Rachel: It is going to be my cue to get us started because we have a lot to cover today, and I want to make sure we respect everybody's busy schedules. I'll drop one more time in the chat that intro request for you all. That's going to be sharing who you are in the chat box and also getting that workbook opened up.
No worries about starting it yet. I will key you in when you need to get in there and start working in it, but have it ready to go so that when we get to that slide, you'll have it opened up in front of you. I'll give our poll participants maybe one more second or so to write in their thoughts. We've got about 83 percent of folks who have responded so far.
Hi, Karen, good to see you again.
Cool. I'm going to go ahead and end our poll so we can get rolling. And I'll share the results so people can see a little bit about who's in the room with us. It looks like most of us are in the kind of, I'm getting the hang of it phase of their grant writing expertise, about 54 percent of us. We've got 41 percent who are currently using Instrumentl as a tool and a couple folks who are interested in trying it out.
And then on today's topic, this is an interesting one. How many grant awards are you currently managing for your organization or across clients if you're a consultant? We’ve got about 40 percent of folks, a predominant number of folks, who have one to five grant awards they're currently managing. Awesome. Got a smattering of a few other folks. About 17 percent have 15 plus. Wow! We need to learn all about your post-award management system, so we can get up to that level. And some of us are still waiting to win our first awards.
So, we're going to dive in on this topic today. I'm so excited to be with you all. As a reminder of what we're getting into, we are focused on We Won That Grant: A 5-Step Blueprint to Successful Post-Award Management.
Thanks again to folks who have participated in this grantseeker growth course. I've had so much fun joining you over the past three Thursdays. This is our last one on this particular series. For those of you who are new to Instrumentl, we’re the most loved all-in-one grants platform for grant prospecting, tracking, and management. And we currently work with more than 3,500 nonprofits and grant consultants in saving time and finding and applying for more grants.
For those of you who haven't seen me on the Zoom screen before, my name is Rachel. I'm the events and community manager at Instrumentl. My job is to help create events like this, and I come from the nonprofit sector. I have a decade plus of experience in the arts and culture sector, specifically in museums. I'm based in Los Angeles, California. So, for any of the Pacific time folks in the room, quick shoutout for that.
I'm also really excited to be joined by one of my colleagues today, Katie, and I'm going to invite her to hop on the screen real quick so she can share a little bit about herself.
Katie: Hi, everyone! My name is Katie. I am an account executive here with Instrumentl. I joined Instrumentl actually from a major gift fundraising role. I worked for the Salvation Army for about five years, so I'm very familiar with the development space and in nonprofit world. And now, as an Instrumentl advisor, I'm helping nonprofits and grant writers save time and really enter into a more peaceful, harmonious relationship with their grantseeking and grant management.
So I'm here to help you find more funding, win more funding. I'm located up in Northern Minnesota on Lake Superior in a little town called Duluth. So, if any of you are familiar, we just, we're no longer in snow season. We're solidly in the rain right now. But good to be here with you all.
Rachel: Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, Katie, to be with us. She has been such an asset to all the kind of grant advising that our team does for nonprofits across the sector.
So Katie will be in the chat helping you all out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out there. As a reminder, this is about an hour-long program. We're going to wrap it up at around 11:55 Pacific time. This will be super interactive. So, I invite you to share thoughts in the chat. I see folks already contributing some thoughts and ideas in there. Please make sure to respond to those polls. And you'll have a couple of moments to have some independent work time in your workbooks, which I'll share more about in just a second.
This workshop is being recorded right now, so you will get a recording if you need to refer back to anything. Thanks again for just taking the time to be with us. Honor your personal needs, come as you are, and join us this morning with us. But please make sure you are here at around quarter till. I'll transition into the kind of raffle prize moment. Some of the ways you can kind of follow up with the work that we've been doing in this course.
Lastly, I've got those closed captions turned on, so you can toggle that setting on, on your own Zoom platform so you can follow along with us. This event is centered around post-award management, so we'll be talking deeply about that today.
A couple of course materials that you'll be provided. We'll have our course syllabus and workbook. I'll drop that in the chat again for folks that missed that if they've come in a little bit late.
We also have an events resource page. I'll share that as well. This is going to be a page that you can bookmark and go back to. I'm going to include references to resources we talk about today, essentially anything that came up that we want to make sure we have reference to later.
And lastly, I'll be sharing a fun resource for anyone that submits their feedback form, and we have a grants management tracker template that everyone will be getting access to today, so that you can manage your current awards that you've got going on. All those 17 percent of you that have 15 plus awards to manage.
I'll also give you some ideas of how you can get those awarded grants on track. And Katie has so generously offered to help folks that are new to Instrumentl have a one-on-one call, specifically to focus on some of that post-award management.
I also will have an option for current customers to fill out an interest form. I'll drop that in the chat now, just so you have access to that. I will also call back on this later. So, no stress there. But Katie is an excellent resource, and I encourage you to book a call with her if you have a chance. She will be able to go through all the things we talk about today.
