5 Steps To Perfect Post-Award Grants Management with Rachel Werner

Introduction to Rachel Werner

Rachel: Hello, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to talk about all things grants management. Now, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, especially with a lot of the government grant funding that's been coming down the pike.

So, really, we're just trying to look at this in a way to make it more manageable for you. Because a lot of times, we focus on the pre-award and all of the steps involved with that, which are critical:

• The research
• The planning
• Application writing and cultivation

All of that is incredibly important. And then what I want to see is sort of that translation to the post-award side.
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A lot of times, there isn't as much focus on post-award management and compliance.

And so, I'm here to kind of bring up some things and see how we can sort of learn some new tips that could help you as you start to dig into this work a little bit more or perhaps, gain some things that you can bring back to your organizations. So, I think that we already had people starting to share their information in the chat. So, thank you. It was really great to see a wonderful representation of folks from all over the country.

And Will already gave me an introduction. So, I'm not really going to go into detail about my introduction. I'm based in the DC area, so if you're there, hello.

And we primarily started to work with clients in the DC area but now we've expanded across the country. And one of the things that we've really started to also focus on is post-award management. So, let's talk about what we're going to be reviewing today.

What Is Post-Award Grant Management
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So I think of compliance as sort of the broccoli of the grants work because a lot of people don't really want to talk about compliance, policies, reporting, and all of those things. But they're an important component if you want to keep that grant funding and sustain it for future years.

It can be a lot more fun to talk about those applications, going after new funding sources, new projects, and really looking into these new relationships that you can develop and building out existing relationships with funders—but this is also a critical component. So, what we're going to do is talk about:

• The importance of post-award management
• How to use research tools like Instrumentl and other strategies to learn about post-award needs
• How you can think about post-award needs from as early as the pre-award stage
• Top five tips to manage your grants
• Review and reflections to kind of talk about what we learn

And I think that, as I mentioned before, there's a lot of focus on pre-award. So, this is sort of shifting our thinking to:
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How do we take some of the skills or the tools that we use in pre-award and apply them in post-award? And that's really what this is about.

The Role of Compliance in Post-Award Management

So first of all, why is grants management so important? This is sort of a question that I'm posing. And I'd love to maybe, Will, you can call out things from the chat box.
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But what do funders want to see regarding their grant awards?

So, if you are requesting funding from a foundation, a government funder, or a corporate entity, what do you think they want to see regarding their grant awards? What is important for them? And so, Will, you can start sharing anything that people have shared.

Will: Yeah. Absolutely. Folks mentioned the following:

• The impact
• How we’re going to measure success and report on outcomes
• Relevance and proven management
• Demonstrated need
• Contract adherence
• Meeting deliverables

Rachel: Great. Well, those are all wonderful answers. And I know that those are all very much at the top of funders' minds. And depending on the funder type, some more than others. But the answer is knowing that their funding makes a difference. And I think all of the things that you shared are part of that.

They want to see how you as an organization are:

• Implementing their priorities
• Implementing their interests
• Making an impact by directing their resources toward the support of a larger issue, cause, or initiative

So, thinking about target groups or causes that need additional resources that could be based on a certain target population, a certain geographic area. Also thinking about the community aspect, especially for those local funders and how that could be a critical component to building those viable communities that can really help preserve the fabric of that area. And also thinking about how DEI initiatives contribute to a more equitable, inclusive society that we’re working towards—and funders are thinking about this across the sector.

So, all of your answers kind of fall into this—how to strengthen the backbones of organizations so they can continue to do great work.
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And that's really the point of post-award compliance. I’m going to keep trying to take it back to that: it's really trying to make sure that you can continue providing great service support and just contributing to the impact of the people that you serve or the causes that you support.

The Broccoli of Grants Work: Compliance and Its Importance

So, why is it important?
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If your organization does not report on your outcomes or provide enough information on progress to your funders, you may not receive additional funding in the future. It's important to really contribute to that story and cultivation strategy.

That's a huge component of building that relationship with funders because you want to make sure that everything that you put in that application is actually adhered to.

And if not:

• How are you making those pivots?
• How are you explaining that to funders?

As some people mentioned before, the reports, outcomes, stories, and data are really critical to sharing your story.

We know that there are challenges. We know that things have changed, especially in the past three years. But how are you conveying that? How are you reporting on that to funders?

And also connecting with grantmakers and making sure that you:

• Continue providing that sort of story to them throughout the course of the life cycle
• Maintain that information on file and share it as needed for all different areas, either:some text
  • Financial regarding your budget
  • Operations
  • Administrative information
  • Emails
  • Programmatic (activities, outcomes, stories or testimonials that would be important to share)

This is something I generally use in presentations because all of these moving pieces fit into the grant lifecycle.

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We know the importance of research and strategic planning. I think that probably is the most important component of the grants lifecycle because it sets the stage for how you do all of the other work. The other one that I'm really going to be focusing on is four, which are award management and monitoring.

To me, that's almost the second most important component because that's what you do to sustain that grant throughout its lifecycle, throughout the work you're doing with that funder.

So, how are you sort of setting that tone with funders? What does this mean from an organizational perspective?
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When you think about grants management—and I really like this description—grants management is the processes and methods organizations go through to oversee grants from an operations, financial, and programmatic vantage.

Grant management encompasses every part of a grant's lifecycle, from pre-research to post-award closeout.

So even though award management and monitoring is a specific phase, the whole focus of grants management, you have to kind of think about it across the lifecycle. So, it's really important to think about it throughout the whole process. And as you're looking at opportunities, determine if they're the right fit because you're going to have to manage that funding.
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I've actually had clients decide not to pursue additional funding because of the additional post-award requirements that were needed for them to continue with that.

