Migrating from GrantHub to GrantWise: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you are reading this, you have already decided. GrantHub is gone, you have evaluated the options, and you are moving to GrantWise. Now comes the part most blog posts skip: actually getting your data across.

This guide walks through every step — working from the data you exported before GrantHub went offline January 31, 2026, cleaning it, mapping it to the GrantWise model, importing, and verifying. It includes the steps most teams forget (contribution-agreement data, contact history, attachments) and the order of operations that prevents data loss.

Pin this. Migrations are the kind of thing you do once and never want to do twice.

Step 1: Start with what you exported from GrantHub

GrantHub shut down on January 31, 2026, so direct access to the tool is gone. What you are working from now is whatever you exported before that date. Here is what the standard GrantHub export included:

• Grants CSV — one row per grant, with columns for grant name, funder, status, deadline, amount, program officer, and notes. This is your primary migration file.
• Deadlines CSV — a flat list of all deadline dates linked to grant records. Often redundant with the grants CSV but worth keeping as a QA check.
• Contacts CSV — your funder contact records: name, organization, email, phone, role, and any notes attached to that contact.
• Document attachments — PDF and Word files attached to individual grants. These were available as a zip download from the GrantHub export screen.

If you exported, your files are likely in your Downloads folder or in whatever folder you use for grant administration. Search for granthub-export or grants.csv.

If you did not export before the shutdown, you are not starting from zero. Most of your grant data also lives somewhere else: award letters and CAs in email, program notes in a shared drive, deadlines in a calendar. The inventory step (Step 2) will help you reconstruct what matters.

Step 2: Inventory your grant data outside the tool

Grant data never lived only in GrantHub. Before you import anything into GrantWise, do a quick inventory of everywhere your grant information currently lives. This takes thirty minutes and prevents two days of hunting down missing records later.

Check these sources:

• Email folders: Award letters, CA PDFs, funder correspondence, submission confirmations, interim and final report acknowledgements.
• Shared drives (Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox):Application drafts and submitted versions, budget templates, past reports, CA schedules.
• Your calendar: Reporting deadlines, funder meeting notes, submission reminders.
• Offline spreadsheets: Any side-spreadsheets you were keeping for CA tracking or budget reconciliation (which most GrantHub users had, since the tool never handled post-award).

Create a one-page inventory: one row per active or recently-awarded grant, with columns for grant name, funder, current status, key upcoming date, and where the CA document lives. This inventory becomes your QA checklist after the migration is complete.

Step 3: Map GrantHub fields to GrantWise fields

Before formatting your import CSV, match each GrantHub column to the corresponding GrantWise field. The table below covers the standard GrantHub export columns.

Status mapping

The most common import error: status values must be lowercase enum strings in the CSV (e.g., in_progress, not In Progress). Clean these in your CSV before uploading.

Step 4: Set up your GrantWise org profile before importing anything

Do not skip this step. The GrantWise AI writer reads your org profile every time it drafts a section. If you import 30 grants and then fill in your profile, every AI draft up to that point will be generic. If you fill it in first, every draft from day one will have your mission, your communities served, your program areas, and your language baked in.

Go to Settings > Organization Profile and complete these fields:

• Mission statement — paste directly from your website or your last application. This is the single most-used context in AI drafts.
• Programs and services — describe each program area in 2–3 sentences. The AI will cite specific programs when describing your work to funders.
• Communities and populations served — geographic communities, demographics, Indigenous communities by name if applicable.
• Annual operating budget range — funders often ask about organizational scale; pre-loading this avoids manual entry.
• Staff count — similar to budget, used to contextualize capacity claims.
• CRA registration number — required for most federal applications; easier to have it pre-filled.
• First Nation band number — if applicable, your ISC band registry number. Enables accurate Indigenous funder matching.

This takes about fifteen minutes to fill in thoroughly. It will save hours across the next year of drafting. Do this before Step 5.

Step 5: Import your grants

With your org profile complete and your CSV cleaned (status values lowercased, dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, amount fields numeric), you are ready to import.

1. Go to Settings > Import > Import Grants.
2. Upload your cleaned grants CSV. GrantWise will show you a preview of how each column maps to a field.
3. Review the mapping screen. If any column is auto-mapped incorrectly, use the dropdown to correct it before committing.
4. Check the preview rows at the bottom. Look for any rows where the status field shows “unknown” — this means a status value did not match the enum and that row will import without a status. Fix these in the CSV and re-upload.
5. Click Import to commit. GrantWise will process the file and return a count of rows imported, skipped (duplicates), and errored.

After import, go to your grants list and filter by Needs Attention. Any grant that imported with missing required fields (typically a missing deadline or unrecognized funder) will surface here. Review and complete each one.