Okay. And before we get started, I want to announce some fun raffle winners. We had some folks who shared some of their key learnings on LinkedIn. We had some really lovely folks just sharing some ideas here. So, I want to make a shoutout to a couple of people. Mary, Sarah, and Paul, you all have one coffee on us. And they had some really great posts on LinkedIn. I'll share them here. Just talking a little bit about their experiences in our grantseeker growth course. So, congrats to Sarah, Mary, and. Paul. And if you are interested in being in the running for a coffee on Instrumentl, you can feel free to share your learnings, as I had on this last slide. You just add the hashtag #GrantseekerGrowth. I'll be tracking that on the back end. And thank you for sharing your learnings with your community.
Okay. So what are we getting into today? We're going to start with focusing on the key components of our post-award management. We're talking all about what we do after we've won a grant, making sure we're super organized there and what components need to be included every time we're managing a grant.
We also want to talk about some of the goals of post-award management, what is most important for us to be keeping at the forefront when we're working on managing our post-award, and ways we can improve maybe our existing awards management systems, so that they can be the best possible.
I'll share a couple of ideas for tools for post-award management to kind of get us all organized and make sure your teams are on track.
And then we'll talk about that 5-step blueprint, the title of our workshop today, essentially getting your teams all on board so everyone is following the same pathway for success in the post-award space.
Lastly, we'll end with a little Q & A and our wrap-up, and we'll get to celebrate all the folks who have participated in this grantseeker growth course over these past three Thursdays. So stay till the end. You probably already know that this course is CFRE certified. So, by submitting your feedback form and essentially proving that you were here for this full event today, you will be able to receive one CFRE point towards initial certification or recertification.
You'll also get this free template that I mentioned in the beginning. This is our grant tracker template that everyone that submits their feedback form will have access to. Super great if you just need a place to start to get your grants super organized.
And if you've attended every session, you're going to get a nifty little certificate of completion, a little digital badge that you can display on your website or LinkedIn, and since you've come to the past three sessions, you'll get a total of those three CFRE points.
If you have been here every Thursday for the past three Thursdays, can you give a little shoutout in the chat. I want to see our, yeah, our raised hand.
I see you, Morgan.
Oh, yay, Cindy.
Oh, my gosh. Bri, Jennifer, Kara. Y'all just make my heart sing. Thank you for spending time with us altogether learning. I love to see it. So, you all will have your proverbial little graduation caps on later today and get to graduate from this first grantseeker growth course. Yey.
Per usual, I'll do a quick post-event session. I'm calling this office hours, and I'll stick around for about 15 minutes after the Zoom officially ends, and people can ask me questions, share feedback, or just chat with me for a second before they get back to their work days.
Oh, I'm so glad to hear it, Cindy.
Okay. So, let's start about this process we're going to be getting into. We're diving into post-award.
Great, you've won a grant!
Now, the real work begins, right? You had a lot of work to get to this point. There's a lot of work still to come. I've got some quotes that I've pulled from current Instrumentl customers and folks who have shared some of the reflections of the post-award space and how that maybe impacts their workflows.
One of our customers here, who's a director of grant management, said, “It's hard to keep the information flowing from one department to another, and to the program team and their actual implementation of the grant.”
One of the deputy directors we spoke with said, “Oh, it's grant reporting time…Six months later I have to go back and try and look through all of the books saying, okay, which expense went where?”
And lastly, the CFO at a nonprofit said that they were looking for a solution where they can send the operations teams, not finance, to a platform where they can get information without looking in our accounting system.
If any of you kind of reflect on like some of these quotes, if some of this is also in alignment with maybe things you're experiencing in your organization, you can say me too in the chat, or just say the same. I feel like post-award management can be a whole different piece, and sometimes folks are not always prepared to take on all the aspects across the teams, right? Same. Yeah. I'm seeing a lot of ‘same’ in the chat. Carolyn has a thumbs up. For sure.
So, I'm going to ask us to consider our veggies, and I'm going to explain for a little moment what I mean by that.
Rachel Warner, who's the owner and CEO of RBW Strategy. She's also a principal at MyFedTrainer and an Instrumentl expert council member and partner of ours. She says that “post-award compliance is sort of the broccoli of the grants work because a lot of people don't really want to talk about compliance, policies, reporting, but they are so important if you want to keep that grant funding and sustain it for future years.”
So, we're talking about the veggies, the things that we sometimes don't always love to eat, maybe for especially picky eaters, but that are truly important to our grants management as a whole, making sure it's healthy and growing strong.
I'm curious to hear from folks in the chat. What are some key aspects of your post-award management plan? I want you to think about some of those things that you're always thinking about once you've been awarded that grant or some quick kind of key components of your post-award plan. I'll give folks a moment to think about it and add some thoughts in the chat.
Oh, yeah, I'm seeing some great responses here.
Kaja says, “Tracking progress towards goals. They've got reporting requirements and dates.”
Caitlin, “Sharing the impact of the award.” Absolutely.
Trish says, “Financial tracking.”
Sue, “Capturing metrics and impact.”
Yep. We've got deadlines from Hannah. Tammy also said sharing impact.
Pamela, “I looked through reporting requirements and due date and immediately add it to our grants Google calendar.” Yep. 100%.
Kelly says, “The team is not always wanting to follow through on commitments.” Oof, I feel you there. 100%.
Nitya says, “Yeah, financial tracking and for multi-year grants, keeping internal interim reports.”
