Despite the importance they play in the running of most nonprofits, grant proposals are intimidating. Not only is finding the right grant a long and complex process, but the different steps required to complete the application can be overwhelming.
Praised for its intuitive design, GrantHub is an online grant management software that helps nonprofits and grant consultants manage their proposals. But is GrantHub worth it, or would your nonprofit do better with an alternative?
Part of Foundant Technologies, GrantHub seeks to provide nonprofits and grant consultants with the tools they need to optimize their workflow in hopes of increasing efficiency and, as a result, securing a larger number of grants.
Below, you’ll find a breakdown of GrantHub’s key features.
Finding New RFPs and Funders
GrantHub’s strengths lie not in its discoverability features, but in its tracking and management ones. In other words, rather than helping you find new grants you might not have heard of before, it instead focuses on providing you with the tools to more efficiently administer all the different stages of your proposals.
For this reason, users will often use GrantStation to find new grants and GrantHub to manage them, with the two softwares supplementing one another.
Since GrantHub focuses on streamlining the grant application process as much as possible, GrantHub relies on Guidestar for the information provided in its foundation profiles. This includes detail on:
What types of projects were successfully funded in the past
Funder’s history, current priorities, and future goals
Information on deadlines and other important dates
That being said, because GrantHub relies so heavily on GrantStation and Guidestar, it is not often considered the best platform for finding new leads. If one wishes for help discovering new or obscure grants to apply for, GrantHub’s features will not be enough, and an additional account with a different platform will be required.
If you want tips on how to successfully find new grants, check out this post on our blog.
GrantHub’s tracker is specifically built to help you monitor all your different applications so that you will always know what you’ve already done, what you are currently doing, and what still needs to be done. You can also easily create tasks for each project, organize any grant-related documents so they’re easy to retrieve, keep important notes and information on funders, and update the status on your proposals.
Furthermore, GrantHub provides a calendar that lets you keep track of important dates and helps you better visualize your prospects and strategize accordingly.
Collaboration and Reporting
GrantHub gives nonprofits and grant consultants the ability to have up to 35 users on one single account. This makes it easy (and cheaper) for your team to work together.
The ability to create and assign tasks, as well as to send automated emails can help keep everyone on the same page.
Other useful features include:
An answer library where you can save your previous application responses
Pre-built, flexible templates to facilitate the creation of reports
The ability to export your pipeline into Excel, PDF, or print
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When it comes to pricing plans, GrantHub presents its members with two different options. Both of them include:
20GB Storage
35 users in one account
Unlimited support
The difference between these pricing plans comes down to payment installments and the ability to purchase annual upgrades.
The first payment plan is the monthly plan. This requires members to pay $75 per month. While the monthly payment plan gives you flexibility, when multiplied by 12 to get the yearly cost, it totals to $900. This is $105 more than the annual plan.
The second payment plan is the annual plan, which requires a $795 yearly payment. Besides the features included above, this plan also allows for:
An additional 20GB for $150 more per year
An additional 10 users for $150 more per year
Of these two options, the annual plan offers the best value.
Looking at user experiences is one of the best ways to examine whether or not GrantHub is worth the investment.
When looking at reviews, it is important to be critical of the information presented, as different nonprofits have different needs. This means that the feature that makes the product or service 5/5 star for one organization may be inconsequential for another who would then judge the same product to be only 2/5 stars.
Similarly, it is important to note what sort of patterns emerge from multiple reviews. Outliers will exist on both ends of the spectrum, and though their experiences are valid, they might not be reflective or applicable to your particular situation.
With all of this in mind, let’s examine what some of GrantHub members have to say about this platform.
Capterra is a software review website that helps different organizations and individuals decide which products are the best fit for their needs. When looking at GrantHub’s review page, we can see that most users are incredibly happy with GrantHub’s intuitive design, its stellar customer service, and the fact that GrantHub allows them to keep all the information about their grants in one place.
This particular customer enjoys the alerts they have set up to remind them of important dates and deadlines, making it so they don’t fall behind on their work.
