Teams that manage their grant work within Instrumentl don’t miss deadlines. They stay on top of every stage of their grant lifecycle with key information always within reach. They make grant management look effortless.
We understand the complexities of grant management. You need to be on top of every step: whether finding grants, meeting deadlines, maintaining compliance and reporting to leaders and funders—you’re responsible for fuelling the mission of your organization.
But the way teams manage grants today are antiquated, not built for efficiency. That's why we've developed a comprehensive guide to grant management, showcasing how you’ll build a grant-winning engine with Instrumentl.
Instrumentl’s grant management platform offers you the tools to efficiently…
find and research grants.
track all grant stages.
keep leaders informed.
With Instrumentl, you move from chaos to control.
If you’re ready to never miss another funding opportunity and streamline how you work, this ebook will outline how Instrumentl will become your partner in Grant Management Excellence.
Welcome to the future of grant management, powered by Instrumentl.
The Instrumentl Team
The Grant Management Challenges Nonprofits Face
“What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to grant management?”
That’s what we asked almost 300 hundred nonprofits in a survey in the Fall of 2023. We learned that each nonprofit approaches grant management differently.
Some nonprofits renew the same handful of grants each year.
Other nonprofits continuously pursue new sources of funding through grants.
And then there’s a whole spectrum between.
We wanted to understand how nonprofits that pursue grants all year round build the processes and teams they need to scale. These are their top three challenges:
Tracking all their grant work in one place
Accessing the resources (both in terms of time & staff) to achieve their goals
Meeting deadlines and collaborating effectively with their team
The first and third challenges (tracking grants and collaborating to meet deadlines) relate to the tools and processes nonprofits have in place to manage grants. The second challenge (accessing resources) relates to capacity.
So what are nonprofit teams that need to win grants all year round doing? Surprisingly, when we asked them what tools they use to manage their grants, 66% said they don’t use any tools or platforms to manage their grants.
The majority of nonprofit teams manage their grant work across scattered notepads, sticky notes, email chains, reminders, phone calls, and Excel files. There has to be a better way.
What teams need today to manage grants effectively is one platform the whole team can access. The whole team needs to have the tools and information right at their fingertips to find more grants, gather the data needed to write competitive proposals and track all stages of the grant lifecycle, from researching to managing awarded funds.
That’s where Instrumentl comes in.
In the next section, we’ll outline the exact ways Instrumentl aids grant management for teams that pursue grants year-round.
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Instrumentl is an all-in-one grants management platform for nonprofits and consultants. We empower you across every stage of your grant lifecycle.
The platform provides access to the most comprehensive database of grant opportunities and a host of tools that make tracking grant work and centralizing key information straightforward, not overwhelming.
In short, teams that use Instrumentl achieve more with less stress.
Below, we outline the three main areas in Instrumentl that will help you with grant management. We’ll also provide a snapshot of the specific tools that you’ll use at each step.
By reviewing the sections, you’ll get a clear idea if Instrumentl is right for you and your team.
1. Efficiently Find and Research Grants
Providing access to an extensive database of grant opportunities that align with the organization's mission and needs.
The good news is that there are a lot of funding opportunities out there. Companies, foundations, government agencies, and so many additional organizations want to help nonprofits like you make a difference. The not-so-great news is that there are so many funding opportunities that it can be difficult to know where to begin!
Many nonprofits suffer from option paralysis, and that’s one area where Instrumentl can shine. We serve as a one-stop shop for grant opportunities because of our extensive database. You can search by:
Fields of work
Funding uses
Location
And more!
All of this customization is to help you narrow down opportunities that are relevant to you. It also creates a smart matching algorithm that can do the work for you in the future when you save your searches.
For nonprofits who spend hours searching for opportunities, this will completely streamline how you search for and locate grants, driving efficiencies across your organization.
You’ll never need to scour the Internet endlessly for grant opportunities again when you use Instrumentl.
Offering detailed profiles of grantors, including their priorities and requirements, enabling nonprofits to tailor their proposals effectively.
Sometimes, it helps as you’re looking at funding opportunities to get a picture of the grantor. Who are they? What do they stand for? Who have they supported in the past? Unfortunately, searching for this information takes time, and you’ll find yourself down a rabbit hole of endless scrolling before you know it.
Thankfully, that’s not the case when it comes to using Instrumentl! We provide comprehensive profiles to help create a funder snapshot. It includes only the relevant information you need, including:
Current and past grantees
Geographical giving
Grant size
Giving by category
Form 990s
And more!
Our profiles will help you spot the funder’s big-picture trends and identify how you can fit into their priorities. With them, you’ll be able to identify how to tailor your application and increase your odds of landing the grant.
The profiles also include information about grant requirements, as well as insights on organizations they prefer to partner with. After all, if a company is looking to work with local organizations and you’re 5,000 miles away, it likely won’t be the best fit.
All of this information - and more! - is located within Instrumentl, so you won’t need to hunt around for details.
Automating updates on newly available grants, ensuring organizations are always up-to-date with funding opportunities.
