Managing a grant involves vital steps such as application review, project tracking, fund monitoring and compliance reporting. When you understand the pre-award, award and post-award phases, as well as the best practices that go into grant management, you can significantly streamline your funding workflows. Advanced software offers automation and built-in tools to boost efficiency across the entire grant management timeline.
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Managing a grant from award to closeout involves designing funding opportunities, evaluating proposals, distributing funds and monitoring project progress until completion. First, you must understand the three primary stages of a grant, which are the pre-award, award and post-award stages.
To manage the pre-award stage, you must review applications that grant seekers submit for funding opportunities. Once organizations submit their applications and internal information related to their goals, your team can determine which applications qualify based on criteria such as the following:
Mission
Project plans
Fundraising needs
Team size
Revenue
Automated software can significantly accelerate the pre-award stage. An automated system scans and sorts applications, routing them to the correct review teams immediately. This gives your team more time to evaluate applicants’ eligibility.
Your team can then select organizations that meet the necessary criteria, have a clear funding objective and have positive revenue projections. Your team must also consider how many staff members or volunteers organizations have and how well your funding award could help them succeed in their missions.
During the award stage, your team notifies applicants of your decisions, comes to an agreement with each winning organization and distributes funds. The grant agreement contains the terms and conditions that are vital to the grant management process, outlining requirements for grant winners. Each grant agreement should contain these details for your grantees:
Reporting frequency and content requirements
Funds disbursement schedule and allowable expenditures
Project timeline, objectives and how these align with the grant’s terms
Regulations, record-keeping and audit requirements
The official point of contact at your funding organization
Formal modification processes
After disbursing funds, your team works with recipients to ensure they meet all expectations and requirements within their agreement. The post-award stage involves the following tasks:
Compliance and performance metric tracking: You must ensure that each organization under your management follows the terms in the grant agreement. This involves tracking their project’s effectiveness and compliance.
Fund utilization monitoring and budget oversight: Organizations must use grant funds according to their agreements. Grantees are responsible for keeping records such as invoices, receipts and purchase orders. As the grant maker, you can perform audits to track grantees’ spending and ensure all costs are allowable under the grant agreement and related regulations.
Continuous communication and workflow reporting: Grantees must communicate with your organization and other stakeholders throughout the term of their grant. You might receive periodic reports, perform audits, conduct interviews or schedule on-site visits to monitor a grantees’ mission progress.
Maintaining detailed documentation of outcomes: During a grant’s closeout phase, grantees are responsible for submitting reports on how they used their funds throughout the grant period. They must also reconcile financial expenditures and return funds from corrections, refunds or audits if necessary. You should receive reports approximately three months before each award’s end date.
Maintaining robust procedures and performing regular risk assessments is the best way to stay compliant while managing a grant. Here are some grant management best practices for compliance reporting, whether you grant awards to one applicant or several organizations:
A specific individual or small team can give specialized attention and expertise to grant compliance efforts. When you assign compliance tasks to a team or expert on your staff, you have a centralized point for the following tasks and precautions:
Establishing comprehensive internal controls creates a framework of checks and balances within your organization. You can segregate duties within your organization to enhance decision-making accuracy and perform regular internal audits to identify errors or potential noncompliance vulnerabilities.
Periodic risk assessments are vital for preventing and mitigating potential compliance violations that could impact funding initiatives and reputation. Your team should look for the following types of risks during assessments:
After identifying these risks, you should prioritize them based on their potential financial, reputational or programmatic impact. Your team can also enhance monitoring protocols and provide targeted compliance support to grantees for extra precaution.
Maintaining compliance requires a proactive system for tracking and integrating dynamic regulatory changes into grant-making practices. Your team should subscribe to official government publications, industry alerts and legal advisories that pertain to funding programs and philanthropic activities.
Designate one or several team members to review updates regularly and assess their impact on existing grant agreements, future funding opportunities and compliance requirements for grantees. Timely adaptation to new or modified regulatory frameworks is crucial for ensuring the conditions you impose on grantees are current and enforceable.
Financial reconciliation ensures your grantees spend the funds you disperse as intended. As the grantor, you must verify that each grantee’s financial reports and expenditures match the grant agreement’s plan and requirements. This part of the process involves tracking and comparing the following documents and financial information:
Organizations track grant deadlines and reporting requirements with dedicated grant management software and centralized calendars. Teams log grant criteria, application submissions and award winner details into systems that track metrics and trigger automated alerts. These systems can automatically send notifications of awards, dispersed funds, reporting deadlines and changes in regulations.
Yes, you need software to manage grants effectively in today’s fast-paced funding environment. Grant management software enhances and streamlines your processes for greater accuracy and efficiency, delivering the following advantages:
Advanced grant management software offers a streamlined, easy-to-use platform with built-in compliance controls and automated workflows. The following grant management software programs can significantly enhance your processes.
Intelligrants IGX is a configurable process management software that supports your operations from pre-award to post-award phases. With Intelligrants IGX, your team can quickly analyze and report data on an easy-to-use platform and boost efficiency across every task. This software solution adapts to your organization’s needs, workflows and specifications.
IG Essential is an out-of-the-box grant management solution with preconfigured workflows, roles, reports and forms. While IG Essentials is less configurable than Intelligrants IGX, it offers faster, easier implementation and a lower up-front investment. IG Essentials is grant management made simple.
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Here are some of the most common questions about grant management:
IntelliGrants IGX and IG Essentials are some of the best grant management software programs. They share the following tools:
You can also take advantage of advanced tools, such as drag-and-drop configuration, accessibility compliance and GIS mapping, when you use Intelligrants IGX.
Software automates data compilation, generates compliance-ready reports, calculates spending percentages, tracks metrics, and can export data in formats stakeholders expect. This reduces manual work and errors.
Yes, advanced grant management software is designed to help grant makers manage multiple grants at once. Its centralized platform compiles all documents and data into one secure location so that your organization can track multiple grants efficiently.
The entire grant funding and grantmaking process can be a headache waiting to happen if you don’t know how to manage grants or the best grant management practices to follow. At IGX Solutions, we know how essential it is to keep up with critical deliverables throughout the entire grant life cycle.
Our IntelliGrants platform makes it easier to manage grants with a centralized dashboard, preconfigured templates, built-in compliance tools and personalization features that adapt to your organization. The IntelliGrants IGX solution empowers agencies to efficiently analyze, track, and report on all grant data in the system from any stage in the grant life cycle, from pre-application and beyond. We also offer IG Essentials if you need a more out-of-the-box solution with faster implementation.
Instead of using outdated systems or separate tools, keep all the information you and your team need right at your fingertips. Contact us to book a demo or learn more about our full range of solutions.
