When we speak to organisations that rely on grants as a large portion of their annual revenue, it’s very clear that in today’s landscape strategic grant management is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Managing grant funding usually means a combination of juggling multiple spreadsheets, email threads, documents, portals and calendar reminders. The long-term consequences of this approach can be severe, and cause teams to miss acquittal deadlines and risk losing future funding.
Another common issue is when grant management tasks are divided among multiple people it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. To solve this problem, it is possible to hire a Grant Specialist or Grant Officer who can centralise grant ownership, but these team members still have to manage tasks like milestone reporting, gathering information from stakeholders for applications, financial reconciliation, and all the administrative burden of keeping track of multiple grant programs and projects manually.
One of the best ways to look at solving the grant management gap in a grant-dependent organisation is by implementing grant management software to centralise grant operations.
Why is Centralised Grant Management Important?
Strong grant management is the backbone of financial stability for many regional councils and non-profits in Australia that rely on grant revenue to maintain operations. It encompasses everything from identifying suitable funding opportunities to applying for grants, and then managing the funding and reporting until acquittal.
Dan Pritchard, CEO of SurePact, points out, “When we have an organisation that’s attempting to deliver their outcomes and deliver their impact over a fixed period of time, peaks and troughs in their ability to access grants and access funding can cause them a real challenge.”
This financial instability can lead to:
- Difficulty in long-term planning and budgeting
- Inability to commit to multi-year projects or initiatives
- Potential staff layoffs or program cuts during funding gaps
Organisations relying on grants face risks when they lack centralised grant management. Without clear ownership or a reliable system, they may become inefficient, and, most importantly, lose critical knowledge of current grant programs when key team members leave, which causes them to risk future funding and damage relationships with funders.
The long-term impact of not centralising grant management means financial instability becomes normalised and teams are expected to tread water to stay on top of grant-related tasks.
How Does Grant Management Software Help Recipients?
A majority of grant management software is developed for grantmakers and funders who distribute funds (outbound grants). There are huge efficiency gains that grant management software for grantmakers offers government agencies, non-profit organisations, and foundations to manage their application submission, review, scoring, and award processes digitally.
For grant recipients who focus on managing inbound grants, the options for software are limited, and we often hear from those working in non-profit and local government that grant teams resort to bouncing between spreadsheets, accounting systems, email threads and calendar reminders to stay on top of their post-award grant management priorities.
However, recently there has been an increase in awareness that grant management software for recipients can solve the governance and accountability problems in the post-award phase when it comes to reporting and risk monitoring of grant-funded projects.
Grant management software helps teams tie the key stages of their grant lifecycle, from the recipient’s perspective, from pre-award to post-award, so that they can connect the dots from funding to outcome.
The 5 Advantages Grant Management Software Provides Grant Recipients
1) Applying for the Right Grants On Time
Governance when it comes to what grants to apply for (and which to not apply for) is critical, but often not considered when organisations lack central ownership of their grant strategy.
When different teams start applying for grants on their own without a consistent governance process or place for making those decisions, there are consequences, such as:
- Submitting multiple submissions for the same grant program
- Creating a last-minute project that may be unsustainable in the long run just to win the grant
- Applying for grants they can’t afford to win, due to co-contribution requirements
- Being awarded grants without noticing that delivery timeframes cannot be met
- Causing other projects to be delayed or dropped due to new grant obligations taking up resourcing
- Missing deadlines, because the application was not prioritised
- Introducing unsustainable costs of managing new assets without prior planning
This is where grant management software comes in handy by:
- Standing up a governance process whereby standardised checkpoints need to be met before a new grant program can be considered.
- Acting as the collaboration space for stakeholders across the organisation to work on the grant application together, where questions and risks are flagged with sufficient notice.
- Documenting all the requirements, stats, and deadlines for grant programs in the pipeline so applications can be prioritised by urgency.
2) Integration with Finance Data
Grant management software can integrate with finance systems to unlock significant efficiencies, such as:
- Real-time financial tracking of grant expenditures, which reduces the need to ask the finance team for updates on spend on grant-funded projects.
- Finance-ready acquittals; providing reports and data on grant allocations from one source of truth, without needing to untangle multiple spreadsheets with VLOOKUP and pivot tables.
- Keeping leadership and stakeholders on the same page when it comes to monthly reporting, or simply when you’re thrown a curveball question during a meeting.
It is vital to integrate core systems that are already embedded within the organisation to adopt new processes, such as grant management. Thanks to integration, new processes can instantly deliver value and gain buy-in, which allows them to be successfully implemented. In contrast to spreadsheets and manual processes, this is where cloud-based grant management software wins.
3) Not Missing Reporting Deadlines and Variations
Grant teams with experience know that winning grants is only half the battle — managing grants and meeting all reporting obligations after the grant has been awarded can be more important than submitting the grant application itself.
Upon receiving a new grant, the organisation is also signing on to project delivery requirements that must be met based on the funding agreement established. The ongoing reporting provided back to the grantmaker serves as critical touchpoints to prove that you are delivering on your promises. As time goes on, particularly for multi-year grants and projects, there will be a need to manage and communicate variations to ask for additional funding. If left to the last minute (or worse, not flagged at all) this will put future funding at risk, even when it’s a grant that’s already been awarded.
Grant management software for recipients gives the organisation the tools to:
- Manage reminders and tasks for reporting deadlines.
- Make acquittal reporting faster by centralising data through integrations with finance data.
- Monitor any risks in project delivery so variations are flagged with enough lead time to the funder.
4) Reducing Key Person Risk
Without a centralised source of truth, grant-dependent councils and organisations that experience high turnover of staff risk losing track of their current grant operations. This leaves the remaining team members with little idea of when future reporting is due on the grant funding streams they need to continue managing.
Information around activity logs, variations, and external contractors are hard to tie together using purely spreadsheets and a filing system, especially where there’s a need to marry up a many-to-many relationship, such as when:
- You have multiple grants that fund one project, or
- You have multiple projects funded by one grant
Purpose-built grant management software helps recipient organisations bring this web of data together and helps ensure continuity when key team members leave. On top of that, having data stored and maintained correctly also simplifies hand-off to any incoming staff who are likely to join long after previous team members have departed.
5) Maintaining Reputation with Funders
In the tight-knit Australian grantmaking community, reputation is everything. Organisations that consistently struggle with meeting compliance, reporting, and project delivery requirements on grants they have been awarded will risk damaging their relationships with funders.
“Erosion of trust is something that occurs quite easily with grantmakers, partners, and stakeholders if an organisation is struggling to consistently manage compliance and reporting around their grant programs. Grantmakers are always looking for organisations that have got a great track record of managing grants. They know that their money is safe with those organisations, and they can rely on them to continue to produce outcomes and drive impact.”
Dan Pritchard, CEO of SurePact
The consequences of this erosion of trust can include:
- Reduced chances of securing future grants, and potentially jeopardising existing funding that’s already been awarded if acquittal and milestone deadlines get missed often.
- Damaged trust with key stakeholders, which is hard to gain and easy to lose.
- Negative word-of-mouth within the funding community and challenges in securing fresh funding from new grantmakers.
Next Steps: Getting Started with Grant Management Software
Now that you’re aware of the benefits of using grant management software, the next step is to do your research and shortlist potential software options that fit your organisation’s needs. Check out our article on how to choose the right grant management software for more tips.
SurePact is an example of grant software that has robust features around project tracking, grant funding allocation, and reporting for local councils and organisations that want to take control of their grant funding as recipients. Book a demo to learn if SurePact is the right choice for your team.
