How to Choose the Best Grants Management System

Experienced grantmakers know that managing a grant program on a single Excel worksheet can be a real nightmare. From the involvement of multiple reviewers to custom report building, grant management requires powering lots of processes within a limited time frame, which is difficult to do with Excel. With online grant management software that resonates with the goals of your project or organisation, you get all the necessary solutions in a single package.

Grant management system requirements

Many users focus primarily on the available tracking features when it comes to choosing a comprehensive grant management platform. Indeed, the capabilities for real-time submission management and payment verification will get the process up and running quickly. However, an up-to-date software solution for grant management can be much more than that. Here are the major tasks that a grant management system should be able to accomplish:

• Provide multi-level user access to a database/submission dashboard
• Enable flexible budgeting (expense tracking, cost allocation, etc.)
• Guarantee transparency and data protection in terms of the submission review process
• Automate report building and verify real performance against the established metrics

The major criteria for selecting a grant management system

Once it becomes clear that your grant campaigns cannot have a bright future without the use of an efficient software solution, start searching for your perfect-fit software. With an abundance of digital grant management services currently available on the market, it’s critical to ensure that you know what your target is. Explore the options, align them with your grant programs, and decide which quality indicators and software features are the most important to you. Below are the basic selection criteria you might want to integrate into your strategy:

Vendor interviews

Even if a software functionality package seems quite impressive, it doesn’t always mean it is the right fit for your organisation. To understand whether the grant management system can make things easier for you and is easy to adapt, consider running vendor interviews. Here are the questions that will help you find your perfect match:

• Which operational/organisational/administrative processes do you think are the most critical to our grant program?
• Which mechanisms for integrating with our IT system do you have in place?
• Can you identify the potential risks for our program?
• How will you measure your performance?
• How will you help us understand that we’ve achieved the best results possible with you as our vendor?

Data migration

Whether you’re switching to an online event management system for the first time or you’ve used other software before, your grant program is most likely linked to some sources of data. Accordingly, data migration is one of the principal quality indicators when it comes to grant management. Ensure that you entrust your grant program to a software solution that can help unite all of the disparate data streams into one transparent source of information that provides full-scale data visibility.

Integration

To reduce the workload for your organisation, you might want to integrate grant management software with your existing financial systems or any other third-party applications. Check to see whether a vendor is good at integrations before making your final decision.

Training

You can’t adopt a new technology without adopting a new learning curve. Still, wasting too much time on training might substantially decrease your ultimate performance. Focus on grant management software that is intuitive, ensures quick user adoption, and doesn’t require users to go through tiresome onsite training processes. Also, inquire whether a vendor has reliable 24/7 client support available to help you solve ongoing issues.

How do you find the best grant management system for your foundation?

Narrowing down the choices and focusing on solutions that are truly the best for you is a complicated task. The only way to make it work is through systemising the needs and requirements of your foundation in terms of grant management. Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding the best grant management system:

• Establish your needs. Gather your team and dive deep into a brainstorming session. The result should be a detailed list of your organisation’s needs. It’s very important not to discuss any particular software options during this session to ensure you meet your specific requirements without being linked to any functionality packages. As a result, you’ll develop the optimal plan for how to achieve the best grant management results using the resources you have.
• Determine a realistic budget. Smart spending choices are always based on scrupulous budget planning. Identify your foundation’s income, decide how much should be spent on the support of each grant management stage, and develop a realistic budget. It’s a good strategy to design three budget categories: expected costs, the maximum amount of money your foundation is prepared to spend, and a backup budget. This way, you’ll have a budget solution for any event scenario.
• Prioritise the must-haves. If you’re planning to involve judges/reviewers from different countries, your primary focus in terms of submission evaluation should be an automated assignment tied to a specific time zone. Through the identification of your must-haves, you can create the right conditions for a targeted search. This will make your task much easier as you focus only on the solutions with the features that match your must-haves.
• Consider team limitations. There’s a misconception that grant management software can fully substitute manpower, but the reality is very different. To keep track of all processes, moderate submissions, and resolve ongoing issues, you still need a team. Decide how many people will take charge of a grant program and establish a means for assigning responsibilities as well as tracking progress. Based on this data, look for solutions that will match your team’s limitations.
• Research tools. Visit the Capterra website, ask for recommendations from colleagues, or read “A consumer’s guide to grant management systems,” which includes over 20 software reviews. The biggest indicator of your success is how well you do your research.

• Demo the options. Once you have your custom list of the best software platforms, contact the vendors and ask them whether you can demo the products. You can also inquire about how to test the features that you consider the most vital and jump directly to them.
• Evaluate and decide. Narrow down your choices to the software packages that have the most resonating functionality for your requirements. To make the final decision, evaluate some secondary nice-to-have features, compare pricing, and tap into the ways of integrating the software with your current infrastructure.

Conclusion

From an intuitive interface to excellent data migration features, efficient grant management systems have many superpowers. Explore your foundation’s requirements, demo the best solutions you find on the market, and then take your grant programs online.