User:Jrubner/Grant Management Software

Grant management software is a technology solution that assists fund-seeking organizations such as nonprofits and universities in administering and automating the grant process. Functions can include grant discovery, budget planning, peer collaboration, regulatory compliance, proposal submission, administrative reporting and project tracking. Often available as a web-based cloud service, grant management software helps grant managers, principal investigators, researchers and other individuals ease grant-related administrative burdens.

Grant management software roles

A grant manager (or grant administrator) can be responsible for many tasks--from grant writing to regulatory compliance. He or she can also be responsible for identifying grant project teams and ensuring teams are communicating effectively. These tasks are often time consuming. Grant management software is designed to reduce the time spent on these activities by automating functions such as opportunity discovery, peer collaboration and workflow tracking.

Grant management software offers pre-award or post-award solutions, or both. The pre-award process encompasses everything needed until a grant is awarded, such as applications and preparation. The post-award process encompasses tasks after an award is won.

Some solutions, such as the BlackCat Grant Management System, provide features for the entire lifecycle of a grant. Other solutions, such as In4Grants, offer comprehensive and targeted services for the pre-award process. Yet others, such as InfoEd International, focus on the grant discovery part of the pre-award process and offer some post-award services.

Most grant management solutions are available as a hosted service. Under this model, customers pay vendors for online access to the software. Commonly called SaaS (software as a service) or a cloud service, hosted software is available as an application that is run at vendors’ own facilities. One of the benefits of hosted software is that customers often need little or no internal IT support. Despite some concern over security, hosted services are usually more secure than nonprofits’ own IT systems.

Grant management software market

Many nonprofits, schools and universities rely on grant funding. Each year, all U.S. grant sources give an estimated $1 trillion in grant money. The federal government alone spent $489 billion in grant funding in fiscal 2006.

Grant management software companies operate in the information-management market. In a 2009 report, Gartner Group said the business-intelligence segment of this market grew 22 percent, despite overall stagnant IT expenditures that year. For grant discovery and collaboration in particular, annual market spend is estimated at $1.5 billion, of which $350 million is attributed to grant-management-specific IT solutions.

Grant discovery

Grant management software can help customers find grants by automatically searching known funding sources and alerting users when applicable grant opportunities are available. One site that grant discovery solutions can search is Grants.gov, which lists opportunities from 26 federal grant-making organizations. Other funding sources that can be included are foundations. There are hundreds of foundations in the United States, the top three being the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation and J. Paul Getty Trust, which have combined assets of $54.1 billion. In addition, some discovery solutions search for grants that are offered at the state level.

Grant collaboration

Preparing for award submissions, finding funding opportunities, and managing grant projects takes considerable collaboration. Some grant management software offer collaboration solutions to make this process easier. Collaboration solutions can help users review grant opportunities, vote on opportunities to apply for, and communicate with other project peers.

A select few software vendors deploy social-media applications to simplify collaboration, which help limit the sometimes cumbersome serial communications process of emails. Increasingly, researchers and others involved in the grant process are adept in modern technologies such as social media. Older professionals are using social media, too; according to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll, 47 percent of adults aged 50 to 64 used sites such as Facebook. As a result, social media tools are increasingly being used for business communications purposes, including the business of managing the grant process.

Grant tracking and reporting

Organizations that receive funding often have to track grant-related activity and report results to grantors. These tasks can include creating and maintaining award documentation, preparing budgets, and ensuring fund use is within grantor compliance. Grant management software can offer solutions for these tasks. It can record who participates and manage grant-related documents such as letter templates as well as export data to programs such as Excel for easier reporting.

Select grant management software solutions

• BlackCat: Developed by Panther International to manage the entire lifecycle of a grant, this system facilitates the creation, entry, storage, management and analysis of funding resource information. It also supports milestones and compliance management.

• In4Grants: Developed by InfoReady, In4Grants offers discovery of targeted funding opportunities, project-based social-media collaboration, and automated tracking capabilities that limit the use of manual filing, spreadsheets and document-sharing sites. This solution is focused on the pre-award process and caters to universities, schools and economic-development organizations.

• InfoEd: This solution helps institutions better search for grant funding with its SPIN (Sponsored Programs Information Network) system and manages certain aspects of the post-award process.

• IntelliGrants: Offered by Agate Software, this commercial off-the-shelf product features application and workflow management, scoring, audit assistance and more.

• IT Works: This solution helps higher education and research institutions track total direct cost, total indirect cost, cost sharing, and information regarding principal investigators and investigator effort. In addition, this software offers compliance monitoring.

• Microsoft Grants Manager: This accelerator from Microsoft streamlines the grants process from initial solicitation to approvals and awards. Features include tracking grant status, processing payouts and report creation.

• Sage Fund Accounting: An integrated financial management system that helps grant seekers stay within budget and demonstrate greater accountability, this solution also helps customers with reporting requirements such as those mandated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

• WizeHive: This cloud-based platform automates an organization's forms, workflows and business processes.

External links

1. BlackCat http://www.blackcatgrants.com/
2. In4Grants http://www.in4grants.com
3. InfoEd http://www1.infoed.org/
4. Grants.gov http://www.grants.gov
5. Pew Research Center http://people-press.org/