New grant opportunities pop up all the time, and it can be stressful to keep up with them. Endless thoughts of “What if I miss the perfect opportunity because I stopped searching?” will keep you scrolling far longer than you should!
Thankfully, with Instrumentl, you’ll never have to wonder.
When you go into search for new opportunities, you have the option to not only save it but also set alerts to be notified of new opportunities. You can adjust your search parameters to be as broad or specific as you need them to be.
From there, Instrumentl does the hard work for you, crawling through the internet for new grants and flagging those that meet your criteria, delivering them straight to your inbox and your dashboard. If your needs change, all you need to do is adjust your saved searches to ensure you’re only getting opportunities that are relevant to you.
These automatic updates will streamline how you search for grants, and it’s so intuitive and easy to do that you’ll never miss another potential grant opportunity.
2. Streamlined Tracking Across All Grant Phases
Providing a single platform for tracking the stages of all grants, whether they are in the prospecting, application, decision, or award phase.
You can bring all your grant work under one roof when it comes to using Instrumentl, helping you track your entire grant lifecycle with ease. Everything you need to know about your grants will be located in one place.
Some of the cool things you can do within Instrumentl are:
Searching for new grant opportunities.
Saving promising grants to go back to them.
Seeing all active grants, complete with the start and end period, to stay on track.
Viewing tasks across all your grants to identify potential bottlenecks.
Filtering by assignments and other criteria to get a clear picture.
Tracking payments.
This dedicated space for all of your grant needs promotes collaboration within your organization because you can all check the status at any given time. If you have questions, you can connect directly in Instrumentl or take it offline within your organization.
This centralized platform helps you understand where you’re at with a grant in a single glance, helping you take action and stay on top of all your grant management needs.
Offering real-time updates and notifications to keep nonprofits informed of grant status changes.
Critical to the grant management process is real-time updates. Whether you’re being tasked to give a quick update to a board member or pull a report for the funder, you need to know where you stand at any given moment.
If there are any updates or changes to your grants, Instrumentl will keep you notified so you can stay on track. You’ll be able to see if:
Your grant has moved from prospecting to applied.
Any grant requirements have changed.
Upcoming deadlines for current grants.
Application cut-offs for new opportunities.
And more!
With saved alerts, you can automate the process and only get messages when things change or when deadlines are approaching.
It makes collaboration easy when you’re all on the same page, and Instrumentl’s smart matching algorithm, notifications, and alerts will keep you on track to landing and maintaining the grant of your dreams.
Allowing organizations to manage and monitor payments, ensuring funds are received and allocated correctly during the award phase.
There’s a lot more to grant management than just winning the grant, and one pain point we often hear about is how to track payments. Many nonprofits don’t have an efficient system in place, which can add stress and confusion to the award management process.
After all, if you don’t have a good way to track your money, how will you know where it’s going? Instrumentl can help you keep your financials in order, managing the entire end-to-end grant lifecycle all in one place.
Not only is there a beautifully designed and intuitive payments tracker in Instrumentl, you can also stay on top of your grant goals with relevant notifications and alerts sent directly to your inbox.
To make sure you stay on track with your grant payment process, you can:
Get a weekly digest of grant progress and a summary of your overall activity.
Pull various awards views and additional awards reports to share progress.
Receive ad hoc alerts for off-track spending that don’t align with grant requirements.
Customize your calendar integration to receive relevant updates and dial down the noise.
It all comes down to simplicity and ease of use. You want a simple method to track your payments, which will help you stay on top of your grant goals, easily share your progress, and understand what funds you have available to use at any given moment - and Instrumental can do all that and more.
Streamlining project implementation by keeping essential grant documents organized and easily accessible in one place.
We hear time and time again that grant management can sometimes feel a bit like herding cats. You’re trying to wrangle all the key stakeholders, deadlines, and other pertinent information together, but inevitably, things start to fall through the cracks.
That’s not the case when it comes to Instrumentl. We provide a dedicated space for your grants - those you’ve received, past grants, and ones that are simply on your radar. You can track all your documentation in one place, which helps you understand where you are at a single glance.
Some of the key features that help you do this are:
Linking external documents to Instrumentl, ensuring all are using the right documentation.
Exporting relevant reports to keep all your stakeholders in the loop.
Downloading summaries for executives that give them a high-level overview at the click of a button.
All of your essential documentation can be housed within a centralized platform to bust silos and drive collaboration. You can tame the chaos of project management by housing all your essential grant documents in one place.
3. Keep Leaders Informed and Empower Your Team’s Efficiency
Teams can access key financial information about grants, build reports, and stay on top of deliverables.
As your one-stop shop for all of your grant needs, Instrumentl can also help you keep your financial information in order. You’ll be able to upload your project budgets, receipts, and other documentation all in one place. Why is this important?
Instrumentl really provides a space for you to manage your awards and finances, which will help you understand your budget status at any given moment, stay on track with your financial requirements, and so much more.
Every cent that you get will be documented and properly allocated, thanks to Instrumentl’s robust features. Best of all, you can easily pull reports to keep all stakeholders in the loop. Your post-award management has never been this seamless.
