The Importance of Effective Grant Management, and How Anaplan Can Help
By: Eric Doherty
If your organization relies on grants to secure funding, you know the importance of every step in the grant administration and management processes. Careful oversight of grant applications, reporting, fund allocation and more can keep your office thriving, while oversights can lead to lasting financial difficulties.
Technology has a role to play in improving the grant management process. Using a business planning platform to drive the performance of your grants is a way to optimize your finances, going beyond manual capabilities.
With the right digital solutions in place, you can enhance the levels of visibility and oversight you have over all of your grant applications and allocations. From governance and accountability to communication and collaboration, technology tools can facilitate all the most important parts of grant management.
What Grant Management Challenges Do Organizations Face Today?
Achieving sufficient funding through grant applications is a demanding process, and there are plenty of issues that can prevent your organization from reaching its targets. Much of the effort invested in grant management goes into getting over these difficulties. In today's landscape for public-sector agencies and nonprofits, leading challenges include:
Limited funding availability: If the overall amount of money allocated to a specific area has fallen in recent years, it can be demanding to receive sufficient consideration for your particular organization.
Increased competition among agencies: Related to tight funding budgets, the intense competition between organizations raises the demands on each agency's grant management team. Applications must be especially well-crafted to get results in such a tough climate.
Complex grant application processes: When grants are difficult to apply for, this limits the amount of applications your organization can send out, and increases the chance of human error.
Tough reporting requirements: Obliging reporting requirements takes time and effort from your team. Gaining visibility into grant applications can be especially challenging when your organization doesn't have a digital system to act as a single source of truth.
Difficulties aligning funded projects with goals: Once your organization has secured funding for its projects, there is further management work needed to ensure those projects fit in with your overall objectives.
The Consequences of Grant Management Mistakes
Overcoming those difficulties is essential, especially because any slips can lead to lingering problems that can harm your organization in the months and years to come. These include:
Loss of future opportunities to secure funding.
Improper internal allocation of funds from grants.
Overspending or underspending on specific projects.
Failure to achieve intended project outcomes.
Just as a well-designed grant management approach can help you lock in success, failure to apply best practices can hold your organization back from its goals. This means the stakes are high for the way you approach grants.
How Does Technology Address Grant Management Concerns?
The right technology platform can be the pivotal enabler for your grant management strategy, giving your team members more visibility into data and freeing them up to accomplish extra tasks through automation. When implemented by an expert partner like Allitix, the Anaplan business planning solution is a natural fit for the grant process, taming the inherent complexity and helping your organization get ahead.
When organizing grant management in a business planning platform, agencies and nonprofits can:
Establish clear guidelines and procedures affecting both grant applications and reporting.
Streamline all grant administration tasks with automation.
Track and forecast spending resulting from grants.
Foster effective communication and collaboration among stakeholders.
What Are the Benefits of Using Anaplan for Grant Management?
The right planning software platform can make all the difference for grant management, providing a solid framework to build digitally-enabled workflows for superior performance. When your organization uses Anaplan in a grant management context, the impact can include:
Greater efficiency and effectiveness in overseeing your various grants.
Increased transparency and accountability around grant administration.
Better, more efficient use of resources.
Enhanced compliance with grant requirements and regulations.
Improved ability to demonstrate outcomes to funders and stakeholders.
In short, Anaplan shines a light on processes that may have otherwise remained opaque and makes it easier to oblige the countless requirements associated with modern grant management.
The advantages of working with Allitix to implement Anaplan aren't limited to the team directly responsible for grant management. Having a high-quality planning solution delivers real-time collaboration and scenario planning, which helps groups throughout the organization pursue overall objectives.
Planning via Anaplan fosters trust and confidence among stakeholders throughout the organization because they have access to consistent data and clear projections. The eventual beneficiary is the organization itself, as this approach to planning can deliver a clear path to success and sustainability that goes beyond grant management.
Specific Anaplan Capabilities to Assist with Grant Management
While an Anaplan implementation customized by Allitix experts to your organization's needs can enhance decision-making across departments and functional areas, it's worth spending more time on the features and functions most relevant to grants.
By taking full advantage of these capabilities, you can turn a liability into a strength, moving confidently through grant applications, reporting and allocation to stay competitive within your vertical. Pertinent functions include:
Tracking and managing grant timelines: Since the Anaplan interface includes interactive dashboards, users can easily track the timelines of their active grants and communicate that information with their colleagues. Tasks, milestones and deadlines are all easy to schedule and refresh. Having visibility into all these facts helps grant applications remain on track.
Adjusting timelines when necessary: Once a grant timeline is set within Anaplan's interactive dashboards and Gantt charts, included tools allow users to easily adjust those timelines or reschedule completely. It's also simple to reallocate resources and communicate changes to stakeholders on the project.
Facilitating stakeholder collaboration and communication: Grant planning teams need to stay in contact to optimize their performance. Since the Anaplan platform is cloud-based, it's easily accessible to all stakeholders, no matter where they're logging on from. Its included communication and collaboration tools facilitate real-time updates on grant progress.
Monitoring burn rate to track current and projected spending: Anaplan contains financial tracking and reporting tools that can compare real spending against budgets and also project future spend based on current expenditures and project milestones. This can provide a visible burn rate — by monitoring this rate, stakeholders can maintain an ideal investment level and avoid both over- and under-spending.
Measuring vital KPIs throughout the grant process: Key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to grant management include budget utilization, cost per outcome achieved, project progress relative to milestones or deliverables and grant adherence to reporting deadlines. By using these types of numbers, stakeholders can verify that their grant programs are reaching their potential and fulfilling objectives.
Tracking resources and cost allocations: The modeling capabilities of the Anaplan platform allow the allocation of resources and costs not just to specific grants, but to components within those individual grants. This enables informed allocation, monitoring and decision-making to optimize the allocation of resources. This precision makes it easier to achieve grant objectives within tight budgetary constraints.
Monitoring expenses and resource usage: Aligning costs with a grant's objectives and budget is a challenging process. Anaplan makes this task easier by using specialized recording and tracking features to follow resource and cost objects once they're assigned to a specific grant. If any discrepancies arise between a grant's objectives and its budget allocation, stakeholders can take immediate action to keep the project on track.
Anaplan vs. Manual Grant Tracking
The Anaplan team used a case study with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to present the benefits of the system for agencies dependent on grants. The example demonstrates how the automated tracking and data management capabilities included with the system contrast with the heavily manual, spreadsheet-based methods organizations may use by default.
The speed and usability advantages provided by Anaplan's functionality allow offices to accelerate the life cycle of their grant processes, overcoming the departmental silos, inefficient manual processes and in-depth reporting requirements that can slow down grants.
Departments that have adopted the planning solution have achieved more wins on their grant applications, taking full advantage of the ease that comes with digitization. Connected planning and cloud-based data access, combined with next-generation dashboards and planning tools, can empower the teams responsible for funding.
Ready to Get Started with More Effective Grant Management?
Grant management is just one of the elements of your organization that can benefit from an Anaplan implementation spearheaded by Allitix — but it's an important one. Considering the central nature of grants to public-sector funding, combined with the rising challenges of applying for and winning grants, it's clear that technological advantages have real value.
When your organization is ready to embrace connected planning, you need to ensure your Anaplan implementation will suit your specific needs. Working with an expert partner on the software adoption is the clearest way to achieve a positive return on investment on a short timeline, and to ensure that value lasts.
This is where Allitix comes in. Our team uses cross-industry knowledge and expertise, along with a deep immersion in the capabilities of the Anaplan platform, to deliver outcomes that truly suit organizational needs. To find out more, contact us now or watch our on-demand webinar.