How to Enhance Your Grant Management as a Nonprofit

Grant management is a complex process that spans from the pre-application stage all the way to the post-grant closeout, and doing it well is key for maximizing your organization’s potential impact. When you can efficiently manage payments, track project progress, report to grantors and close out your grant, you give your nonprofit an even better chance of securing additional funding in the future.

If you’re at the start of a new grant cycle, a little direction can help you identify areas for improvement easier. This article contains important guidance on how to enhance grant management in your nonprofit without overly complex solutions.

The Benefits of Improving Grant Management as a Nonprofit

Grant management is critical for securing funding and effectively using it to make your nonprofit’s vision a reality. Some of the biggest benefits of enhancing grant management for nonprofits include:

• Simplified compliance management: Improving your grant management strategies can help your organization ensure you’re handling your funding properly and reporting progress in accordance with your grantors’ requirements, making it easier to avoid noncompliance penalties.
• Efficient resource allocation: Effective grant management makes it easier to create realistic budgets for your projects, which ensures you have the resources you need to make your vision a reality and meet your funder’s requirements.
• Improved revenue streams: Having a reliable grant management system in place can help you source and manage more grants at once, increasing your nonprofit’s ability to do good and broadening the opportunities available to you.
• Enhanced accountability: Grant management requires intense attention to detail in documenting each transaction, and an effective grant management system makes it easier to create accurate audit trails for your funders.
• More sustainable operations: A well-designed grant management program goes beyond the individual project — it’s a crucial consideration for your nonprofit’s long-term survival. Prioritizing effective grant management can help you ensure you’re making the biggest possible impact on your community, which is essential for achieving your mission.

Of course, every nonprofit experiences obstacles in its quest for progress. However, effective planning and investments can help nonprofits overcome those challenges.

Common Grant Management Challenges for Nonprofits

Here are just a few of the most common grant management obstacles nonprofits encounter:

• Limited resources: Effective resource management is a critical component of grant management, and it can get tough when you’re balancing multiple grants at once. Adopting a centralized, web-based system can help simplify these requirements so you can manage your grant portfolios without purchasing more resources than you need.
• Miscommunication: Slow or unclear communication between the different parties involved with a nonprofit can cause process delays, data errors and other issues.
• Lack of visibility: Without a clear view of every component in your nonprofit’s system, you lose the ability to accurately measure performance and return on investment, which can cause compliance issues between you and your grantors.
• Compliance management: When you receive a grant, your organization needs to adhere to the financial and legal requirements your grantor outlines in your agreement. Meeting these requirements typically involves thorough record-keeping and total transparency to produce compliance reports by the deadline.
• Outdated systems: Many nonprofits still rely on a combination of paper-based and legacy systems to manage their grants, which introduces additional complexity to the process.
• Lack of time: As a nonprofit organization, you already have a lot on your plate — financial oversight, resource allocation, organizational planning and more. Adding complex grant management tasks to your to-do list can be challenging without a modernized digital solution.

No matter how large or small your nonprofit is, you can overcome these challenges with the right tools and strategies. 

7 Solutions for Improving Nonprofit Grant Management Processes

Making major changes in a nonprofit can be complex, especially when your team has become accustomed to repeating the same steps each grant cycle. Fortunately, you can improve your existing processes and policies without overhauling them.

Here are seven actionable tips you can use to enhance your nonprofit’s grant management processes.

1. Assess Your Existing Practices

Also known as a gap analysis, a thorough needs assessment of your current grant process can help you identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, providing valuable insight into how you can improve.

Here’s a quick overview of how you can use a gap analysis to identify your areas for improvement:

1. Establish your goals: Where do you want your nonprofit to be in terms of grant management? What is a reasonable target you can shoot for in the next grant cycle?
2. Evaluate your gaps: Where is your organization falling short of the goals you established in the previous step? These shortcomings are the “gaps” between your current state and your target.
3. Define your strengths: What is your organization already doing to improve performance? What works well? Note these reflections as a reference to encourage your team to continue excelling in these areas.
4. Create an action plan: Brainstorm realistic steps you can take to work toward your goals. How long will it take? How can you measure your progress?
5. Document and implement: Thorough documentation is essential for bringing your action plan to life. Make sure you note every recommendation and idea you and your team come up with for future reference. Then, set a date for when you will launch your strategy.

2. Close Communication Gaps

One of the biggest challenges in grant management is maintaining close communication with your grantors — late messages and miscommunications can lead to project delays and noncompliance penalties, potentially costing your nonprofit its funding. 

A centralized grant management solution that can integrate with the other communication and document management tools in your IT stack is essential for improving communication with other parties. It enables you to manage all your information from one simple location.

IntelliGrants® IGX, for example, features built-in communication tools you can use to keep all stakeholders up to date on project progress, major expenses, timeline updates and more. Plus, integrated web-based applications enable you to collaborate with the relevant parties in real time to enhance decision-making and follow up on important messages.

3. Promote Data-Driven Processes

The best decisions usually involve intense consideration, and that’s also true for grant-seeking. Data-driven decision-making in grant management is the process of using data to inform important decisions, such as:

• Selecting grants to apply for
• Planning upcoming projects that will require grant funding
• Choosing post-award key performance indicators to measure
• Establishing your project budget
• Determining what information to include in your proposal

Managing this process using paper-based and legacy solutions is often more challenging than necessary. Switching to a digital solution with powerful analytics and reporting capabilities can help your organization more effectively leverage the data you already collect.

