By the time June settles in, the rhythm of grant work changes. Foundation deadlines tend to thin out. Program officers set their out-of-office replies, and the funder you’re trying to reach is on vacation.
For a lot of nonprofit leaders, the pipeline goes quiet, and the momentum you built through the spring feels like it is slipping away.
The summer slowdown is one of the few stretches of the year when grant work gives you three gifts: time, attention, and space before the next deadline.
What you do this summer shapes how the fall goes. We’ve found the organizations that use June well tend to walk into September steady.
Want to stress yourself out? Wait until August to catch up for a tireless (and tiring) fall.
Here are three things you can do during the summer nonprofit fundraising slowdown.
1. Plan while you have the room
Summer doesn’t mean no deadlines. Some funders run a cycle straight through July, and a late-July due date doesn’t care whether your staff is out of office. That’s why it’s critical to look at what’s due and plan around it.
Start with your calendar:
Mark the summer deadlines and staff them now, while you can plan around vacations. Set clear priorities and assign responsibility so everyone knows who writes, who reviews, and who signs off, before anyone goes on vacation.
Pull mid-year program numbers. It’s so much easier to track this down now than it is to wait for colleagues to wade through emails after vacation.
Give yourself permission to prioritize the rest. If a proposal can wait until September without costing you the opportunity, let it wait. Forcing a grant through a slow stretch can cost more than it returns.
There is a quieter piece of summer planning that pays off later: the board.
Many boards take August off and come back ready for a fall retreat, and whatever you plan to hand them then is far easier to assemble now. A mid-year financial read, a sense of where the strategic plan stands, a clear picture of what the numbers need to look like by year-end.
Although fiscal calendars vary, you can still use the time to plan.
For example, an organization closing its year on June 30th is starting fresh, while a calendar-year organization is already prepping for the retreat. Either way, most of the work of looking prepared in October gets done in June.
If your grant calendar still lives in your head (or a tab you haven’t opened since March), our breakdown of the grant funding timeline is a good place to start.
2. Decide which funders are worth your fall
The quiet months are the best research months you will get. With fewer live deadlines competing for your attention, summer is when we do the bulk of our prospect work: reading 990s, mapping funding ranges, and sorting the funders who are a real fit from the ones who only look like one.
A strong fall starts with a list you believe in.
It is also a relationship season, even though it rarely feels like one. The strongest funding partnerships get built between the grants, not at deadline time. We believe in building relationships. Summer is the best time to move from transactional to trust-based funding.
Here’s a few ways to start:
List the funders you need to check-in with and confirm their availability. A short June email to find a meeting window saves a September scramble.
Move your cultivation activities to June or September. When we build a client’s grant tracker, we deliberately shift relationship touches into June or September, when people are more likely at their desks.
For funders with no warm contact yet, queue a round of introductory letters. They are low effort, they can be sent in volume, and they tend to aid inquiries later in the year. They also give the team a sense of progress during a slow stretch.
This is the work that grows revenue rather than only maintaining it. We apply for roughly three times the funding a client wants to raise. We achieve this by building prospect lists ahead of the deadlines instead of during them.
3. Sharpen your story before the rush
When the fall deadlines arrive, the organizations that perform well are usually editing a strong narrative, not writing one from scratch the night before it is due. Now is when you build the raw material.
Pull your boilerplate and read it the way a funder would. Is the needs statement current, or is it still describing the organization you were two years ago? Does the impact language match what your programs do now?
This is also the moment to check your framing. The most persuasive grant writing describes communities by their strengths and their goals. That’s what separates a proposal a funder believes in from one they skim. Refreshing your voice across your core documents in July means every fall proposal starts from a stronger place.
The good news is none of these activities takes the whole team. It takes a few focused hours while your inbox is a little quieter.
Summer nonprofit fundraising slowdown: let's make fall manageable
The summer months are the planning window that makes the fall manageable. And for organizations weighing what next year should look like, summer is the right time to start a bigger conversation about a steadier, less reactive grant program.
If you want a simple way to get started, our Grant Readiness Checklist walks through where your calendar, your funders, and your materials stand. It will help you understand how ready you are for the months ahead.