As a nonprofit executive, you are probably aware of how intricate the grant administration process is. Finding the correct funds, handling reporting obligations, and submitting applications can take a lot of time. Fortunately, there is a technique to speed up the procedure.
You can arrange and rank your grant proposals using application management software tools until they are approved in full. Once a process is established, you may devote more time to developing valuable workflows that further your objective.
The administration of grants and contracts for a nonprofit is a varied and challenging process. Any organization, specifically one that receives numerous grants, must have an experienced grants manager (including federal awards). In addition to coordinating the overall grant process, from formulation to closeout, a qualified grants manager will also make sure there is continuous interaction throughout the grant’s duration.
In this article, we will define the 5 grant management best practices for non-profits that any organization receiving grants must follow.
Create A Highly Compact Team of Professionals
It takes more than straightforward administration to manage current and upcoming grants. It’s a mistake to give duties to groups of people without experience or motivation.
Create a team with people who have worked together before. Give assignments to individuals who have the knowledge and abilities to complete them as effectively as possible.
Various divisions within an organization will normally be responsible for the overall conception, execution, and closeout of a grant. A planning department will incorporate grant actions and produce the required deliverables and reports, while a finance department will indeed be entrusted with reporting discretionary grant spending, maintaining the budget, and guaranteeing full cost recovery.
Similarly, a development department may be charged with writing and presenting grant proposals. In short, it is necessary to establish a team where everyone knows their responsibilities and is keen to fulfill them.
A Grant Tracking List/Calendar
You and your organization may stay organized by using a grant calendar. It ought to serve as a prompt for you to submit your grant reports and a reminder of the due dates for proposals to your funders.
You may track your grants in a variety of ways. Your grant calendar could be made up of a whiteboard or a simple wall calendar, a group Outlook or Google calendar, a project management system, Excel spreadsheets, or, ideally, a grant management solution like GrantHub, SmartSelect, etc., that integrates all these components into a single, seamless system. Whatever method you choose, try to adhere to the following standards:
- Everyone is aware of impending deadlines.
- When tasks have due dates, reminders are sent to the task owner.
- Anyone on the grant team can readily view grant materials and monitor their forthcoming deadlines.
- You follow a procedure to keep your calendar updated with fresh chances.
- Your long-term plan constantly takes into account potential funding sources that recur.
- The method effectively makes it possible to communicate your grant plan, progress, and outcomes.
Keep Track of Grant History & Main Funders
Creating a robust grant management strategy for your organization will benefit you in the long run since it will enable you to create a detailed, structured record of how you’ve qualified for, handled, and reflected on all prior funds.
You will then have a thorough understanding of how your staff has managed things in the past when getting ready to activate a new grant. Lean on any organizational or internal monitoring tactics that performed particularly effectively, and patch in any significant holes that became obvious only in retrospect.
keep up-to-date records of important donors and grant history. Someone’s email inbox shouldn’t be filled with this material. It compromises the capacity for fundraising and the potential effect on your organization.
Keep a record of contacts, priorities, and previous outcomes. Timely information availability is essential for managing your grants effectively. Without it, you face the risk of missing important dates and chances.
Analyze the Organizational Capacity
An organization should ensure that it has the ability to perform activities daily and produce the deliverables before submitting a grant. The organization should be careful to include expected deficits in the proposal if there are any. The proposed budget and timeframe, for instance, should consider the time needed to onboard and educate a new recruit if new staff members need to be hired.
A reasonable budget should also be confirmed by the organization. Are there any alternative sources of funding the organization would need to use in the event that there will be any cost overruns or charges that are not permitted to be incurred?
The organization should make sure when assessing the proposed budget that all expenses required to carry out the proposed activities have been taken into account. Nonprofits frequently underestimate these expenses in order to appear more attractive to applicants on a grant submission.
In the end, though, this is unfair to the nonprofit because it puts the donor’s ability to compare proposals accurately in jeopardy, and it may give the donor a false impression of how much it will cost and take to carry out the planned activities. It also increases the likelihood that the grant will be undervalued, forcing the nonprofit to find additional funding to supplement the grant.
Create a Boilerplates Library
Take time to ensure that you and your business are “grant-ready.” There are several resources that are ready for grants. Find one you like, and use it to make sure everything is lined up. It’s thought that you can finish up to 80% of the work required to draft a funding proposal before you even know to which funders you’ll be submitting it. You can finish more submissions in less time if this work is done in advance. The time saved can then be used for higher-value tasks that will make your proposal stand out from the competition.
You can save key documents, boilerplates, templates, and responses to frequently asked questions in an answer library. Everyone else on your grant team will be able to find, acquire, and use the clearest and most recent information for their grant work if it is available online.
What do you stand to gain? You don’t need to copy and paste obsolete material to the wrong funder or spend time looking for old applications. Additionally, if everyone has easy accessibility to the repository, you may control the information without having to impede the flow of it to those who also require it.
Bottom Line
Grant administration can divert time and money that could be used to change the world. Spend less time contacting people as to what is in their email inboxes and searching through storage boxes. Utilize specialized solutions to streamline the administration procedure and transfer the filing cabinet to a single, accessible platform.
SmarterSelect is one such solution for you. It is the one of the best nonprofit impact measurement platforms that combines multiple data sources to reveal real-time progress toward your goals, evaluate project success against set KPIs, and identify opportunities for further impact.
Author bio:
Mr. Davis is the Founder and President of SmarterSelect, a Dallas, TX based SaaS company that provides online application management services to scholarship, grant, and award providers such as foundations, universities, corporations, and associations. Prior to that he has served as President and CEO of network management firms Tavve Software and Oculan. He has served as a VP and General Manager at IBM/Tivoli Systems. Mr. Davis held several executive roles and was one of the first employees with The Tigon Corporation, a $250M telecom startup acquired by Lucent/Avaya. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a MBA from Southern Methodist University.