Teams can save key documents to each grant, making it easy to maintain organized records.
So many nonprofits have a hard time keeping track of their information. The data is scattered across the organization, and it can be challenging and time-consuming to gather it all together!
There’s always the chance that you’re missing an important input, so when you share progress with supervisors, colleagues, and funders, you’re left wondering if you have a complete view. The best way to get around this is to have a centralized location, like Instrumentl, where you keep all of your documentation.
The documentation is only the start. When you have organized records, you’re able to easily:
Run relevant reports to help you understand the current state of your grant, upcoming deadlines, and more.
Export executive summaries for a high-level overview to give to key stakeholders.
Set alerts when things like spending start to get off track.
This centralized location becomes a repository for all of your grant management information. You’ll never have to search or wonder where information is when you use Instrumentl. You have full information transparency, which keeps everyone in the loop.
Now, it is important to remember that your documentation and reporting are only as good as the data that are inputted, so you have to make sure to keep it up to date, communicate with others how to save their information and audit the documentation to ensure it stays up to date.
A collaborative workspace enables teams to work together effortlessly, accessing the latest grant-related updates and documents.
Whether your nonprofit is a few people or a few hundred people, it’s really easy to become siloed. You get deep into the zone with what you’re doing that it can be difficult to bring others along on the journey with you.
Most times, it’s unintentional! You want to be collaborative, but you’re just moving fast. Everyone knows their little piece that they have to do, and when they need to have it ready by, that they can lose sight of the bigger picture.
What you need to do is un-silo your organization and bust those barriers to execution that stymie your workflow. That’s where a collaborative workspace can help, and Instrumentl can really shine.
When you’re working in the same platform, you have a clear view of the overall workflow. You can collaborate efficiently on grant reporting requirements because everyone is in the loop. All your stakeholder is on the same page.
So, how do we do that? We’ve seen many nonprofits:
Increase their efficiency through task improvements.
Streamline reporting with seamless CSV reporting.
Identify opportunities for improvement with awards view.
Break down barriers to execution with calendar and task views.
All of this is made possible thanks to the collaborative workspace and the new perspective that a fresh set of eyes can bring when all team members are under one roof.
Instrumentl is the central hub for grant management, a key part of your team’s daily workflow rather than an occasional resource.
There are so many grant management solutions out there, but most of them can only tell part of the story. They can help you find grants but not track your current ones. Perhaps they lack effective reporting or automation features.
Most nonprofits find themselves creating workarounds to make the software work for them instead of having an out-of-the-box solution that just works. To do that, you need to have a platform that serves as a central hub for all your grant management needs.
This should be integrated into your day-to-day workflow. You should start and end each day by checking in with your deliverables, logging progress, and looking at what’s ahead. At a single glance, your grant’s end-to-end management is clear.
There are no bottlenecks. No silos you need to break. There is full and complete transparency to help you streamline your grant management process and land more grants.
The goal of any platform should be to make your life easier. Your time is precious, so it’s well overdue to find a grant management solution that can be everything you need in a single platform.
Experience The Future of Nonprofit Grant Management
The future of nonprofit grant management is here, and it’s Instrumentl. It’s a great all-in-one solution to help you manage your grants from simple prospecting through the entire life cycle., which can completely revolutionize how you approach grant management.
When used correctly, Instrumentl will serve as the single source of truth across the entire organization. It enables easier grant collaboration and improves visibility across all phases of the grant life cycle, including:
Locating new grant opportunities with Instrumentl’s robust search features.
Managing application deadlines, reporting requirements, and other important information.
Tracking and reporting data, including financial reports and executive summaries for key stakeholders.
With Instrumentl, you’ll be able to handle your post-award management with ease, allowing you to have all your team members on the same platform, with a dedicated space for awarded grants and simple payment tracking.
The proof is in the pudding, and we can - and have - done all these things for clients throughout the year. Whether promoting simple task improvements, automatic reporting, externally linking to documents, viewing tasks and awards, and so much more, Instrumentl has everything you need from a grant platform.
It’s built for modern nonprofit management, catapulting your organization into the 21st century to help you find, land, and manage the grant life cycle with ease.
Instrumentl empowers nonprofits to achieve their missions, making grant management more efficient and convenient. By now, you should know all about some of the great features that allow us to do this.
We take the guesswork out and break silos by bringing teams under the same roof, unique all of your grant needs in one place.
We make finding new opportunities and learning about potential funders a breeze with our comprehensive funder profiles and smart-matching algorithms.
We create convenient, automatic reports to keep all stakeholders in the loop.
All of this is in support of you. We want to make it easier for you to land your next grant, stay organized through the process, and spend your time doing what you do best - changing the world.
It’s time to leave manual processes in the past. When you invest in Instrumentl, you’re making an investment in yourself. You’re revolutionizing your grant management process. And, most importantly, you're maximizing the difference you can make.
Ready to try? Sign up for your free, 14-day trial at Instrumentl today!
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