That being said, when looking at the negatives, this same customer mentions a dissatisfaction with GrantHub’s integration with other softwares. Despite being hailed as being easy-to-use, GrantHub has difficulty exporting files to create reports.
This dissatisfaction is echoed by the user below, who wished that GrantHub had more features related to Finding New RFPs and Funders.
As we mentioned before in this article, GrantHub’s strong suit is grant management, not grant discoverability. While the platform makes managing grants a more efficient task, it does little for the research end of the grant proposal process.
This begs the question: if one must still do all of the research on their own, and then they cannot even download the information into GrantHub but must instead manually type it up themselves, then how much time are they truly saving?
Users who reviewed GrantHub on Software Advice praise its user-friendliness and its customer support service. They also enjoy the ability to keep all of their grant information in one place, claiming that it makes planning for multiple grants less overwhelming.
But they also share concerns about the website being slow to load and the lack of customization features. Furthermore, despite their incredible grant management features, many users still wish that it would also help with grant discoverability.
Overall, GrantHub users are incredibly happy with how it optimizes their processes. However, the lack of features assisting with research makes one wonder whether GrantHub is worth its price.
Is There a Better GrantHub Alternative? Instrumentl Examined
Now that we’ve examined GrantHub’s features, pricing plans, and reviews, it is time to consider alternatives.
Instrumentl knows that grant research and grant management are both lengthy processes that take a lot of time and hard work. Highly regarded by grant consultants, rather than only assisting nonprofits with one part of the grant proposal journey, Instrumentl empowers its users to optimize every aspect of their workflow.
Unlike many of its alternatives, Instrumentl does not require a supplemental subscription as it helps with grant prospecting, grant tracking, and grant management all in one single platform.
Instrumentl’s 14 day free trial gives nonprofits the opportunity to see just how much they can do with this platform before committing to a full subscription.
Just as we did with GrantHub, we examined each of Instrumentl’s key features below.
Finding New RFPs and Funders
The biggest difference between Instrumentl and GrantHub is that more than just a grant management software, Instrumentl is also a comprehensive database that can be used for finding new grants. Its detailed funder profiles have great insights on all of the following:
Giving patterns over multiple years
History of past grantees
Average and median grant amounts
You can search for new grants by location and area of interest, making it easy to find a diverse number of new funders whose priorities align with your project’s mission. Furthermore, Instrumentl’s smart matching feature gives you personalized recommendations based on your nonprofit’s mission and your project criterias.
Tracking Prospect Research and Submissions
But that is not to say that Instrumentl’s research features come at the cost of its management ones. When it comes to tracking your prospects and keeping track of your progress, Instrumentl’s tools help you manage multiple grants, store notes, and save your searches for later use.
Even better, their grant calendar helps you plan out future submissions, while the automagical deadline reminders and the updates on any changes in the funder’s priorities will make sure you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Collaborations and Reporting
Instrumentl understands that teamwork is the key to success. As such, the platform does its best to facilitate collaboration between team members.
You can easily create and assign tasks, share notes on different grants, and see how everyone is progressing so that your entire nonprofit is well-informed on how your different proposals are going.
Its report feature also allows you to easily create PDFs or CSV reports so that you can spend more time focusing on your mission.
Wrapping Up: Is GrantHub Worth It?
Grants can be both intimidating and overwhelming. This is why tools like GrantHub are so valuable. Championed for its intuitive design, its customer service, and its ability to keep all of your information in one place, GrantHub is an incredible grant management platform that optimizes workflow.
However, unlike many of its alternatives, it is lacking when it comes to providing nonprofits with a comprehensive database that can be used to find new grants. This means that GrantHub is only helping nonprofits through half of their journey. To complement it, many might need to have an account with a different platform, which would increase costs.
By combining the research stage and the management stage, Instrumentl offers nonprofits the best of both worlds. You can sign up for a free 14 day trial today and see the difference it makes for yourself.
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