given project, our platform will continuously smart match you to good fit grant opportunities customized for your fundraising goals. When you alter your "search", you'll find that the "search results" of grant matches will update accordingly.

With a separate grant tracker for each project, you can compartmentalize and manage your work efficiently while still getting the big picture across your overall fundraising efforts.

This way, you'll streamline your grant prospecting and can organize your saved grants across project trackers for each dedicated funding goal.

Use your project workspaces to save your favorite grants and track them over time, receive deadline reminders, view your history with a grant or funder, set up tasks and task reminders, ​​​and see your progress from a bird’s eye view.

There are two types of projects on Instrumentl - a Matches & Tracking project, and a Tracking-Only project. You can choose which type of project you'd prefer whenever you create or edit a project:

1) A Matches & Tracking project will provide you with both a tracker and funding opportunity matches. You'd select this type of project if you are seeking out new funding opportunities.

2) A Tracking-Only project will just provide you with a grant tracker. You'd select this type of project if you are just looking to track grants and not prospecting.

Note: You will still have a main "All Projects Tracker", which will allow you to view all grant work together.

Depending on your organization or clients' needs, you might customize your projects in a traditional way, or you may experiment with some creative avenues to align with your unique goals.

You can compare the number of projects available across across plans here.

Projects tend to work best when mapped to specific funding goals, as this helps refine your resulting funding matches down to the best fit.

Users typically find the most success when being as specific in their "search" as possible. Depending on your project's setup, your fundraising search could essentially narrow down to:

If you actually tried typing all that into a search engine, you'd probably come up short! But with Instrumentl's project "search" criteria, you can effectively translate those specifics into your prospecting efforts and find those very grants created with your organization's needs in mind.

However, if you don’t have a specific project in mind or would like to conduct a search across a blanket topic area, you can also put in information that is as broad as you'd like. Note that this will result in a large amount of matches to scope out as you wish, but they won't necessarily be the optimal fit.

Some users may intentionally use a broad set of criteria to pour through thousands of matches (akin to a saved search of "grants that help children"). They might hide hundreds of bad fit matches on the first pass to revisit them later on, as this might be their preferred workflow for certain clients or circumstances.

For nonprofit organizations with distinct program areas, we highly recommend mapping projects on Instrumentl to the different programs areas at your organization. On the other hand, if you have a main program area at your organization, or your program areas are quite similar, then having fewer projects on Instrumentl might be sufficient.

For academic researchers, a “project” on Instrumentl could correspond to an actual research project you may be working on. Faculty may have projects dedicated toward different departments, or across campuses.

Consultants & freelance grant writers typically set up separate projects for each client they are working for. Neatly manage clients in separate project spaces, tying one or more projects to a given client. Get client-specific matches, tracking, and reporting.

Sometimes for larger clients, you may find yourself pursuing multiple funding initiatives at the same time. In that case, it’s advised to create different projects for each key funding initiative.

Now that you understand how Instrumentl projects function at a high level, start creating your own with our guide to perfecting your project setup.

You can continue to remove, edit, or add projects (based on your plan's project limit) to meet changing needs. Small adjustments to your project's setup and Fields of Work can match you to more good fit grants than ever before!

Reach out to our friendly support team if you have any questions about projects! Message us via the chat bubble when you're logged in, or email us at hello@instrumentl.com.