Ooh, that's a lot of work. I love seeing all these. Continue to share some of those key aspects. These are things that we always want to make sure we're keeping front of mind when we're planning towards that post-award phase.
I'm going to talk a little bit about some of these details of the key components, each being really crucial to the successful administration of grant funds and maintaining the best possible relationship you can with your funders. Now, each of these components are going to play a critical role in the successful management of your grant funds. They might require some of this meticulous attention to detail. I know a lot of you have to kind of take on that role, strategic planning, and maybe even proactive management to ensure the project is not only meeting its goals but does so in the way that aligns with funders’ expectations, and even things like legal requirements. So, by excelling in these kind of key component areas that I'm going to break down here, organizations can help build stronger relationships with their funders, hopefully paving the way for future support and collaboration. We want to play the long game here and make sure we're basically setting ourselves and our funder relationship up for success once we've won a grant.
I'm going to start with compliance, one of our veggies. We can call this the Brussels sprouts or something. You have to have to have to, right? Make sure you are complying with the grant terms of your awarded grant. I'm sure all of you know this. But compliance involves adhering, not just to the standards of the grant. But also to legal and ethical standards that are applicable to the plot of the project, as well as the specific requirements that have been set up by the funder.
So, some of those key aspects that need to be included with compliance - Need to adhere to these legal regulations. So, that means that all project activities should be complying with local state, federal regulations. This could include things like labor laws, environmental laws, depending on the project's nature. This also means that your programmatic, operational, and financial teams need to be in the know. I'll get a little more into this when we talk about our 5-step blueprint in a bit and kind of how you can set them up for success here.
I also want to highlight that this might also mean you need to take a gander at some of the internal policies your organization has. Things like your travel policy or your cash management policy. Make sure those are updated before you have disbursements happening across your teams.
We’ve also got the grant agreement conditions. We want to make sure we're following all conditions and stipulations set forth in the grant agreement. I saw many of you say that that's one of the first things you do, making sure you fully understand the grant agreement and have all those deadlines in place. You want to make sure you really understand how the funds are meant to be spent, any prohibited activities related to those funds, and other donor stipulations that have been laid out in the agreement.
And our last thing for compliance brussels sprouts, ethical standards. We need to make sure we're maintaining high ethical standards, not only for compliance, but also maintaining public trust and integrity of each of our organizations. Examples of this can include being transparent, maybe about conflicts of interest. You don't want to be exaggerating any data or fabricating anything in reports, protecting confidential information about program participants, for example, and just generally trying to avoid any misallocation of resources. We could probably do a whole session just on ethics and grant awards. Maybe I'll put that on my standby list for our next series. But yeah, these are so valuable and important and something I know many of you keep front of mind when we come to compliance.
One of our next components here is going to be the budget. Effective budget oversight ensures that all funds are used appropriately and as intended, which is our goal, and critical for meeting the project goals and funder expectations. So, the key practices here include tracking spenddown, our kind of budget monitoring. What we often refer to this as spenddown, you might hear that term a couple of times today, these are the funds that need to be spent from a grant. Regular monitoring of these expenditures against the budget plan, comparing with our budget against the actual spend, will ensure that our spending aligns with the approved budgets that we've sent to the funder and the project timelines. That's a super critical part of our budget component.
We just want to also make sure we're adhering to the budget determined in our documentation. I know sometimes some of those things can be a little fluid. If your program teams are realizing they're going over budget in one category and underspending in another, that could be totally peachy with your funder. They may have no problem with that. But you will want to know that early, so you can inform the funder ahead of time, instead of backtracking later and realizing that, oh, actually these funds were allocated in a different way than we anticipated. This will continue to build that pathway of trust for the funder.
And lastly, for budget, we've got that financial reporting piece. We want to make sure we're keeping detailed records and supporting documentation for all our financial transactions. This is just going to be crucial for both financial accountability and can be vital for those of us who experience audits. This is something that we always might keep in the back of our mind as a possibility when some of us are going to be required to have an audit. I'm sure some of you can speak to some of that experience in the chat, of having an audited grant. I'm curious to hear if some folks have experienced that before.
Our last key component that I'm going to dive into here a little bit is reporting. It's going to communicate that progress and the outcomes of the funded project to the grantor. So, affected reporting needs to include these timelines, which many of you are super aware of. We want to adhere to the reporting schedule that we've set out in the grant agreement. Those delays can kind of maybe deteriorate some of our funder trust and could potentially affect future funding opportunities.
Our next one here is accuracy. We should make sure that the reports are accurately reflecting the activities, the expenditures towards the project’s objectives. Misreporting, whether it's incidental or accidental, can lead to severe consequences, including perhaps having your funding withdrawn. So, making sure we're being accurate as much as possible with our reports.
And then detail, we want to provide a detailed account of the project. This will help the funder see the impact of their investment, and I know many of you are probably pretty well-versed in getting that qualitative and quantitative data or evaluation that you've had to submit before for reports of this nature.
Lastly, we're doing that impact reporting. We're highlighting the impact that the funder has made. It's so important to clearly outline how the results of the grant on the programming that has been provided align and support with the funders mission and goals. This is, again, going to just enhance your relationship with the funder and potentially lead to further support.
