A recent study by BearingPoint has shown that by automating key processes and providing self-service to grant seekers, grant makers can significantly reduce their administrative overhead by up to 87%. Many grant making organisations are under increasing pressure to produce efficiency gains or deliver new and innovative services. Online grant management provides a way to lower operational costs, whilst simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction.
The challenges of managing a grants operation include:
To address these challenges fully you need to go beyond a simple online application form and to go beyond a traditional database. Our government-strength flexible framework enables us to configure the solution to meet your policy, stakeholder and budgetary requirements without compromising the underlying standards of security, reliability and usability.
Benefits and Savings
Functionality
These functions are a "menu" rather than an absolute list because we tailor for each customer. For example some customers have an existing back office / CRM system, in which case we can add collaborative working and online applications to your existing system.
- Eligibility quiz guides choice of programme
- Self-service registration and logon
- Wizard driven pre-applications and/or full applications
- Built in help and guidance
- Spell check, word count, automated calculations
- Save partially completed applications
- Supports collaborative applications
- Supports third party approvals and nominations online
- Track progress of applications
Staff workbench
- Track and monitor case status
- Search historical information
- Automated progress chasing
- Helps meet deadlines with “to-do” lists
- Can escalate urgent or overdue work
- Manages workflow, allocating tasks to next participant
- Produces and files correspondence
- Search, select, assign reviewers
- Management reporting
- Easy to use reviewer’s workbench
- Online view of case documents
- Online scoring and report writing
- Reminders and deadline alerts
Post Award Monitoring
- Applicants given secure self-service access via web portal
- Access privileges protect confidential data: e.g. only their own projects
- Selective view, displays subset of case information
- Interactive guided progress reports & payment requests
Committee
- Collaborative working with colleagues
- Shared access to documents
- Decision record
- Conflict on interest checking
“We wanted a supplier who would partner with us over the long term, to help us grow our ideas and implement them in a modular and agile fashion. Toplevel has been very flexible and supportive, and their partnership has helped us get as far as we have as quickly as we have.”
Gary Castle
Head of IT & Facilities
The Heritage Lottery Fund
“Toplevel has enabled the Charity Commission to help charities get advice that they need and access to the services they want at a time convenient to them. The new system not only allows charities to submit their annual accounts and returns through an online portal, but also allows them to update trustee details and get in touch with us securely online.”
Nick Allaway
Executive Director
Charity Commission
“We put our current programme application online in English and Welsh. It worked well - this has the potential to save a lot of effort in publishing electronic application forms in multiple languages.”
Ivan Salcedo
Head of Creative Services
National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts
