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Government agencies are some of the biggest sources of grant money in almost every sector of society. The United States government awards more than $1.2 trillion in grants each year — and many of these grants go to state, local and tribal government organizations for further regranting cycles.
No matter which level of government your agency occupies, properly managing this funding is critical for ensuring your grantees get what they need to accomplish their projects. Building a strong grant management strategy is one of the best ways to devise and implement grant funding solutions in your government agency.
A quick refresher on the basics of grant management can help us establish what needs to happen with funding. Grant management involves the entire process of creating and administering grants, which typically includes the following steps:
Once this cycle ends, you may begin the cycle again once you have the funds available for another award. Grant cycles typically take anywhere from one quarter to several years, depending on the size of the award, the grant’s intended outcomes and the number of applicants you have to review.
Understanding the difficulties your agency deals with in granting and funding management is essential for finding ways to improve your strategies. Some of the most common challenges government agencies face in funding and grant management include:
Most government-funded grants are highly regulated to ensure accountability and prevent fraud, and regulatory complexity increases the more local you go. Federal requirements tend to be broad and far-reaching, while municipal regulations are significantly more detailed.
For example, all federal grants awarded to state, local and tribal governments must comply with the administrative requirements established in the Common Grant Rule, formally known as the Uniform Administrative Requirements for Grants and Cooperative Agreements to State and Local Governments. Those requirements include but are not limited to:
Ensuring your grant management strategy adheres to these complex requirements can be challenging when your agency is operating on a tight budget or timeline. Using grant management technology that has built-in compliance management features can help you minimize risk without stretching your staff too thin.
Low staffing, tight budgets and inefficient record-keeping systems make meeting compliance requirements unnecessarily difficult for grantors. Reliance on outdated legacy systems limits your ability to get the most out of your funds due to:
Using a centralized system can help you reduce these costs by eliminating the need to maintain multiple platforms at once. It can also make it easier to adhere to the relevant standards, improve internal workflows, simplify communication and much more.
Without access to the proper tools or data, it’s challenging to determine whether your award is really helping its intended beneficiaries. Receiving regular reports is important for monitoring progress, but you’ll also want a way to keep up with transactions between reporting deadlines. Advanced analytics and reporting solutions can help you and your grantees understand the full impact of your grants by providing real-time updates and generating reports with quantifiable insights on demand.
How exactly does grant management increase the impact of your funding? Here are the biggest benefits of using grant management processes to improve funding:
If your agency needs help getting started with grant management, you have plenty of resources to draw inspiration from. You can refer to funding standards and regulations and other government agencies, to name a few sources.
These three techniques can help you enhance your grant management processes and ensure smoother funding management in future grant cycles.
Digital grant funding management systems enable you to consolidate all your grant-related information under one roof, from financial reports to application reviews. Plus, automation makes it easier to keep processes moving, even when they would have run into obstacles using traditional systems.
Centralized solutions for grant funding like IntelliGrants® IGX can help you streamline your processes with:
IntelliGrants IGX is a web-based, all-in-one solution that can handle all your funding and grant management needs. With seamless integrations into the rest of your tech stack, our solution can help you rest easy by ensuring smooth data transfer and analysis throughout the grant life cycle.
Developing clear guidelines and frameworks for all grant cycles can help your agency distribute funds more evenly between grants, improve internal controls and create efficiency-boosting new processes.
Implementing best practices for grant management by adopting a digital solution like IntelliGrants IGX can help you streamline all of the above with built-in compliance configurations. Rather than allowing your grant processes to run behind due to compliance and communication backups, a comprehensive solution can simplify these tasks and save you valuable time.
One of the biggest benefits of a centralized grant management platform like IntelliGrants IGX is its ability to enhance communication and collaboration between different parties.
Storing all grant data in one centralized location ensures everyone with the proper authorizations can access and directly collaborate on grant management documents — even within the same document.
Your agency can also promote internal collaboration on key grant processes by partnering with other departments to reflect on and identify opportunities for continuous funding improvement.
Read our testimonials to see how IntelliGrants IGX helped real agencies improve their grant management processes.
Switching to IntelliGrants IGX helped the Bureau reduce overall operating costs and improve its ability to move funds toward the most impactful projects. By providing a wider range of monitoring tools and more streamlined communication between stakeholders, the Bureau was able to achieve seamless workflows that adhered to its unique policy and regulatory requirements.
While the New Jersey DCA has used the System for Administering Grants Electronically to manage grants for nearly two decades, IGX Solutions helped the department tailor the system to better meet their specific requirements.
Automated workflows optimized key internal processes and procedures, which eliminated bottlenecks and improved grant administration efficiency.
IGX Solutions worked closely with the Texas Department of Agriculture to develop grant management solutions that matched their unique workflows. The new solution’s intuitive interface and automated workflows helped the department manage more than a dozen grant cycles with greater efficiency than ever.
If your agency is looking for a modern funder grant management solution, IntelliGrants by IGX Solutions can help you achieve your goals.
Our platform is highly configurable, so you can input all the standards and regulations that apply to your organization and automate compliance. Streamlined workflows and powerful reporting capabilities help reduce the risk of fraud and funding misappropriation by enabling you to catch discrepancies in real time. Plus, GSA certification and built-in SOC 2 compliance provide peace of mind that your data is safe from external threats.
If your agency needs a rapid implementation with minimal changes, we also offer a preconfigured option called IntelliGrants IGXpress. This option allows you to achieve the impact you need without spending extra time managing granular settings and tasks and keeps your agency focused on core processes.
Ready to get started? Book your free demo today, and feel free to reach out with any questions!