Wow, yeah. Stacy says, “Annually, I have 10 to 15 audits from grantors and monthly meetings with accounting and program directors to ensure we were on track in every area.” Wow, I got to put a fire emoji on that one. That's a lot of work, Stacy. Proud of you for pushing through. That's a big endeavor, but it's so important and so valuable.
So, it's time for a quick poll because I just want to get a sense of where we feel our organization is at with our post-award management approach. And I've kept this for a 1 to 5 scale, just to keep it kind of simple and narrow down here. If you could kind of share, on a scale from 1 to 5, what would you rate your organization? Or maybe if you want to think, if you have clients, like an organization that you're working with, on its post-award management approach? 1 being like, uh-oh, we've got some issues here, or it's like non-existent essentially, to 5 out of 5, we've got all of these components that I just mentioned and we are rocking and rolling.
Oh, yeah, I see some. Yes, Jordan. Exactly. 1 is like not so great, 5 is awesome. I see some in the chat. Getting a lot of participants in our poll.
Yup. Joanne, you might just be starting out and that's okay to be at a 1 at this point.
I'll give folks just maybe 10 more seconds or so. I've got about 68 percent participating so far.
Yeah. Carolyn, I feel like the government grants just set you up differently for that post-award management. There's so many other requirements that kind of get you all settled there. Yeah.
Yeah, Melanie says 2 to 3.
Okay. I'm going to wrap our poll and share our results so we can see. So we've kind of landed in like a solid 3. Almost half of you said, on a scale from 1 to 5, you would rate your organization at a 3 for its post-award management approach. So, it might have some of these aspects, but it might be missing a few that would help you just have like that ease of post-award management that we're not really getting right now. Yeah. There's maybe some bumps in the road. Some of you at a 5. I love to see that 8 percent that's at a 5. Tell us in the chat what you're doing right now that's helping you get there. And then some of us at a 1, you know, maybe we're just getting started out.
So let's talk a little bit about how we can be better, how we can do better. Based on all these components that I just talked about that need to be in place for the best post-award management, we should have some goals. So, as I mentioned in our kind of where we headed today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the goals we should have for our post-award management process. And this is true regardless of what platform you're using. Regardless of your organization status, this is something that everyone should be kind of essentially aiming for in their score 5 out of 5 post-award management.
First, we've got that there's a single source of truth for every stakeholder. So, we try and limit the amount of duplicated tasks or siloed teams. This can happen sometimes when you've got email threads with some people and not others that are happening. You don't necessarily have a repository for the most up-to-date information on spend or programmatic details or data about what's happening in the actual programs. So, making sure as much as possible that there is one place where all this information lives.
Second, yeah, we want to make sure there's one place for all the grant efforts. You kind of want to have this 100-yard view. I know a lot of you are responsible for managing this essentially. And if you have other tasks that you're responsible for, you want to have a really quick way to have that bird's eye view of the grants that you're working on, reports, the spend, and all of those deadlines, so you make sure you're not stressed missing anything.
And that last thing is, you know, we are the captains of our team here, of our grants team. And it might just be you that one person team, but you should have the full oversight of the entire grant life cycle, so you really have a great understanding of what's happening with the grant all the way from pre-award to post-award. And this should be happening even before you've been awarded the grant. So, you should know the ins and outs of your grants, finances included, all in one place, that single source of truth, and making sure you all have those tasks and deadlines laid out.
So I'm going to give us some ideas for how we can kind of take our post-award management up a notch. I'm going to start by suggesting a couple of tools for post-award management. So we've looked at all these different components. I'm going to give you some ideas for some tools that other folks are using to make sure that we have the successful administration of grant funds and we're continuing to maintain that great relationship with funders.
So, some possible tools that we might include here. Some folks might be using manual systems or databases, and you can shout out in the chat if you have ideas for tools that you're currently using to manage your post-award.
Manual systems or databases. We've got Excel files. So folks might be keeping track of their awards across Excel.
Yup. Melanie’s got my Asana, which I'm also referencing here.
We've got Slack. So you might be communicating with different teams across Slack to essentially communicate where you're at with your grant.
We've got Basecamp. Some people might be using Basecamp, which is a project management system. I see some folks have some ideas in the chat.
We've got Google sheets, maybe a replication of our Excel sheets or Excel files.
And then we've got, let's see this last one here, Asana and Monday. com. I'm seeing some people have put that in the plus one for Slack and the Google suite integration. Yeah, absolutely. We've got Salesforce Trello hub planner. Yup. And Monday. com. Some really great recommendations here.
One thing I want to highlight with all of these tools. They are all viable tools and many of us are using them right now. But I want to remind us again of our goals for post-award management that I just had mentioned in the previous slide. Let's look at those again really quickly.
And I'm going to jump ahead because my animations are getting a little wonky here.
So, we want to be looking for that single source of truth, that one place for all of our grant efforts and the kind of full oversight of our grant cycle. Some of these tools might have some of these aspects. But for example, we may not be able to have a 100-yard view of grants, reports, and spend if everything is spread across multiple spreadsheets or Google sheets or Excel files, things like that.
