Streamline Processes With End-to-End Grant Management

On Sept. 29, 2015, StreamLink Software CEO, Adam Roth presented at the International City/County Management Association’s (ICMA) annual conference on the grant ecosystem, evolving federal legislation, and the growing need for an end-to-end grant management solution. Below are key takeaways from his presentation.

Today’s Grant Ecosystem

Today’s grant ecosystem intertwines initiatives across your entire organization, creating a system with many different levels that involve all aspects of grant management:

• Fund distribution: Funders create opportunity applications, solicit responses, assess and choose recipients, and track and report on performance.
• Research and planning: Recipients conduct diligent research to find grants applicable to their organization, and then prepare a proposal that showcases why they deserve funding.
• Activity management: Recipients streamline communication processes, delegate tasks, and align activities with performance and financial expenditures.
• Post-award performance and reporting: Recipients demonstrate their ability to spend funds strategically and appropriately, and create reports that comply with new federal requirements as well as highlight performance.

The above responsibilities are distributed between three main bodies:

• Funders: Federal agencies, foundations and other entities that provide grant funding to prime recipients.
• Prime recipients: The main grantee responsible for managing awarded funds and overseeing sub-recipients.
• Sub recipients: Receive awarded funds from prime recipients.

Typically, each of these bodies mange their day-to-day activities through a mix of spreadsheets, emails and calendars—often resulting in chaotic processes. By implementing an end-to-end grant management solution, communication, performance reporting and workflow management can be simplified.

Legislation Drives the Need for End-to-End Grant Management

As a result of new legislation requirements, such as the OMB Uniform Grant Guidance, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) and Treasury “Do Not Pay” initiative, organizations need to:

• Update processes to ensure compliance and accountability.
• Streamline processes and improve transparency via technology.
• Capture information as data, not as “attachments.”

Compliance requires organizations have visibility and insight into every stage of the grant lifecycle—from pre-award planning to post-award reporting.

How Grant Management Software Can Help

Grant management software can help your organization gain visibility across all grant activities, comply with federal regulations and meet reporting needs. With software implementation, you can:

• Access grant data and information whenever, wherever.
• Automate business processes, reminders, compliance and reporting.
• Centralize and store all grant-related materials, communications and performance data in a single location within the cloud.
• Control financial statements.
• Easily add programs as you grow, without incurring additional costs.
• Integrate with financial systems.
• Standardize report information into data elements.
• Sync with other systems for tracking, monitoring and reporting purposes.

You can also appropriately meet all pre-award and post-award needs, including:

• Search across a wide range of grant opportunities.
• Save and share criteria and results.
• Host competitive bidding for funding initiatives.
• Track funds and projects.
• Oversee performance and budget activities, sub-recipients, external lead-recipients of fund distributions and grant vendors.
• Gain efficiencies by automating grant processes during both pre- and post-award management.
• Record and map tracked time to the correct grant, allowing supervisors to review and approve employee timesheets each week.

Interested in learning more? See below for the presentation slide deck.