5 min read
Are you feeling the overwhelming pressure of administrational tasks, as opposed to activities contributing to your organisation’s purpose, such as making an impact on your community? It’s a common occurrence in grant management. This can make it difficult to know what impact you are making and how you can do things more effectively.
There is so much involved when managing funds and striving for a positive impact. Administering financials, managing contracts and reporting back on outcomes – the full grant lifecycle is extensive. Grant management requires a lot of administration and communication and involve a range of stakeholders. This tedious process can hold you back from achieving your desired impact. The key is to make the process more streamlined, more efficient and easier for everyone involved. How can this be achieved?
Digital transformation.
A term that has recently grown in popularity, digital transformation is the adoption of technologies to create new or modify existing business processes and customer experiences, which can lead to enormous advantages and increase in outcomes.
Using a modern software solution to manage your grants, contracts and impact reporting brings all your activities together, streamlining your process, and leading to a range of significant benefits and can help accelerate your digital transformation.
The impact of digital transformation on grantmaking
1. Efficiency
Instead of using paper forms or several different (manual) processes to manage the different stages of the grant lifecycle, digital solutions consolidate everything in one place. With your application, assessment and reporting all managed in one system, everyone will be able to access the information necessary from the same updated source. This systematic way of managing the grant lifecycle means that double handling of data is in the past, repetitive tasks can be automated, and change of errors and time spent on administrative work will be reduced.
For AVPN, having a unified point of truth that consolidates the copious amount of materials that comes with the application process has played an integral role in improving our approach to grant management. With multiple application tracks ongoing at the same time, it can be particularly demanding on the resource hours to juggle between them. Leveraging on such a system has enabled us to do more with less time and draw more focus into our core mission to effectively mobilise capital towards impact.
2. Collaboration
While conventional philanthropy would suffice in the past, there is a shift occurring. Funders, stakeholders and other ecosystem players are expecting to be more involved when it comes to the grantmaking process. Collaboration has become more important, and there is a stronger focus on measurable impact. By having a variety of actors involved in the process, easy communication and transparency is needed. Digital solutions, such as grant software, provide a centralised and connected space for effective collaboration during the grant process – from application and assessment all the way through to impact reporting.
Collaboration with a focus on measurable impact becomes more important in effective grantmaking
AVPN’s inaugural pooled fund brought together a diverse group of funders to support a unified cause. In adhering to this spirit of collaborative philanthropy, we wanted to make sure the applicant review process similarly reflected a myriad of different viewpoints. Leaning on the structural support of the grant system allowed for frictionless involvement of external parties in the decision making process.
3. Transparency
With the continuously increasing privacy requirements in mind, transparent processes in handling sensitive and personal data become more important. With a secure software solution to manage your grants, you can maintain one source of truth, adhere to privacy requirements whilst providing appropriate levels of access to those involved. This leads to reliable data, allowing you to make informed decisions. Furthermore, grant software provides you with an audit trail, which can provide you with insights into your own processes and assist you with compliance requirements.
4. Responsiveness
In the past year, we all experienced the importance of flexibility and responsiveness. Industries serving social and community purposes, in particular, benefit from a high level of adaptability as they are required to act rapidly to support those in need. As circumstances and policies change, processes need respond to community demand in a timely manner. By having a system in place that is transparent and scalable, changes can be made rapidly, reducing disruptions to the community and business.
5. Reporting on impact
With growing stakeholder involvement and expectations, the importance of reporting on impact has increased. The focus on transparency during the grant management process further increased the importance of impact reporting. Digital grant management solutions provide you with an overview of your entire grant lifecycle. With easy-to-use reporting capabilities, grant software like Enquire easily captures a grantee’s impact indicators and targets at the application step of the process. Later in the grant lifecycle grantee report, their actuals simply feed into the impact story for stakeholders. This provides you with incredible insights into your process and a clear view on the impact you are making, enabling you to continuously improve your social impact.
The End Goal: Continuous Social Impact
If you want to improve the efficacy of your grantmaking process by reducing manual tasks and focusing resources on responding swiftly to the region’s most pressing social issues, grant software is a necessity.
Through digital transformation, AVPN is better equipped to ensure the continuity of our grant programs for future rounds and are on the right path towards enhancing support to our beneficiaries.
Want to know more about how digital solutions can transform your grant management, contract management and impact reporting?
Visit Tactiv Grant Management or contact us for a chat to discuss your situation.