So, there is one tool that does actually do all of these things, and you might be able to guess what that is, and that's our new Spenddown tool on Instrumentl. I'll talk really briefly about what this does so you can get a sense of why I think it's pretty awesome. It's one of the newest components of Instrumentl. It's just like a beautiful piece of technology. So, I'll tell you why.
This new spenddown feature actually gives you kind of this clear and concise view of your awards, so you don't have to ever worry about like returning unspent funds or wonder how much is left in your award. And we wanted something that was super usable by grant professionals and grant managers, basically you all that are in the room right now. While I'm sure we can navigate cookbooks in a pinch, I do not find that platform to be super user-friendly as someone not in the finance world. So, the idea here is that the interface is super clear and simple. There are high level visuals with these concise indicators of progress, so that can give you your leadership, your board, or your boss, easy visibility into the progress of any given award. It's focused on grants, which is great. That's what it's built for. So, it's designed to track what is most important to you. All those key components we talked about a couple of slides ago. And it's really easy to set up, and I'll show you in about 60 seconds how simple that is. I'm going to do a really quick little overview video, and I'm just going to kind of like narrate it as it goes here.
So, essentially, once you've changed a grant to an awarded status, budget and spenddown tracking will be available in your financials tab. So, you can find the upload template on here. And essentially, you'll use that template that's linked there. Got an example here. You'll upload your template, and then you'll be able to map your expenses. So, it's showing you how those expenses have been mapped and what they are going towards. And then all of the expenses are captured, and you can easily track how much is left to spend. So, this visibility will hopefully empower you and your team to stay on top of that post-award management so you never have to leave any money on the table ever again. It's a great visual. It also looks just so beautiful. So, I love kind of doing a little preview of that. As mentioned, it's just so easy to take a look at that. Sorry, I skipped a slide here.
So, here's just a screenshot of an example that I've pulled from one of our users. They've got a lot of awards they're managing. They're managing 56 grants at 1.18. million dollars of awarded funds. So they've got a lot going on. But you can see here, this is kind of following all of our goals for post-award management. We want to make sure there's that single source of truth. We can see that they have opportunities to indicate deadlines for next reports. There's also a tasks section that got cut off of the screenshot, but you can add tasks to folks as well. And just knowing full oversight of the entire grant cycle, knowing the ins and outs.
So, if you want today, you can actually see this in action with your own awards and opportunities, if you don't have grant awards just yet, or you want to also see this perspective grants that you're working on. I'll drop that link in the chat for everybody. And this link is just for this event right now. So, I won't be sending this link afterwards. I kind of try and keep these to just folks who are in the room with us. I'll drop that in the chat. This will prompt you to set up your trial. So, if you're interested in getting that started, you'll be able to do that there. You'll also be able to get time with Katie on the calendar in the same link. So, it will really help you get on track, and Katie will be able to talk through how she might suggest you do that. And like, seriously, I just tried this. I swear, in action, seeing this first time, it just like made my heart so happy because, you know, post-award and spenddown can be like eating those least favorite veggies. We know it has just to be prepared right, maybe with some seasoning or some spices or something, AKA the beautiful visuals that we have laid out.
If you are a current customer interested in checking this out, you can leave your information in the interest form. I will highlight this as a PRO feature. So, you may not have current access to this depending on what your plan is. For anyone that's checking this out for the first time, you will have access to all the features across plans, so you can see really what works best for your organization before you commit to anything. I want to make sure you get a sense of kind of what feels most beneficial to your organization. I'll drop that in the chat one more time. And I encourage you to check that out. It is just such a beautiful tool and it's been fun, one that our team has been working super hard on, so I was excited to share with you today.
Okay. Back to the task at hand. We've talked about the key components of our post-award management. We've talked about the goals, the ways that we need to make sure our tools are set up for success so that everything drives us towards that super awesome post-award management phase. And then we also want to talk about the 5-step blueprint. Basically how are we getting our teams on board to make sure they know exactly what's coming down the pipeline.
So, what I would love for everybody to do, I'm going to talk about each of these steps in just a second, but I'm actually going to ask you to follow along in your workbooks. So, we've got our 5-step blueprint. I'll talk about the grant kickoff, budget management, project monitoring, reporting and communication, and the evaluation and closure. We're going to talk about the objectives of each of these sections and the action items that should be associated with each of those. I want to see where your organization is at right now. And it looks like my image was missing here. But what I want you to do is open up your workbook. If you need that link again, I'm going to drop that in the chat for anyone who joined us late today.
And yes, Carolyn, I just saw that. There is that course syllabus and workbook. You're going to scroll over to page 3, and you're going to see a table in there. It is broken up by each of our blueprint steps. And so, what you'll do is I'm going to go through each step of the blueprint. There are going to be I think three on there, three checklists that you're going to check off, and I want you to follow along as I talk through these. I would like you to think about if your organization is planning to do each of these things in each phase. So, you'll check it off if you're like, yes, our organization is doing this, this and this when it comes to the grant kickoff stage.
Lastly, also you just write some notes for yourself. I have notes broken in for each of these blueprint sections, so that if you feel like maybe you're checking off two out of three of those action items but one needs to be bolstered up, you can jot yourself a few notes to remind yourself. Reflect a little bit on your process. If you're not there yet with your post-award management, maybe you haven't managed a grant yet, think about what needs to be in place in order to make sure you can actually check off those three.
