Grants Management Process

It’s where the grantmaker awards the grant, works with the awardee on a final agreement, and awards funds. With Submittable, you can create branded, customized portals to give your grant application platform the same look and feel as the rest of your materials.

From grants and scholarships to awards and CSR programs, we partner with you so you can start making a difference, fast. The start-to-finish platform makes your workflow smarter and more efficient, leading to better decisions and bigger impact. Easily report on success, and learn for the future—Submittable is flexible and powerful enough to grow alongside your programs. Upon completing all the closeout requirements, including a review of the final financial reports and results from the awardee, the grant lifecycle comes to an end. This might seem fairly straightforward for grants with a single recipient, but managing awards for a larger grant program can become overwhelming without a strong grant management system in place.

Put The Financial House In Order

Getting updates on how your grant money is being used can be crucial to funders, for meeting federal requirements, or making case studies to communicate your organization’s impact. During this stage, the grantor and recipient work to ensure any expectations or requirements outlined in the agreement are being met. This stage includes the implementation, monitoring, and closeout of the grant program. Once you’ve set up your application, it’s time to announce your new grant program. You’ll need to figure how you’re going to promote your grant and get qualified people to apply. Consider marketing partnerships and reaching out to people and organizations directly.

Awards may be given based on factors that are out of your control, such as regional priorities or economic status. Although receiving money is the end goal, it is important to track overall productivity and create award and goal incentives for the sustainability of your organization’s efforts. Allowing your grant management process to integrate seamlessly with your database and tracking software will help improve accuracy of reporting and make your grant application process even faster. This can also help you to track contacts at various companies and foundations. Once a grant has been awarded, software can be integrated with accounting programs to release funds and track expenditures. To be successful, you should be strategic about the types of grants you will — and won’t — apply for.

Be sure to understand the complexities of creating and reporting financials with multi-year grants included in your revenue stream. Multi-year grants need to be set up in your financial tracking system to show spending within and across each fiscal year.

Wrapping Things Up: How To Manage A Grant: The Ultimate Checklist & Tips

These include things like creating a grant calendar to ensure you’re pacing accordingly and implementing grant management solutions to streamline the process. We’ll touch on each of these best practices and explain how you can use them for your own grant proposals process. Competition for grant funding is fierce, but an effective grants management system will support your efforts and manage the entire grants lifecycle. Properly monitoring all activities is essential to mitigating financial risk, and without the help of technology, improper tracking is much more likely to happen. For grantmakers, grant management encompasses the processes and administrative work that happen throughout the grant lifecycle. This includes setting up the grant, reviewing applications, selecting worthy recipients, disbursing grant funds, and ensuring those funds are put to good use.

Your application should collect all vital information, but nothing more; you don’t want to overwhelm applicants with unnecessary work. If you do this correctly, you’ll set your reviewers up for success and make later reporting requirements easier. As a developer of leading grant management software for grantmakers, Submittable works with thousands of grantmakers every day. This gives us a front row seat to grantmakers’ priorities, frustrations, and–best of all–the creative ideas and tools that help them achieve their mission.

Creating A Successful Grant Process

Grantmaking organizations tend to value relationships highly—a breach of an agreement may mean future opportunities are closed. Hold a meeting of partners to celebrate the grant award, to review each organization’s role, to agree on reporting deadlines, and to finalize start-up plans.

• As grant management professionals seek to maintain compliance, generate revenue and increase capacity in their organizations, technology is one solution offered up for consideration.
• Take a look at the questions or format of the report in advance, and set aside time to finish it ahead of schedule.
• We’ll touch on each of these best practices and explain how you can use them for your own grant proposals process.
• The pre-award phase includes all tasks prior to the grant recipient being chosen.
• Once the agreement is signed by both the grantseeker and funder, the grant will be officially awarded.
• We’ll define key terms and points in the grant management process and suggest best practices and technology you can use now to achieve your goals.
• It tracks changes in public funding regulations and helps you understand internal controls and audits.

It can also help you determine an appropriate amount of funding to request and how much funding can be reasonably expected. HHS distributes the largest amount of grant funding of any Federal agency.

Managing Your Grant:

Learning how to manage a grant well involves a lot of planning and delegation. If the agency doesn’t provide you with a grants management document or booklet, ask if they have one and if so, get it. As you start your grant program, you may be able to manage the process with notebooks, spreadsheets, and file folders.

Times have changed and grant opportunities are not to be taken lightly. A well-researched grant opportunity can win over the competition. To say the competition is fierce would be a more accurate assessment. Make your application a priority and leave nothing to question. After the grant agreement has been signed and the funds have been disbursed, the post-award stage begins. The award stage is generally the shortest of the three phases.

This process can be a long and complicated one, often requiring proposals and paperwork that can, at times, seem arduous and overwhelming. Grant management is a key part of leading a nonprofit organization. Developing a grant management process to implement in your nonprofit is a sound way to feel confident you are meeting the requirements of your grant agreements. This is even more true when you are juggling more than one grant at once. Grant management can feel unwieldy, especially if you are starting from scratch or inherited a dated program.

Grant giving organizations require recipients to submit detail upon request. Tracking and measuring the progress of a grant can be one of the greatest frustrations that grant managers face.

Dummies has always stood for taking on complex concepts and making them easy to understand. Dummies helps everyone be more knowledgeable and confident in applying what they know. We’ll share with you insights such as what percentage of grantees are new vs. returning, what the median grants are between the different types of grantees, and what cause areas funders care about most. Foundations- this is likely the widest net of grantmakers to consider. You might think of some specific foundations to add to the list without leveraging a search tool; however, adding foundations could come in the next phase of prospecting as well. Board and stakeholder suggestions- ask your board and stakeholders who they know that may be interested in giving to your nonprofit.

Grant management includes strategic planning, efficient grant design, program development and effective tracking, and having sufficient resources to smoothly manage the process. As a nonprofit leader, you likely know just how complex the grant management process is. From searching for the right grants to handling reporting requirements and filing applications, it can be a time-consuming endeavor.

Many grant management software companies publish blogs and white papers full of advice and tips. Once you’ve identified organizations you want to work with, you can follow their sites for the latest offerings. Best practices in grant management range from cash management and accounting controls to records retention and reviewing the ROI of each grant and the entire program. If you have prepared successfully, you already have a team in place to execute on the grant and a process to track the deliverables. From start to finish, you need a solid plan that will help you succeed. Gaining inside knowledge into funding opportunities can also be easier than you might think. For example, when applying for a particular program, it can be helpful to examine information on previous awards made through that program.

A good monitoring system demonstrates that your organization is ethical and efficient. Project management Plan projects, automate workflows, and align teams. First, you must register with the Data Universal Numbering System or D-U-N-S®. The D-U-N-S® Number is a copyrighted, proprietary means of identifying businesses on a location-specific basis. The number is widely used by both commercial and federal entities and is the standard business identifier for federal electronic commerce. It can take up to four weeks or even longer for this process if there are problems with your information. To create a resource library, organize relevant documents that show proof of information such as revenue, current funding, and the size of your team.