Grant professionals spend nearly 30 hours a week on invisible, manual labor — and it's costing organizations real funding. Instrumentl surveyed over 1,000 grant professionals to measure, for the first time, the true scale and cost of shadow work across the sector.
In this report, you'll learn:
- How much time is lost — and where it goes. We break down the ~30 hrs/wk across nine categories of manual, repetitive work — from re-answering similar questions across portals to chasing colleagues for financial data.
- What it's actually costing. 87% of organizations have walked away from, delayed, or downsized a grant because of operational burden. The median grant left on the table: $75,000.
- Why almost no one trusts their numbers. Only 18% of grant professionals can answer a basic budget question within minutes — and 54% have low-to-moderate confidence in their own financial tracking systems.
- How shadow work scales with complexity. Benchmarks segmented by org size, budget, and grant volume show where the breaking points are — and which organizations are most at risk.
- What leading practitioners say needs to change. Six grant experts weigh in on what should be automated, what should never be, and how to make the case for better infrastructure.
Whether you're building the case for new tools, making a staffing ask, or helping leadership understand the real complexity of your work — this report gives you the data to back it up.
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