Kim, let me see if I can give you a PDF version. That might help. So the PDF version is there. That should prompt you to be able to download one. You can also always do this in your own time after the event. No worries, Kim. I know how it happens. I'll drop those links again for everybody and then we'll go ahead and get started here. So you want to go ahead and scroll to page 3 and you'll follow along with me as I talk through each of our sections of the 5-step blueprint.
Okay. So, on page 3, you're going to see the first section is our grant kick-off, step number one. So we want to make sure our objective here is to establish a clear starting point for the grant’s life cycle. I saw when we first asked in the chat what you get up to when you are awarded a grant, this is one of the first things y'all already do. Some of the actions here that you want to make sure you are completing. You'll want to conduct an internal kick-off meeting to align the project team with grant objectives. That might be including the director of programs, that might be including finance, any operational staff that need to be in the know of the grant agreements that they're all on the same page. You want to review those grant agreement documents thoroughly to make sure you fully understand all the terms and conditions.
And then you're going to want to document any roles and responsibilities very clearly. I'm suggesting possibly using a RACI matrix. That's R-A-C-I for those who may be familiar with that. That stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. I'll drop that in the chat as well. That's a great way to just kind of set your team up so that you can make sure everyone is super clear on which responsibilities they are accountable for.
So, on page 3 of your workbook, just take a second to check off, if you feel like, yes, our organization is approaching all of these actions with step 1 of the blueprint. If you have any notes for yourself that you want to look back on later, think about some of the ways that you can maybe address some of these things if they are lacking in some capacity. Or maybe you're doing all three and you're doing them great, but you could just love to add something else into the grant kick-off phase.
Yeah, Kelly, the purpose of the grant kick-off meeting is to make sure you're establishing that clear starting point for the grant life cycle. So think about this? You've told your program teams three months ago, like, hey, we are awarded this grant, and then finally the funds are dispersed to us three months later. They have probably, I will honestly say, completely forgotten that that is happening if it's not actively a part of their day to day work, or they're not being reminded of that grant award coming up. So, this just essentially makes sure that everybody is aware of which grant agreements need to be followed, that the grant is starting and ending at certain times, that these are deadlines for evaluation reports or impact highlights, all that jazz. It's getting us all on the same page essentially.
Timeline. Yes, Giovanni knows.
Love that, Francine. Yes. A timeline or Gantt chart. I'll talk a little bit about that in a sec.
And Melanie says, “Yeah, I started holding application kick-offs and award kick-offs. We decide who the stakeholders are and the RACI.” Love that snaps for that.
Our second step here, if you want to scroll down, some of you might have gone ahead in your workbooks, totally fine. I want us to focus on our budget management and financial compliance. So, the objective here in step 2 is ensuring that financial activities all align with funder expectations and the conditions set in the grant. Right? So the key actions that need to happen in step 2. You need to set up a budget tracking system. This is to monitor all of our expenditures and ensure they align with the approved budget. You want to schedule those regular budget reviews of the finance team. I saw someone mentioned that earlier. I can't remember who it was. They are monthly meeting with their finance teams to address and rectify any discrepancies as they come up. So, you're not trying to backtrack and do this and you're actually submitting the final report or mid-year report, whatever it might be.
And lastly, you want to make sure you're maintaining all financial documentation for audits and ensuring adherence to applicable financial controls and regulations. Basically, you just want to make sure you're doing this as cleanly as possible, keeping track of all of that documentation so you don't lose track of where funds are being spent, if you ever needed to go back and look back on that. That might mean, you know, making sure your program teams are aware of like where their receipts need to be uploaded to, or for bigger purchase items, is there some sort of process or policy in place to make sure that those are approved ahead of time.
So, go through on step 2, check off those ones that you are crushing at, and then maybe write some notes to yourself for some things that you could work on, some kind of areas of growth in step 2.
Ooh. And I love this question from Melanie, “Is anyone doing well on the budget tracking? We have one person show in accounting using QuickBooks. How are you all extracting the data from QuickBooks?” Folks, have some thoughts? You can always reply directly to Melanie in the chat. I'd love to see what you all might be experiencing with that.
All right. And step number 3, we're going to move along here. Our objective here in implementing project monitoring and any adjustments that are necessary. This is essentially to just monitor the progress and make necessary adjustments to stay on track for the project that we've established with the grant award.
So these key actions here. Maybe developing and implementing some sort of performance management system. One that I would highly recommend, and actually I'm going to drop a link in the chat for this one, is a balanced scorecard. And there's an Instrumentl template that I'll actually give you. I'm going to drop that in the chat right now. This might help set you up if you're wondering what the heck a performance measurement system should look like. The balanced scorecard template can give you a great idea of how to essentially assess the performance and success of your grants.
We've also got us an action item to regularly assess project milestones against our timelines and deliverables. So we want to make sure that we have a timeline in place and that we are constantly kind of checking in on those key milestones that need to be met as we go along.
