The 5 best practices for automating grant management workflows: A guide for modern grantmakers

According to research, grants comprise 19% of all charitable giving—meaning grantmakers and their work are often the backbone for nonprofit success and impact. However, facilitating all of that funding can come with quite a few administrative burdens for grantmakers.

While manual grant management is possible and even popular among grantmaking entities, managing the grants process by hand (multiple disjointed tools, human-only verification and spreadsheet-based tracking) can create significant inefficiencies, increase the risk of errors and limit an organisation’s ability to scale its impact.

More than that, it can take away precious time that grantmakers could be spending on more important tasks like strengthening the grantee-funder relationship and building grantee capacity—and most importantly, advancing the mission-critical work that creates lasting change in the communities they serve.

In this article, we’ll cover exactly how grantmakers can streamline the grants management process so the entire process is more efficient, effective and impactful for everyone.

1. Map your current grantmaking

Before jumping into the ins and outs of grants automation, it’s important to first understand the current state of your grantmaking processes. An audit of your workflow is essential to figuring out where your system is bottlenecked, error-prone and just plain frustrating.

To do that, document all touchpoints across the grant lifecycle (pre-application through closeout) and note where things could be improved and become more efficient. Consider chatting with staff to find out what’s administratively burdensome or difficult and check in with past grantees to ask about their experiences, too. You might find out exactly where major issues lie faster than you think.

Once you’ve conducted an audit, set some baseline metrics for improvement, or goals you’re hoping automation will help you achieve. This might include reducing rates of error or even improving applicant satisfaction.

2. Streamline applications and reviews

One of the best time-saving automation tips for grantmakers is to adopt a software that allows your grantmaking foundation to handle everything in one central system—from application to close out. This can help your team improve cycle times, reduce bottlenecks and errors and overall make the process smoother for everyone.

With software like Good Grants, grantmakers can take advantage of features like:

Action flows: Configure a multi-stage workflow to automatically move applications through the grant lifecycle. Perfect for application approval, nomination acceptance, in-depth review rounds and more.

Automatic scoring: Perfect for screening applications and pre-qualification, auto-scoring drastically reduces the effort of sifting through individual applications by automatically scoring answers using your unique and pre-defined opportunity criteria.

Decision score matrices and leaderboards: Examine scoring in detail, application by application, with a matrix view of all reviewers and a breakdown of their scoring input. Then, view your review dashboard for live, real-time calculated and tabulated results.

3. Automate eligibility and compliance checks

Another great way to automate the grant management process is by using automatic eligibility and compliance checks to ensure that your grants process is accurate and compliant. Using a grant lifecycle management platform with automated compliance checks like Good Grants, foundations can access built-in:

Eligibility screening: Good Grants’ eligibility screener helps deliver a better quality experience for all participants by diverting ineligible applications automatically—saving everyone time, energy and effort.

Compliance auditing: Maintain a detailed and searchable record of all user activity within your Good Grants program with an audit log. Applications, categories, downloads, funds, users and more can all be found within audit log searches.

4. Automate communications and notifications

Effective grantmaking thrives on clear, consistent communication. Yet without streamlined systems, both grantmakers and grantees find themselves trapped in endless email chains, answering the same questions repeatedly and losing valuable time to administrative friction rather than meaningful collaboration.

To avoid that, grantmakers should automate their communications with:

Triggered email notifications: With Good Grants, grantmakers can send emails to users automatically based on triggered events, such as application submitted, user registered and more.

Broadcast emails: Instead of sending one-off communications, send bulk email communications targeted to specific program participants based on roles, activities and more.

In-application support: Add hint and help text to individual questions or fields so grantees to submit their applications simply and easily with very little back and forth communication.

5. Streamline grant reporting

Grant reporting can be incredibly burdensome—for both grantmakers and their grantees. Manual processes include compiling data from multiple sources, reformatting information, tracking documentation and coordinating approvals across teams.

To reduce the burden on both sides of the process, grantmakers can use software like Good Grants to:

Manage post-award performance simply and easily: Keep funding on track and grant performance in check by soliciting programmatic, financial, KPI or other pertinent grantee reports, at any time—all in one place.

Export data and bulk downloads: Access all your data and reports easily with quick and easy spreadsheet exports and bulk downloads of applications and other relevant data.

Simplify grant applications: Give grantees access to a one-stop shop for all of their reporting with the ability to upload images, documents or other files in one convenient place.

Automate your grant management with Good Grants

Managing the grants lifecycle can be incredibly burdensome for grantmakers—and take precious time away from more important tasks that help to amplify impact.

With Good Grants, grantmaking foundations can automate and streamline every stage of the grant cycle, from application to closeout and finally reduce bottlenecks, errors and delays—and make more impact than ever.