The Grantwriting Hamster Wheel:

Did you know  Canadian charities spend over a billion dollars (of donor money) annually just chasing grants?  

Last year, charities across Canada raised billions from donors, foundations, and corporations. But they had to spend billions just to get it. Every year the total raised keeps declining and the total spent to raise it keeps growing. The list of tactics and money spent to get this money keeps growing, while the funds raised keeps shrinking. It's not the charities' fault.

The process isn't yielding us the desired outcomes.

My kids got a hamster for Christmas (Harvey). It's nocturnal. Every night, I hear Harvey race around and around and around this hamster wheel only to end up at the same spot - sleeping in his woodchips and fluff the next AM. There feels something perversely apt about this for us in fundraising and granting. We're all running frantically in our wheels, exhausting ourselves only to wake up facing the same challenges. But here’s the thing: we created the wheel.  

The internet was supposed to make this easier and cheaper—and in some ways, it has. But the landscape has also become more complex. More platforms. More giving channels. More noise. More competition for attention. Combined with cost of living pressures and shifting donor priorities, we're spinning our wheels faster than ever.

So it may sound counterintuitive to suggest we need to do less, rather than more.

Even sub $1M charities spend $30,000 a year just identifying grant opportunities and submitting LOIs. If you don't invest that time and money, you risk missing out entirely. But consider what that $30,000 could fund in direct services instead of paperwork.

But it's not just charities that feel trapped in the hamster wheel.

Foundations often receive 100 to 400 applications per open call. I've spoken with funders who say they're overwhelmed—"hundreds of proposals and barely enough time to read them." They're spending tens of thousands on bloated software and hours drowning in duplicate information. One foundation director confided, "We're reading the same information about the same organizations multiple times a year, just formatted differently. It's madness."

Even a simple LOI can take hours to write. A modest grant typically takes around 20 hours of writing time. Multiply that by hundreds of applications, and just reviewing them starts to look like a full-time job.

Some quick math: Assume a grant application takes 20 hours to complete at $40/hour (a low-end rate for a skilled grant writer). That's $800 per application. Multiply that by 200 applications and you're looking at $160,000 in labor spent before you factor in prospecting, admin, and reporting. Furthermore, this doesn't factor in the Executive Director, Program Officer or other staff time.

And that's just one grant cycle from one foundation.

One organization we work with spent over 500 hours just adapting the same program descriptions to fit different application formats. That's 15 weeks of full-time work that could have been spent serving communities in need.

Now imagine that across the country—thousands of organizations, running endlessly in their hamster wheels, chasing funding instead of impact.

The fundraising machine will keep growing until we intentionally say enough is enough. We are stuck in a model that wastes resources, creates burnout, and favors those who can play the grant game and not necessarily those doing the most impactful work.

There's a better way to fund what matters. In just the past few months, some of Canada's leading funders have already joined this wave, stepping off the hamster wheel and embracing a standardized, streamlined approach that saves everyone time and resources.

After reviewing over a thousand grant applications, talking with hundreds of philanthropists and charities, we've developed a unified grant process. One process and (soon) almost a billion dollars for giving. We’d love to have you see what it’s all about. 

Ready to escape the hamster wheel?

👉 Charities: Join our upcoming webinar "Breaking Free from the Grantwriting Hamster Wheel" to see how you can streamline your funding process.

👉 Funders: Book a call to learn how you can eliminate the cage altogether and join other leading Canadian foundations in this transformative approach.

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