And lastly, we're adjusting the project plans as necessary. We might be addressing delays. Maybe something happened later and you had to cancel a program that you were supposed to run in April and now it's running in May. No big deal. Make sure to address those project plan adjustments accordingly, or any changes in project scope.
I'll give folks another second to complete step 3. And if you're like, Rachel, move on, we're good, then you can give me a thumbs up in the chat. I don't want to move too fast for anybody here.
Awesome. Here, I'm going to take that as a thumbs up for our crew. Okay, cool.
Awesome. So step number 4, we're almost done here. We want to make sure we are reporting and communicating effectively with our funders. So, the objective here is keeping all stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the project life cycle. And I think of this as stakeholders not just on the funder side but also people in leadership, folks that should be in the know on the success and project status of the grants.
So, some of the first actions you want to be doing here with the reporting, you want to make sure you're preparing and submitting progress reports as required by the funder, ensuring that they are accurate, compelling, and timely. We talked a little bit about that in some of our key components of post-award management.
Our second one here is making sure we're using clear and effective communication channels to update both internal stakeholders and funders on project status. Some of you might be doing this in things like Slack. I know folks who are currently using Instrumentl use their tasks to communicate updates to internal stakeholders. You want to make sure that you're continuing to keep your funders and stakeholders up-to-date.
And lastly, organizing those periodic review meetings. Maybe that's folded into something with finance. Maybe that's something that you incorporate with your programmatic teams. Some sort of review that happens regularly to discuss progress and any challenges that might be coming up with the administration of the grant.
I'll give folks just a second to jot down any notes that they have about step number 4.
Yeah. And then now, Corinne, I see your question. I'm happy to chat a little more with you in office hours about that.
All right. I'm rolling along. Our last step in the blueprint is making sure that we are properly addressing the evaluation and closure of the grant. So, the objective here is to make sure we're assessing the project’s impact and properly closing out the grant award.
The key actions that I've indicated in this section, number one, we've got a thorough evaluation that's been conducted of the project based on our initial objectives and outcomes. This is not something that we do at a hurried pace at the last minute. This is something that's been set up in advance so that the program teams know that this is happening. You have the eval metrics already set up, you know who's administrating the evaluation, all that good stuff.
You're going to be preparing that final report that details the project's outcomes, impact, and lessons learned. You might've been writing narratives for the funder throughout the grants administration process. It might not just be one final report. So making sure that you're keeping track of all those documents in one place, again, adding that single source of truth, so you can reference information about the grant across its life cycle and you're not chasing down that info.
And, lastly, ensuring all contractual obligations are fulfilled, and you're going to formally close the grant with the funder.
So, I’ll give folks another like 10, 15 seconds to check off their actions that they feel they're completing well or prepped to complete in step number 5. Jot down any notes that you want to use to reference for later. And give me a thumbs up when you feel like you have completed kind of this 5-step evaluation of your organization's post-award approach.
Stacey's on it. Awesome. So is Caitlin. Great. I'll wait for a few more folks to give me that done or thumbs-up in the chat. Get to critical mass here, so we can wrap up our program.
Awesome. Cindy, yeah, lots to think about. Good. I'm glad. Like some things to kind of stew over and noodle on. Awesome.
All right. I'm seeing a lot of folks that are done. You can always come back to this. This is your personal reflection sheet. So, I encourage you to save this and make sure you have a place where you can access it when you are ready for that next post-award management phase. Have this at hand, so you know what you should be focusing on.
Just kind of curious, like how do we do? How many of you were like, oh, I've checked off every single thing in the box. Maybe you've got a hundred percent on that. Maybe you're around like, I don't know, 75 percent of those are checked, you're doing pretty well. You can add your kind of score or your sense of where you're at in the chat.
Kathleen says not great. That's okay. We all have improvements to do.
Yeah. Kelly says 50%.
Oh, great. Claudia says, “Discovered some gaps I hadn't considered.” Yeah.
And Morgan says, “Always room for improvement.”
We can always do better. It's hard. We have a lot of other things on our plate, but it's good to kind of take a stake of where we're at in the post-award phase.
Wow. Stacy, 90%. Were you also someone that's managing like 15 plus grants? I feel like you are.
Yes, I will share that grant tracker, Jeffina. Everyone will get access to that once I share that final link.
Yes, ma'am. Love to hear it, Melanie. That's great. I think we've done amazing considering our previous lack of standardized process. Awesome.
I'm going to pause for a moment here. We had about 10 minutes to the hour. I want to take any questions that have maybe come up. I'll go through if there are some that have come in from the chat box. But essentially if you have things that you want to discuss as a group, please add those into the chat. You can give like three hashtags at the front of those just to help me organize since the chat is bustling today, and I can go through any things that have come up for folks as we've talked about that post-award phase.
Carolyn says, “Need to improve the non-government grants as we continue to diversify.”
That's a tough one because, of course, each grant has such specific reporting requirements and kind of creating that standardized process can be challenging but definitely worthwhile.
Yeah. Kelly is saying, “What are some of the key documents to keep for each grant?” I'm curious. I'm going to throw that back to the group as well. What documents folks are making sure they keep track of when they're awarded a grant. Some of the ones that come to mind for me, or some of those key components we talked about at the beginning, that's going to be the initial grant agreement, we need to make sure we have that always handy. Any of those reports that are continuing to get produced throughout the course of the grant’s life cycle. The budget. So, updated spend that might be on a monthly basis. You might want to get an updated spend of actuals versus the budget you've submitted to the grant.
