After a grant application has been submitted, it’s tempting to just walk away from the project and relax. You’ve been dealing with intense stress for weeks and you finally crossed the finish line. You deserve a break, right?

Right.

But first there are some things you should take care of right away….

1. Debrief the process.  Go through the entire process from start to finish and make notes about what went well and what didn’t go so well. For those things that didn’t go as well as you had hoped, what could you have done differently? What will you do differently next time? The longer you wait to do this, the more details you’ll forget and less valuable the activity will be.
2. Send a final copy of the full proposal to your client or Executive Director. As excited as you are to have the project finished, they are just as excited to see the final product. Making them wait until Monday could make them a little anxious, so just do it now.
3. Confirm online submittal. If you submitted the grant online, be sure that you don’t walk away from the project until confirmation has been received.
4. Fax signature pages to the funder, if required. Some grants require online submittal, but then you have to fax in signed signature pages within 3 days.  Don’t wait.  Do it right away. It’s easy to forget about this when you have mentally moved on to another project.
5. Gather up all documents related to the project and put them in one place.  This can be a separate pile on your desk to deal with later, if you’d like, or you can go through the process of filing everything away.  The point is that you don’t want to leave your back-up materials scattered all over the place. If you’re like most of us, you’ll be starting your next project right away (or you have several going on at the time) and cleaning one up before you walk away from it will help you be more efficient as you move on to the others.
6. Send thank you notes or email to the people who helped you with the process. This is important. I prefer to send a handwritten note when I can, but a heartfelt email is better than nothing. Acknowledging the help and support of others will ensure that you’ll get their help the next time you need it. Oh, and it’s also just the right thing to do.

Now you can take that well-deserved break.

What other things you do immediately after deadline?

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