Why GMS? Making the Case

If you're managing grant funds in spreadsheets and keeping track of program progress and expenditures with documents and emails, you're likely keenly aware of the inherent risks and administrative headaches. You may already recognize that grant management software (GMS) can address these and contribute numerous other benefits. However, like many of your grant management peers across agencies, departments, and organizations big and small, you probably need to convince others in order to get buy-in for that expenditure. It may be folks in finance, leadership and your IT department that need to first see the true value of this investment. Read on for talking points to help you share how a GMS can actually have significant financial and human impact. 

Why Grant Management Software?

Utilizing a purpose-built GMS mitigates risks, increases spend down, facilitates equity in your programs, improves compliance and reporting, decreases administrative burden, enhances transparency and accountability, and provides access to more funding sources. These are just a few of the benefits you can outline to build your case.

Below we take a look at five critical outcomes of utilizing a GMS, like AmpliFund. What's more, we reference things you can actually track and measure--not just ideas and "nice-to-haves".

Build your case around how implementing grant management software enables you to: 

• Improve compliance and audits
• Automate processes
• Save time (which equals money)
• Centralize to expand capacity
• Increase funding

Improve Compliance and Audits

Organizations often have difficulty tying grant activities to performance metrics, which can cause issues in the single audit. This same data and reporting limitation impacts compliance with federal requirements, which is particularly concerning as these continue to evolve. Noncompliance can result in loss of future funds and even potentially having to pay back current funding. Implementing grant management software can be an effective way to streamline your organization’s processes, improve transparency, and automate reporting requirements for compliance.

Automate Processes

Grants are typically managed by several stakeholders, each with their own methods and tools to accomplish their goals. This can result in disjointed communication and can hinder your efforts to increase accountability. With grant management software, you can simplify existing complex business processes with configurable workflows that replicate steps between disparate systems, standardize procedures, and eliminate repetitive tasks.

Save Time (which equals money)

Federally funded organizations report spending, on average, 40% of their time on general administrative tasks. With grant-funded programs the administrative burden can be large. These include such things as tracking incoming funds, expenditures, and reimbursements; managing internal and external communications; gathering documentation; monitoring recipients; and much more. By using purpose-built grant software designed for managing both grant maker and grant seeker processes, organizations can improve efficiency and drawdown and then reallocate time saved to other pressing organizational and community needs.

Centralize to Expand Capacity

Centralizing grant management requires aligning people and processes across the organization. The benefits include increased transparency, efficiency, compliance, and capacity. All of this is hugely important, but also a large undertaking that cannot be accomplished successfully without implementing the right technology. Grant management software can bring more departments, contacts, and recipients together into a secure "place" to manage all grant activity. Connecting the people, processes, documents, and data within this system also enables you to see where improvements are needed. As a result, this technology can help you to mitigate risk, eliminate information silos, and reduce duplicate efforts and time spent on administrative tasks.

Increase Funding

While a grant management system does require a financial commitment, the key to justifying this expenditure is to demonstrate how this can be recouped. When using a GMS such as AmpliFund, you gain the ability to find more funding sources. In fact, AmpliFund  offers the most comprehensive database of current funding opportunities that you can easily apply for right in the system itself. What's more, as a purpose-built grant management system, AmpliFund enables all of the benefits outlined above. Managing grants with this software helps you to maximize drawdown of existing funds and firm up eligibility to receive future rounds of grant funds from current sources. 

To learn more about our GMS--or have us help you build your case--please schedule time with a solutions expert today. 

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