Yup. Kaja says, “Award letter and goal objectives.”
Glad to hear it, Morgan.
Yes. L. Stephen says, “Invoices.” Yeah. You want to be keeping track of all of the financial spend that's happening related to this grant as much as possible.
Oh, Francine, let me look into that, and I can add that to our events resources page. Francine mentioned that the balanced scorecard is a little challenging to access. I'll put a different version of that, so you can access that maybe not in Canva because I think that is a template that is used in Canva.
Oh, yeah. Claudia says, “Pictures, especially for foundations.” This is so important. I can't tell you how many photos I've taken of amazing programs that I've worked at the museum on and then they just live on my phone forever and I never put them anywhere where anyone could access them and it'd come time to grant reporting and I'd be like, Oh, I have all these beautiful photos I've taken, and like, I don't know if I have photo releases yet for folks that are participants. These are such important things to keep in mind throughout the grant’s life cycle before you get to the grant reporting stage.
Yup. Cindy says, “I also get stories from either staff or participants.” I love putting like a recurring reminder on my calendar to say I need to email the programs team and ask them. Here's like a prompt I can give them that changes on a monthly or quarterly basis to get new responses to program participants, but yeah, that is as such a boon.
Awesome.
I'll continue to collect questions as they come in, but I'm going to move us along so we can wrap up in a timely manner today. You all probably know, I like to take a quick class photo, especially because we have some graduates of our grantseeker growth course today. So, if folks don't mind, if you want to turn on your camera for just a quick second, I would love to take a little snapshot of who's in the room, congratulate our graduates here, and we'll wrap up with sharing our feedback form and next steps for everybody.
So if you haven't already, I'm seeing a lot of smiling faces. Oh my gosh, everyone looks so great. I will count down. I'm going to go through each Zoom screen so I can catch everybody, and I'll take a quick class photo. All right. 3, 2, 1. Smiles! Great waves.
Okay. Page 2. One more time. 3, 2, 1. Love it.
Okay. And page 3. Oh my gosh, there's so many people. Okay. 3, 2, 1. Ah, everyone looks so great. Thank you, everybody. I love seeing all those beautiful smiling faces.
Let's close out with the last things that we need from you today. To get that access to that template that I had shared in the beginning of the program, I would love for you all to share your feedback. I'm going to drop that link in the chat. This is also accessible on that event resources page, if you lose track of the chat after the program.
Thanks, Jennifer. Ah! Love it. I really do wish I could put like little virtual graduation caps for everybody who participated in all three courses.
So, you all submit that form. I'll drop that one more time in the chat, and you'll get access to that free template. For those of you who have participated in all three courses over these past three Thursdays, I'm going to essentially go through the list and make sure I'm capturing everybody, and I will send you a link to your personalized certificate. So give me a minute to get kind of all that organized after we wrap up our event today, but by next week, everybody should have their certificate. They'll get their digital badge and they'll get those CFRE points. Love to see it.
If you had fun with this, which I think a lot of people in the room are expressing some joy about experiencing learning together, I want to mention that the fun is continuing. I love doing these programs with you all. I have a couple of really cool programs coming up. One being the Grantseeker Accelerator. We're doing a little mini summit on May 15th. It's a two-hour program. One with an interactive workshop in the beginning, and the second hour is going to be an expert panel. It'll be really fun. I'm really excited to kind of get folks back in the room for this little mini summit.
We also are starting to do our Grant Chats super regularly. I see a few folks in the room who are some of our grant chats participants. It's a very exclusive event. I limit the capacity to about 50 people. And we're doing them every third Friday. It's a more intimate setting where we discuss current challenges that are coming up with grantseeking, things that colleagues can support us on, all that fun jazz. I love the Grant Chats program. I highly encourage you to join one of those, and I will share the link to register there.
And I'm starting up my next Grantseeker Growth Course. This one was really fun. I'm going to do some different topics in our second series. That starts on May 23rd. I only have the first event listed on our events page right now, but I'll start getting those listed and you'll see what topics are going to be presented. If you have ideas for topics you'd like to see in the next series, please contribute those to your feedback form. I have loved sharing all this content with you, and I'm so glad we can offer all this free programming. Something that'd be really important to me is that you include others in this community. We're trying to make sure we include our peers who need support like this, programs like this, across our field, and that is something that you can all do really easily.
So, please, please, please share about these events with other grant professionals that you think should be in the room with us. I've got an easy link that'll drop in the chat. It’ll prompt you to fill out a really quick form, and it just essentially helps invite folks to our events on your behalf. I'll just share that.
Oh, Kara said, “You might like this event and Rachel's going to send you some information.” Super easy-peasy. I'll drop that link in the chat one more time.
Thanks, Allan.
We are wrapping up for today. That's all for now. Thanks again for showing up today. We so, so, so appreciate you. As mentioned, if anyone has any questions, I'll be sticking around, otherwise I'll wait for folks to kind of take their time to head out of the room, and I'll see you all next time.
Bye everybody!
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