Shadow Work in Grants
The Hidden Cost Draining Nonprofit Capacity
For the length of my career, what Instrumentl is calling "shadow work" has been *the work*. The spreadsheet you maintain because your official system can't track what you need. The email thread that serves as a paper trail because there's no shared record. The budget you rebuild from scratch because every funder wants it formatted differently.
None of that appears in any job description, but every grant professional in the sector knows it intimately. And for the first time, we have data that puts a number on it.
A recent study of more than 1,000 grant professionals by Instrumentl found that shadow work costs the average grant professional's organization $53,700 per year in operational overhead. That's possibly a full-time salary consumed by the gap between the systems nonprofits have and the systems their grant work demands.
What Shadow Work Looks Like Across the Grant Lifecycle
Shadow work is the invisible manual labor that fills the space between the tools grant professionals are given and the work they're expected to deliver. It spans the entire grant lifecycle, from prospecting through closeout.
In pre-award, grant professionals spend an average of 3.4 hours per week evaluating whether a grant is even worth pursuing: vetting funders, reading guidelines, cross-referencing past relationships, and assessing fit against current capacity. That's nearly a full working day every week on work that may never result in a single application.
In post-award, the median grant professional spends 6 hours per week on operational overhead alone: 3.6 hours chasing financial data, 2.8 hours translating between how the organization tracks expenses and how funders want them reported, and 2.3 hours sorting out which spending rules apply to which grant.
The two biggest time drains cut across the entire lifecycle: 5.6 hours per week re-answering the same questions in different formats, and 5.4 hours per week chasing colleagues for information, documents, and approvals. Combined, that's more than 10 hours a week on coordination that better infrastructure would handle.
The Grants You Never Pursued Are the Ones That Hurt Most
The most striking finding may be the one that never appears in any report to your board or leadership: 87% of grant professionals have left money on the table. The median grant walked away from was $75,000. These organizations didn't pass because the opportunity was a poor fit or the proposal wasn't strong. They passed because the operational burden of pursuing it was too high. A third of respondents have walked away from grants worth $100,000 or more.
I’ve personally been retained to write probably federal grants, only to have the client call it quits before we even got going because they realized they hadn’t done the work to make the grant possible. Not once or twice, but close to two times a year.
There's no line item for opportunity cost. The grant you didn't pursue doesn't appear in any dashboard. But it represents programs that never got built, staff who never got hired, and communities that didn't receive the resources they needed.
The higher dollar amounts make sense when you consider the source: grant professionals are far more likely to walk away from a federal opportunity or a large nationally competed foundation grant than from a $10,000 local grant. The difference in application effort is enormous. A local foundation grant might take a day if your language and budget are ready. A federal grant can consume 75% of your work hours for six weeks straight.
Only 18% Can Answer the Most Basic Budget Question in Real Time
"Do we have enough budget left?" is among the most fundamental questions in post-award management. Only 18% of grant professionals can answer it without digging through multiple spreadsheets or waiting on a finance report.
That visibility gap carries consequences: 59% of grant professionals have missed or nearly missed a reporting deadline, and 22% have turned down a grant specifically because they couldn't manage the reporting burden.
The structural cause is familiar to anyone who has managed a grant budget. Funder-approved budgets rarely align with an organization's program budget. They contain unique line items, different categories, and bespoke formats. So the grant professional creates yet another spreadsheet: one that finance won't maintain, that requires constant triangulation between program staff and the accounting office, and that exists entirely outside any official system.
This is a funder-driven problem. Funders request budgets formatted to their specifications, and the work of maintaining those parallel budget structures falls to grant professionals as an unacknowledged part of the job.
A Structural Problem Requires a Structural Response
96% of grant professionals rely on at least one informal workaround. The average person runs four parallel shadow systems at any given time. And I bet it’s even higher.
Here are my systems and workarounds:
Grant Station (grant research)
Instrumentl (grant research)
A bazillion listservs (grant research)
Google Docs (file sharing; asynchronous shared work spaces)
Teams (file sharing)
Word (file sharing)
Excel (building budgets, tracking expenditures)
Google spreadsheets (due date tracking)
Google Calendar (due date tracking)
Google Tasks (task tracking)
Airtable (task tracking for one client)
Adobe (PDF file manipulation)
OnePass (password saving)
Google Passwords (password saving)
Grammarly (editing)
Claude (drafting, editing, researching)
There are probably more, but I’m tired just looking at my already lengthy list.
When the patches feel like the job, the problem becomes invisible to the people doing the work and to the leadership responsible for resourcing it.
The path forward requires more than better tools, though better tools matter. It requires organizations to reconsider where grants live within their structure and how they resource the people doing this work.
Grant professionals are strategic partners who bring the perspective of what is fundable to every organizational conversation: program development, budgeting, HR policy, compliance. If an organization expects its work to be funded by grants, a grant professional belongs at the table from the earliest stage of program design.
Naming the Cost Is the First Step Toward Changing It
The $53,700 annual cost of shadow work is a starting point for a long-overdue conversation with leadership. Paired with the grants your organization has walked away from and the reporting deadlines that have been missed or nearly missed, the data tells a clear story: investing in grants infrastructure is investing in your organization's capacity to serve its community.
Your organization's grant professional is doing far more than writing proposals. The question worth asking is whether your systems, structure, and leadership recognize the full scope of that work and resource it accordingly.