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.
Measuring grant impact is essential for supporting the functioning of philanthropic and government organizations because it:
Of course, creating an effective evaluation program is critical for conducting accurate and insightful assessments.
Before beginning a grant cycle, establish an evaluation plan. Following these steps can help your organization create and implement a robust grant evaluation program.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
Choosing the right program can significantly boost your organization’s evaluation efficiency and accuracy.
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.
