Maximizing Grant Impact: Measuring Success and Outcomes

The United States federal government awards more than $500 billion in grants each year to support projects in infrastructure, arts and culture, criminal justice, scientific research, agriculture, and more. Without proper data and analysis, though, it can be difficult to determine whether these grant projects have been successful.

Both funders and grantees can benefit from a robust grant evaluation program. This guide will explain how and provide tips for achieving this outcome in your organization.

Table of contents:

• The Importance of Measuring Grant Impact
• How to Begin Evaluating Grant Effectiveness: 6 Basic Steps
• Metrics to Analyze for a Quality Evaluation
• Common Challenges of Grant Evaluation
• How Grant Management Software Can Enhance the Evaluation Process
• Start Maximizing Grant Effectiveness With IntelliGrants IGX

The Importance of Measuring Grant Impact

Measuring grant impact is essential for supporting the functioning of philanthropic and government organizations because it:

• Holds grantees accountable: Assessing grant performance enables grantors to see whether grantees are handling funds properly.
• Informs key decisions: The data collected during grant evaluation can help both grantors and grantees make data-driven decisions in subsequent grant cycles to improve their chances of success.
• Enables continuous improvement: The findings from a grant evaluation can provide actionable feedback that both grantors and grantees can use to improve future grant cycles.
• Ensures alignment: Grantors can ensure the project they funded aligns with their organization’s goals and objectives.
• Improves grantee reputation: A string of positive grant reports helps grantees build their reputation and improve their likelihood of winning other grants in the future.

Of course, creating an effective evaluation program is critical for conducting accurate and insightful assessments.  

How to Begin Evaluating Grant Effectiveness: 6 Basic Steps

Before beginning a grant cycle, establish an evaluation plan. Following these steps can help your organization create and implement a robust grant evaluation program.

1. Plan Evaluations With Key Stakeholders

The first step in evaluating grants is to plan out how you will conduct those evaluations. What will your framework for assessing grant impact look like, and what protocols will your team need to follow to complete it? Answering these questions is critical for establishing the right plan.

Getting stakeholders — including your team, key funders and grant beneficiaries — involved early on makes it easier to ensure your strategy meets everyone’s expectations. These individuals can help you determine which metrics to measure to accurately reflect the progress the grant has funded.

Key points to address when planning a grant evaluation include:

• Defining purpose: What is the point of your evaluation? Typically, the purpose of a grant evaluation can include assessing project results, identifying opportunities for improvement and demonstrating the grantee’s accountability.
• Establishing outcomes and objectives: Clearly define specific and measurable goals for your evaluation that align with the project’s objectives and the grantee’s mission.
• Deciding on evaluation type: Will your assessment be formative or summative? Formative evaluations occur at specific points throughout the project to gauge progress and provide time for adjustments. Summative assessments are conducted only at the end of a project to address the grant’s final results.

2. Collect Grant Data

Sufficient data is critical for grant analysis and assessment. You can collect this grant data in various ways, depending on what you most need to know. Some examples include:

• Surveys: At the end of the grant cycle, you can survey project participants and staff to assess their sentiments regarding their success. This method can provide powerful qualitative data, which can reveal context for any quantitative data you collect.
• Interviews: Volunteers or staff members can interview project leadership to gain insight into their actions and opinions at the end of the grant cycle.
• Grant tracking tools: Web-based grant management software allows grantees to track and report progress in real time, so grantors always have access to the most up-to-date information. You can pull quantitative data directly from your software platform to use in your analyses.

Using a centralized online database stores all data collected throughout the grant cycle in one unified, cloud-based location. The cloud enables anyone from your organization to access and work with data from anywhere, on any device, as long as they have a stable internet connection.

3. Establish Evaluation Metrics

When you begin the evaluation process, you’ll decide which metrics and key performance indicators you’ll use to assess the results. These metrics should clearly reflect both your goals and those of your grantees.

Asking questions about what you want to analyze is a good first step for selecting metrics. You can also evaluate whether potential metrics are worth measuring by determining whether they fit into the following dimensions:

• Common interpretation: Make sure everyone on your team understands what each metric represents and why it’s important. A misunderstanding can cause errors to enter your dataset and interfere with your analysis.
• Accessible data: A centralized database and meticulous data collection can help you ensure you have the necessary information and context for your analyses.
• Actionable metrics: Pick metrics that will guide you toward the proper actions to improve your next grant cycle. Data that doesn’t translate into action can create barriers by limiting your potential for improvement.
• Simple calculations: The calculations to arrive at a metric should be easy to follow, even for people who aren’t data analysts. This dimension is especially important if you lack an advanced software system, as calculating complex metrics by hand can introduce unnecessary errors.

4. Analyze Collected Data

After collecting all the data you need, you must extract actionable insights from it. The analysis methods you use for this step should align with the evaluation metrics you established earlier to confirm your results make sense.

Software with advanced analytics capabilities can also help your team save valuable time and effort. These programs use powerful AI-based technologies like machine learning, predictive analytics and data mining to reveal hidden patterns and generate valuable insights faster than a human analyst could. Additionally, since modern programs pull information from a centralized database, you can rest assured knowing the findings of your analyses will be accurate and up to date.

5. Report Your Findings

Once you’ve completed your analyses of the data, it’s time to present what you’ve discovered in a detailed report. Whether you’re the grantee or the grantor, being completely transparent about your findings is critical for producing a meaningful and actionable report.

