By: Kathy Richardson, Smartygrants
I've spent a fair chunk of my career listening to what I've come to call "grants rage."
On one side, community groups: online forms that crash, questions asked multiple times in slightly different ways, reports that take days to write and are never read. On the other, grantmakers: applications that miss the point, don't align to policy goals, or look great on paper but don't deliver much in practice.
Both sides are frustrated. Both are right.
When we built SmartyGrants back in 2009, our first client was a local council about to commission a bespoke system at significant cost. They took a punt on us instead, and we built the system alongside them. More than 850 funders (including 200+ local councils) have since joined.
SmartyGrants is a grants management platform, but it was never meant to be just software. We built it to fix the friction on both sides of the system, and to embed better grantmaking practice into the everyday work of applying for, managing and reporting on grants. I've often described it as a benevolent Trojan horse – we don't just make processing grants more efficient. We're also improving how they're made.
Grantmakers have been very good at measuring activity – how many grants, how many applicants, how many workshops delivered – but less good at answering the obvious follow-up: what actually changed? That gap isn't for lack of effort. It's structural. Too often, policy is made in one room and grantmaking done in another, with no door in between.
That realisation led us to build the Outcomes Engine, a tool built into SmartyGrants to help grantmakers answer that perennial question: what difference did we make? But building the tool taught us something humbling: the hardest part isn't the technology. It's the thinking.
When one Australian council signed up as a beta user, they went looking for their outcomes framework and found themselves drowning in internal plans – nine major ones, 200-plus objectives. It took days of work just to produce a usable list. When they then asked grantees to describe their outcomes? Most wrote activity statements. A few swung the other way – "solving poverty" for a two-year grant. The council ran workshops just to get grantees to the starting line.
This isn't unusual. Across the sector, grantmakers and grantees alike have been operating without a shared language for change. The Outcomes Engine provides that language – a structured framework connecting what a funder is trying to achieve with what grantees actually report. A couple of years on, that council's data revealed something worth knowing: the outcomes being funded were surprisingly narrow. That's not a failure, that's intelligence – the kind that drives better decisions next round.
Our next frontier is AI. Used well, it can improve efficiency, reduce duplication, and surface patterns that would otherwise stay buried. Used badly, it risks automating poor decisions and amplifying bias. Our broad approach to AI is to let machines do the admin, but keep judgement where it belongs – with the humans.
None of what we’re building will eliminate grants rage. But there's a practical place to start: before you design your next round, write down what you want to be different in the world when the money's been spent. Not what you're funding – what you want to change. That single act of clarity reshapes everything downstream. Grant funds are too precious for vague intentions.
Kathy Richardson is Executive Director of SmartyGrants, part of the Our Community group, and has spent more than two decades working to improve grantmaking practice and impact.