4. Implement a Grant Management Software Solution

Siloed data and miscommunication are common issues for organizations that rely on legacy management systems. If you’re still using paper documentation or Excel spreadsheets to collect performance data and generate reports, it’s time to go digital.

Advanced grant management software can help your nonprofit elevate its processes for faster, more effective compliance and grant management. Plus, centralizing all your documents and communication data under one roof can save you valuable time and effort in reporting progress to grantors.

For example, IntelliGrants IGX is a comprehensive grant management solution with a highly flexible architecture that can accommodate various use cases for grantors and grantees. The configurable, user-friendly interface enables organizations to create workflows for specific workflows and processes, such as progress tracking and custom reporting.

5. Develop Comprehensive Training Programs

A well-designed training program is essential for aligning your team, which can help you reduce the risk of inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the grant management process. Training is especially important if you adopt a new software platform because you need to ensure all relevant stakeholders feel comfortable using the technology.

Every team member will be at a different level based on their experience. When creating a training program, consider how you can adapt each lesson to employees’ individual needs to ensure the most effective learning.

While an intuitive solution like IntelliGrants IGX significantly reduces the learning curve by prioritizing the user experience, you’ll still want to provide in-depth employee training to bring everyone on the same page. It can help to appoint one or two tech leaders from your team to begin experimenting with the tool before implementation so they can help their co-workers troubleshoot problems with this new system.

6. Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is the concept of using data from previous projects to adapt and improve processes over time. Acclimating your team to the concept of iterative improvements can help you build a culture of continuous improvement within your organization, boosting your chances of receiving funding.

Here are some tips to get started:

• Ask for feedback: Show your team their insights matter by regularly asking for their ideas and opinions. In addition to sourcing suggestions you may have otherwise overlooked, requesting employee feedback helps get your team comfortable with speaking up when they have something to say.
• Reward small improvements: Every little step toward achieving your goals is a win. Encourage your team to continue pursuing small, incremental goals so they can stay engaged in the process and incorporate their new skills into the next grant cycle.
• Lead by example: Committing to continuous improvement in your daily workflow can inspire your team to follow suit, creating habits over time.

At the end of each grant cycle, your team will feel more comfortable analyzing the data and suggesting ways to make your next application even better.

7. Strengthen Relationships With Your Funders

Miscommunication and delays between grantors and grantees can cause the relationship between both parties to become strained and impact your chances of receiving the full grant.

Some strategies you can use to improve this connection include:

• Personalize your approach: Change your approach based on which specific grantor you’re communicating with to ensure you’re always connecting on topics relevant to them.
• Use mutual connections: If you have any contacts with people and groups who have previously worked with your funders, you can leverage these connections to build trust and differentiate your nonprofit from others.
• Build rapport: Be personable and respectful with your grantors to develop a genuine relationship with them.
• Be transparent: It’s important to be completely open with your funders about how you are using your grant money and the impact it is making. For example, you could invite them to your site to show them in person the kind of work they are funding.
• Use their preferred communication channel: Communicating with grantors via their preferred channels improves the chances of your messages being seen, making it easier to connect with your funders when you need help most.

How IntelliGrants IGX Simplifies Grant Management for Nonprofits

IntelliGrants IGX is an intuitive, all-in-one grant management platform with various applications for funders and grant-seekers alike. Some of its key features and capabilities include:

• Advanced analytics and reporting: Our user-friendly reporting feature enables you to generate compliance reports using real-time data, so you can ensure you’re providing grantors with the most up to date information. Plus, personalization capabilities enable you to build a report that’s as broad or as granular as you need.
• Data security measures: IGX Solutions is SOC 2 compliant, which demonstrates our dedication to protecting your data. Whether it’s contact information or important progress-tracking documents, you can rest easy knowing we have stringent data security measures in place.
• Centralized hub: IntelliGrant’s web-based system consolidates all your data in the cloud for easy access, simplified organization and streamlined analytics. Break down data silos and reduce human error with our unified platform.
• Robust accounting features: Our streamlined accounting capabilities enable you to easily track and process core accounting data to ensure accurate, current reports.
• Automated notifications: Built-in email notifications help you stay on track with important reporting and submission deadlines so you can avoid noncompliance penalties.

Learn more about how IntelliGrants IGX can help your nonprofit, and read our testimonials to see our solution’s impact on real organizations like yours.

See IntelliGrants IGX in Action With a Free Demo

Efficient grant management is essential for securing and keeping grant funding for nonprofits, and grant management software can help your organization achieve its goals faster. To push your nonprofit’s grant management strategies to the next level, consider adopting IntelliGrants IGX.

Our mission is to help nonprofits and grantors streamline grant management so they can focus on making the biggest possible impact on their communities. That’s why we developed IntelliGrants IGX and IGXpress — to give foundations the resources they need to eliminate inefficiencies and keep grant management processes on track.

If you want to learn more, we’re here to answer your questions. Contact us today to speak with a member of our team, or use our scheduling form to book a live demo.