Visualizations like charts, tables and graphs can help grantees support their work by bringing the quantitative data to life. That said, creating these visualizations by hand is time-consuming. A comprehensive grant management platform with built-in reporting capabilities will help you automate report generation and save time.

6. Reflect on Your Results

After reviewing the report and any other reports collected throughout the grant cycle, your organization should conduct a post-mortem reflection that evaluates the overall success of the grant. Some key questions to guide this discussion include:

• How well did the grantee manage their funding? 
• What’s the total impact the grantee left on their community?
• Was there sufficient data to analyze during the evaluation?
• How often did the grantee submit reports on project progress?
• Should the organization monitor different metrics in the next grant cycle?

Metrics to Analyze for a Quality Evaluation

The metrics you choose should be tailored to evaluate specific concerns of the sector in which you operate. Here are some examples of different types of metrics you might use:

Impact and Outcome Metrics

Impact metrics can help you understand how well you or your grantees achieved the goals outlined in the grant proposal. The point of analyzing these metrics is to gauge the degree of change the grant made on the community, which is why the specific measurements used must reflect your organization’s sector.

For example, an organization that receives a grant for education might choose to measure how the grant facilitated improvements in areas like literacy rates and standardized test scores. You should also compare these metrics against the grantee’s historical baseline data to understand the depth of the improvement. If no benchmark data is available, grantees should collect it before continuing with the grant cycle.

Financial Metrics

It’s critical to assess grantees’ financial performance to ensure they handle grant funds correctly. Some examples of useful financial metrics you could measure include:

• Budget adherence: This metric measures how well an organization adheres to the proposed budget, which is important for maintaining grantor trust and preventing scope creep.
• Cost per outcome: This metric helps you understand how efficiently the grantee spent their awarded funds. You can calculate this metric by comparing the total costs of the project with the achieved outcomes.
• Return on investment (ROI): Make sure funds are allocated effectively by comparing the project’s benefits to its costs. The higher the ROI, the better the results.

Compliance Metrics

Monitoring key compliance metrics helps you ensure your organization or your grantees adhere to the relevant regulations and mitigate risk. Grantees in the health care sector, for example, likely need to follow HIPAA regulations to ensure patient data is secure from external attackers.

Qualitative data, such as survey responses and interview insights, are best for this category because compliance is often difficult to put in numerical terms. You could ask team members how well they believe their organization followed key regulations, for example, and draw insights based on patterns in their responses.

Common Challenges of Grant Evaluation

Because organizations are often operating with limited resources and difficulty managing data well, they have more difficulty running a thorough evaluation of a grant cycle. The two most common challenges include:

Resource Limitations

Whether the organization is short on staff or operates on a limited budget, restricted resources present a significant challenge to conducting a smooth evaluation process.

Potential solutions for grantees can include:

• Choosing a more narrow range of metrics to evaluate. 
• Bringing on volunteers to collect evaluation data and conduct surveys.
• Splitting the workload with other organizations in the same field.
• Sourcing additional funding to support evaluation activities.

Grantors can circumvent this issue by investing in advanced grant management software, which can automate key evaluation activities like data analytics and reporting. With this technology, organizations can save valuable time on the most tedious activities.

Lack of Data Management

Failure to manage data effectively can cause inaccuracies and other errors to enter your reporting, which can reduce the effectiveness and value of your evaluation. Data management improves more than reporting and analytics efficiency — it’s essential for maintaining accurate, current data across all parts of the organization.

Here are some examples of data management solutions that grantees can use:

• Setting hard deadlines for data collection.
• Establishing data collection timelines in the initial proposal.
• Choosing specific volunteers or team members to take on a data management role.
• Frequently reviewing and updating metrics as needed to align with evolving requirements.

Both grantees and funders can use grant management software to easily organize and manage all grant data throughout each step of the project. Internet-connected software makes your data more accessible, so evaluations can continue even when one team member must be out of the office for the day.

How Grant Management Software Can Enhance the Evaluation Process

Although it’s possible to conduct grant evaluations using legacy methods, implementing an advanced grant management software platform can help modernize and streamline your processes.

Here are some ways a grant management software solution can help you better evaluate your results:

• Centralized data storage: A web-based solution stores all your information in one cloud database, so you can run analyses and generate reports from anywhere.
• Advanced analytics capabilities: A comprehensive grant management platform like IntelliGrants® IGX can help you save time by analyzing all the relevant data faster than a human analyst could.
• On-demand reporting: Your solution should be able to generate a detailed report both at pre-scheduled intervals and whenever you need to produce quantitative evidence of your impact.
• Automated workflows: A selection of custom and preconfigured workflows enables you to analyze and report on various grant data points with ease.

Choosing the right program can significantly boost your organization’s evaluation efficiency and accuracy.

Start Maximizing Grant Effectiveness With IntelliGrants IGX

While the grant evaluation process can be challenging, investing in a robust grant management platform like IntelliGrants IGX.

IntelliGrants IGX is an all-in-one grant management platform that offers total flexibility to fit your unique organizational needs. Whether you’re at the federal, state or local level, or even if you’re with a nonprofit, you can configure our purpose-built solution to any type of organization and maximize efficiency.

See how IntelliGrants IGX can help your organization with every stage of the grant life cycle. Request your free demo today to get started.