Grants are federal funding announcements sourced from Grants.gov. Kontratar downloads them so you can browse funding opportunities alongside the contract work in the rest of the platform.
A grant is not a contract. A contract buys a service the government wants delivered. A grant funds an activity the government wants to see happen. That difference changes who is allowed to apply, what your response looks like, and how it is judged.
How to get there: Sidebar → Click Grants
1. Browsing Grants.gov opportunities
Select Grants in the sidebar, then Grants.gov.
A close date of N/A means rolling submission. The agency accepts applications continuously rather than against a deadline. It does not mean the date is missing.
2. Intel Ready grants
Some grants carry an Intel Ready tag. This means Kontratar has already read the announcement and pulled out the details that decide whether the grant is worth your time:
- Eligibility requirements
- Funding amounts
- Application components
Look for the Intel Ready tag when you are scanning rather than researching. Grant announcements run to dozens of pages, and most of them will not apply to you. The extracted eligibility criteria let you rule a grant out in seconds instead of reading the full notice to reach the same conclusion.
3. Checking eligibility first
Grant eligibility is narrower than contract eligibility, and getting it wrong wastes everything. Many grants are open only to educational institutions, nonprofits, tribal organizations, or state and local governments. A for-profit business is often simply not allowed to apply.Always read the eligibility criteria before you invest any effort in a response. This is not something you can address in your application or make up for with a strong proposal. If you are not eligible, you are not eligible.
This is why the Intel Ready tag matters more here than a similar feature would in Awards. With contracts, a poor fit means a weak bid. With grants, a poor fit means your application is discarded before anyone reads it.
4. Custom grants
Custom grants let you track funding that does not appear on Grants.gov, such as state grants, foundation grants, and private funding.
- Navigate to Custom → Grants.
- Click Create Grant.
- Enter the details:
- Click Save.
Your custom grants sit alongside the Grants.gov announcements, so you have one list covering federal, state, foundation, and private funding rather than a spreadsheet on the side.
Note where a custom grant came from in the title or description. Six months later, the difference between a foundation grant you found on their website and one a board member told you about matters, and nothing else in the record will remind you.
5. Generating a grant proposal
Kontratar can generate a draft proposal against a grant, using the requirements it extracted from the announcement to structure the response.
- Open the grant you want to respond to.
- Generate the proposal.
- Review and edit the draft before you use it.
A generated proposal is a starting structure, not a submission. Grant reviewers assess programmatic merit, your organization’s capacity to deliver, and whether your budget is justified. None of that can be written for you.Check every factual claim, every figure, and every eligibility statement before submitting. The draft gives you the sections and the requirement coverage. The substance has to be yours.
- Awards. Completed contract awards, as distinct from grant funding.
- Forecasts. Planned procurements agencies have announced but not yet solicited.
- Pipeline Management. How to track a funding pursuit through the 8-stage lifecycle.
Parent topic: Kontratar v2.0 Documentation