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:
- Filtering invalid applications
- Taming the paper trail
- Managing the review process
- Multiple programmes with different rules
- Information from multiple sources
- Speed of service and time to decision
- Keeping applicants informed of progress
- Management Reporting
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
- 24×7 service for all participants; applicants, reviewers, partners
- Improved ease of use for applicants
- Easy for referees & advisors, increasing their response rate
- Improved information quality, leading to better faster decisions
- Save staff time; system progress chases references & reports
- More efficient; generates deadline alerts & correspondence
- Improve post-award monitoring, with online progress reporting
- Bespoke framework avoids re-engineering your processes
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.
Applications
- Eligibility quiz guides choice of programme
- Self-service registration & 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
Expert Review
- Easy to use reviewer's workbench
- Online view of case documents
- Online scoring and report writing
- Reminders & deadline alerts
Committee
- Collaborative working with colleagues
- Shared access to documents
- Decision record
- Conflict of interest checking
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