How do you record your grant pipeline if you haven’t got a fancy CRM?

Tracking the status of your relationships with grant funders is vitally important. From keeping track of upcoming deadlines to monitoring your pipeline for different projects, fundraisers rely on having the information they need at their finger tips.

Yet with fundraising databases often costing a pretty penny, this isn’t a solution that’s available to everybody.

(And, let’s face it – while databases are normally brilliant at managing relationships with individuals, a lot of them lose the plot when it comes to grant-making bodies).

That’s why we’ve created a free tool that you can use to capture and track key information on the status of your funder relationships.

Built in Excel, it’s designed to be easy to use, and fully customisable to enable you to keep on top of your grant fundraising.

Can it as powerful as some of the bigger fundraising CRM systems on the market? Nope. Is it a step up from just writing a list of names on Excel? I think so!

Below, you will find a link to download the latest version of the Funder Relationship Tracker, as well as some tutorial videos that explain how to set it up and get the most from the tool.

If you have any questions about using the Funder Relationship Tracker, or any suggestions for how we can improve it, please get in touch by emailing David.Burgess@ApolloFundraising.com

Hopefully, the different fields are quite self-explanatory, but there are a few things that need to be set up before you can fully use it. This short video provides an overview of the tracker, and some tips on getting the most out of it.

We’ve made some tweaks to the Funder Relationship Tracker, with Version 2 uploaded on 19th June 2025. This short video shows what’s changed and why, as well as showing “behind the scenes” to understand how the Projected Income and Weighted Grant amount sections work.