If your GrantHub had custom fields: these will not auto-map. You will need to find them in the notes column (if you appended them there during cleaning) or enter them manually on individual grant records after import.

Step 6: Import your funder contacts

Contacts import separately from grants. If possible, import your contacts before your grants — GrantWise will auto-link contacts to funder records during the grant import if it finds a name match. Doing it in reverse order means manual linking afterward.

Go to Settings > Import > Import Contacts. GrantHub's contacts CSV maps to GrantWise fields as follows:

• First Name + Last Name → contact_name
• Organization → org_name
• Email → email
• Phone → phone
• Title / Role → role
• Notes → notes

After import, visit the Funders section and open each funder record. If you have interaction history — notes from funder calls, site visit summaries, relationship status updates — now is the time to add it to the funder's interaction timeline.

This part is necessarily manual. GrantHub did not export a structured interaction log, so anything you had in notes fields will need to be sorted into the right funder record by hand. It is worth doing for your active funders — the context carries forward into every future interaction.

Step 7: Re-attach your documents

Documents do not auto-migrate. Every PDF and Word file you had attached to GrantHub grants needs to be manually uploaded to the corresponding grant in GrantWise.

To attach a document: open the grant record, go to the Documents tab, and upload the file. Use a consistent naming convention so the files stay readable years later:

Prioritize in this order:

1. Award letters and contribution agreements for all currently-awarded grants
2. Submitted applications for grants currently under review
3. Past reports for funders you expect to re-apply to
4. Supporting documents for any active deliverable submissions

For organizations with many historical grants, it is not worth re-attaching declined or lapsed grants. Focus on active grants and anything still within a reporting window.

Step 8: Set up contribution agreements for your awarded grants

This is the step where GrantHub had nothing to migrate from. You are not porting CA data — you are creating it for the first time, in a tool that can actually use it.

For every grant with a status of awarded: open the grant record, go to the Contribution Agreements tab, and click Add CA. You will need your signed CA document to fill this in. Here is what to pull from it:

• CA number and signed date — on the cover page of the agreement, usually in the top header block.
• Reporting dates — look for “Reporting Requirements,” “Progress Reports,” or a schedule of deliverables. These are the dates GrantWise will use to send you reminders.
• Award amount — the total funded amount, from the financial schedule (often Schedule A or the CA summary table).
• Budget lines — each line from the approved budget. Label them exactly as the funder labeled them in the agreement. These are the categories GrantWise will use for restricted fund compliance tracking.
• Deliverables — the program objectives or outputs the funder is paying for. Usually in a Schedule B or project description section.
• Restricted fund flags — if your CA specifies “eligible categories” or “approved budget headings,” flag each budget line with the corresponding eligible categories. This is the restricted fund compliance layer.

Step 9: Reconcile and verify — the 5-point checklist

Before you close out the migration, run through this checklist against the inventory you built in Step 2.

• 1

  Every active grant has a status and a deadline.

  Filter grants by Needs Attention and look for any with a blank deadline or unknown status. These are the ones that will fall through the cracks.

• 2

  Every awarded grant has a contribution agreement.

  Open each awarded grant and confirm there is at least one CA record with an award amount and at least one budget line.

• 3

  Every funder in your active pipeline has a contact record.

  Check the Funders section. Any funder with an active or submitted grant but no linked contact is a relationship risk.

• 4

  Every deadline in the next 90 days is showing on the calendar.

  Go to the Calendar view and scan the next three months. Cross-reference against your pre-migration inventory.

• 5

  The Needs Attention section on the dashboard is empty or reviewed.

  Every item in Needs Attention either has an explanation you are comfortable with or has been corrected. Do not leave it as background noise.

When all five points are clean, your migration is done. Everything from here is regular operations.

Step 10: Next steps after migration

The data is across. Here is what to set up before your first regular week in the new tool:

Invite your teammates

Go to Settings > Team > Invite. Program managers, EDs, finance staff, co-applicants — anyone who needs visibility into grant status or CA compliance. Set roles appropriately: Writer for grant staff, Reviewer for program leads, Admin for your organization administrator.

Set up saved searches

For any funding area you monitor regularly — FPCC language programs, ISC housing, Canada Council creation grants, provincial arts council cycles — save a search with your usual filters. GrantWise will run that search automatically and surface new programs when they match.

Turn on email alerts

In Settings, enable deadline reminders (7 days and 48 hours before each grant deadline), CA reporting reminders (30 days and 7 days before each reporting date), and saved search alerts (weekly digest of new matches). These are the alerts that replace the ones GrantHub sent — they will run even if you do not log in.

Test the AI writer on your next application

If you have a grant application coming up, open the grant in GrantWise and use the AI writer on the first section you would normally draft. Because you filled in the org profile in Step 4, it should produce a grounded first draft that knows your organization. Edit from there — it is faster than starting from scratch.