I built a grant management system for Scandinavian Non-Profits. Here's why.
There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching well-meaning organizations waste their limited resources on administration instead of their actual mission. A foundation set up to rescue animals spending hours sorting through emails. A sports federation buried in Excel sheets. A small cultural non-profit losing track of who applied for what, and when.
That frustration is what led me to build Grant Garden: a grant and scholarship management platform for foundations, non-profits, municipalities, and any other organization that distributes funding.
The Problem Nobody Was Solving Well
Most grant management tools fall into one of two camps. Expensive enterprise software with feature bloat that takes months to implement. Or the DIY approach of email and spreadsheets that works fine until it suddenly doesn't.
Neither serves the typical Scandinavian foundation or ideell organisation well. They have real needs: structured applications, review workflows, payment tracking, follow-up reporting. But they don't have the budget or technical staff of a large institution.
Grant Garden sits between those two options. It's capable enough to handle the full grant lifecycle, but simple enough that a small office can get started the same day.
How It Works
The platform covers the full process from both sides.
For organizations distributing grants:
- Create a call for applications. Define your criteria, required documents, and application window. Next time around, clone the previous round rather than starting from scratch.
- Receive applications directly in the system, no inbox required.
- Review as a team. Assign external reviewers to specific applications so they only see what's relevant to them.
- Issue decisions using ready-made templates.
- Collect bank details and document payments inside the platform.
- Request follow-up reports when the grant period ends.
Every step is built to be usable by people who aren't particularly technical. And because Grant Garden also functions as a marketplace, published calls reach applicants who are actively looking for funding without any extra effort from the organization.
For applicants:
Applicants can browse grants from multiple organizations in one place, apply through step-by-step digital forms, save drafts and return later, and track their application status in real time. Decisions and payment details come through the same system. No PDFs by post, no chasing emails.
Creating an account and applying is free.
The First Client: Heymans Djurskyddsstiftelse
My first client on the platform is Heymans Djurskyddsstiftelse, an animal welfare foundation active since 2007.
Heymans funds a wide range of work in the animal welfare space: caring for vulnerable animals, advocacy for stronger legal protections, and research into alternatives to animal testing, among other things. They run an annual grant round with a 1st of October deadline.
They're exactly the kind of organization Grant Garden was built for. The work they do matters. Their administrative capacity is limited. A structured, professional process that doesn't eat into their mission budget is not a nice-to-have for them.
Seeing them up and running on the platform made the whole thing concrete for me. It stopped being an abstract product and became a foundation that cares about animals being able to focus on finding good projects to fund, instead of chasing applications through their inbox.
Why I Built This
I built Grant Garden to support organizations working on things I care about. Animal welfare, humanitarian work, environmental protection, education, social justice.
But the product itself didn't appear from nowhere. Over ten years ago I built a grant management system for Fysiografen (Kungliga Fysiografiska Sällskapet i Lund), a long-term client of mine and one of Sweden's oldest scientific societies. That work gave me a deep understanding of what organizations actually need when managing grants at scale: the edge cases, the workflow quirks, the moments where a system either earns trust or loses it. Grant Garden is built on that foundation.
What I kept seeing across that time was the same pattern. Every hour a foundation spends on administrative work is an hour not spent on their mission. Every krona that goes toward expensive software licenses is a krona not going to the causes the foundation exists to help. It's my attempt to change that.
Who Is Grant Garden For?
The platform works across quite different types of grant-giving organizations. Foundations with small teams and tight budgets. Sports federations processing high application volumes. Municipalities distributing association grants. Companies with corporate giving programs. Non-profits where the same two people handle everything.
The common thread is that they're all distributing funding and spending more time on administration than they should be. Pricing is structured around that reality: it shouldn't cost a fortune to give money away.
GDPR and Data Security
Any grant process involves sensitive personal data from applicants, whether they're researchers, associations, or individuals. Grant Garden stores everything on servers within the EU, maintains audit logs of all actions in the system, and is built to be GDPR-compliant from the start.
Try It or Get In Touch
If your organization manages grants or scholarships and you're still working through email threads and spreadsheets, I'd like to show you what Grant Garden can do.
👉 Explore Grant Garden
👉 Browse open grant calls
👉 Get in touch: [email protected]
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Grant Garden cost for organizations?
Pricing is designed to be accessible for smaller foundations and non-profits. Reach out to [email protected] for current plans.
Is it free to apply for grants as an applicant?
Yes. Creating an account and applying for any grant is completely free.
What types of organizations can use Grant Garden?
Foundations, sports federations, municipalities, companies with corporate giving programs, and other organizations that distribute grants or scholarships.
Where is data stored?
All data is stored on servers within the EU in accordance with GDPR.
Can multiple people in my organization use the system?
Yes. The platform has role-based access with three levels: Owner, Administrator, and Reviewer. Each has appropriate permissions and the system logs who made what change and when.
Does Grant Garden support external reviewers?
Yes. You can invite external reviewers and assign them to specific applications without giving them access to anything else in the system.
Grant Garden is available at grantgarden.org. Heymans Djurskyddsstiftelse's current grant round is open at app.grantgarden.org.