The need to understand efficacy and outcomes from grant-funded activity is common to funders, the academic community, and the public. Yet, few articles in the research administration corpus offer details on and considerations of applying the concept of return on investment (ROI) to grant activity. To determine the volume of material available aside from publications specific to research administration that considers systematic assessment of ROI for grants, a review was undertaken of the periodic literature available on the ProQuest database. A Boolean search for "grant" AND "return on investment" produced over 2,700 results. Following review, 34 of these sources were found to be relevant to a discussion of the systematic application of ROI to grant activity. These articles make it clear that interest in ROI for grants is not isolated to a few disciplines or areas of professional practice and that two categories of use are common for ROI with respect to grants: "econometric calculation" (Frank & Nason, 2009, p. 528) and "impact of…activities" (Weiss, 2007, p. 206). A second substantial theme in the literature is the misalignment of fiscal return on investment and assessment of grant-supported projects. Establishing assessment patterns that consider benefits derived is a preferable pattern. While government agencies in a number of countries have initiated processes of this type, their foci will not facilitate local, institution-specific benefit analysis. Two patterns for measuring and assessing impacts of grant-funded activity are recommended: Uttam and Venugopal's "assessment of benefits from sponsored research" (2008, p. 57) (developed for the Indian National Chemical Laboratory) and the rubric-based, balanced scorecard approach commonly employed in business settings.