Side Note: The other thing I want to quickly mention is that if you are a recipient of government funding, then you probably are aware of 2 CFR 200, which is the uniform grant guidance under the Office of Management and Budget. So, that's really the federal grant requirement. And it's required if you're a recipient of:

• State funding
• Local funding
• Federal grant funding

And that is what you must adhere to. So in order to make sure that you continue to be a good steward, you need to make sure that you understand 2 CFR 200 and its components.

That can be a whole other presentation. So, I’m not going to dive into it too much. But happy to answer questions if you want to email me about that.

And I know that it's so easy to be overwhelmed when you administer grants. So just try to focus on the things that are high priority, things that you can build upon that you're already doing within your organization that can make you continue with your success.

So, I'm curious—and this is another chat question:

What are your biggest challenges related to grants management? What do you see as the greatest barriers to success or things that you might need additional help on?

So I'll defer to you, Will, to call out the responses.

Will: Yeah. Absolutely.

So, there are a couple of references to:

• Technology
• Reports
• Scheduling
• Upkeep
• Coordination with the team
• Staying on top of deadlines
• Requirements for reporting
• Entering data and monitoring
• Reporting deadlines
• Navigating all the different funder portals
• Upkeep of grant tracker and results from data from the internal team and different stakeholders

Rachel: Oh, gosh, I heard a lot of “reporting.” It just seems like the administrative work around grants management can be a lot.

Will is going to share a little bit more about how you might be able to manage the administrative work better. A lot of it just depends on the capacity of your organization, what you'll be able to manage from a financial perspective, and also just from a personnel perspective on who owns the system.

We're going to get into a little bit of the tracking later. But thank you for sharing.

Leveraging Research for Post-Award Success

And so, part two is really how can I leverage research? So when going back and thinking about that grant lifecycle and thinking about the first part, which is the planning and research.
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How can I start thinking about post-award and grants management in the planning and research phase?

One of the things that I like to do is try to think about grant planning and research like a little detective.

Ask yourself:

• What are the things that you want to gather during the research process?
• Are there multiple application cycles for this opportunity or for this funder?

• Can we apply to this funder at a different time in the year?
• Will applying at a different time ease your burden post-award?

If you know that a funder might administer the award three months after you submit the application, is that going to be a burden for you? I know that the work that we do with clients tends to be either December or the end of the fiscal year, which could be in June. And so, there are certain times of year that seem to be more busy than others. So, are there things that you can sort of plan out in your calendar?

And also thinking about the application. Consider:

• Do they require a great deal of information?
• Can I report on these?
• Do we have the capacity to gather this information, and these data, these outcomes, and so forth?
• Can you report on them accurately?

And also financial. We know that if they ask for a lot of different budget breakdowns and information on how you're spending the funds, you need to think about whether you have the capacity to report on those requirements. And also, think about it from an outreach perspective:

• Will you be required to incorporate their award and progress into your existing social media and digital marketing campaigns?
• Is that something that you need to integrate?
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If you can connect with the funder and have a conversation with them, you might be able to find some more details before you actually apply. You may even avoid an opportunity that you know might not be a good fit.

Think about what you can look at from a research perspective. Here are a couple of things that are important to thinking about the application as a treasure hunt.

When you’re thinking about post-award support, here are some questions that are common in applications, and here's what they're really trying to ask. Essentially, the information funders are trying to gather:

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So, those are the kinds of things to think about when you're putting together your applications that they're going to be asking you about post awards, and probably in the reports as well.

And so with that, I'm going to defer to Will to talk through how Instrumentl can be used for this kind of research.

How To Utilize Instrumentl for Post-Award Success

Will: Awesome. So one of the things that you're often going to want to look into is:

• Digging into different funder profiles
• Looking into the sort of folks that they have been funding in the past
• Their funder websites as well

So if you are into bringing some of the management components back into your work, what you'll see in Instrumentl is:

Dedicated Tracker

You'll essentially see a dedicated tracker for each of your projects. Some of the folks mentioned some of the challenge points of post-award grant management, such as keeping everybody in the same loop and getting all their stakeholders involved in the process. A dedicated tracker resolved that issue.

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And that's what you can do once you start to save things into your tracker. You're going to have different dedicated workspaces for each of your respective fundraising initiatives. And then you'll be able to add different tasks for the team members that are responsible for different components of the process.

So, we cover things from the start of the process to the latter half of the lifecycle that Rachel shared in that graphic a couple of slides ago. What you'd be able to do is if, for example, somebody on your team is responsible for reporting in some sort of way:

• Schedule a task for a specific team member
• Set a due date for when they need to tackle that by
• Set who might be collaborating with them on that certain thing
• Get notified of those upcoming tasks related to the grants that you're looking to attract or manage.

View Funder Information

You can also see all the information about the funder in the same place.

So, when you dig into these funder tabs, you'll see where those opportunities exist in your different trackers. You'll see that I have these not only in my environmental project but also in my STEM education project since this is a general operational support grant.

As I scroll down here, this is where you can really start digging into the funder. You can give them a quick phone call. Maybe you already have an existing relationship with that funder and want to catch up with them. Maybe you want to just access that funder’s direct website.

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From here, what we can do is we can dig into that side of things. So one of the earlier comments was on all the different funder portals as well. It can just be useful to have everything in one place because whether that's you using the notes section on the right hand side, as you can see here, I've kind of included a note of what they're proud to support. You can also just dig into their actual background information of who they're funding the most.

Giving Behavior

So, things like the giving averages and medians.

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Or if you're on our standard plan or above, you'll see things that are unique to Instrumentl, like the openness to new grantees.

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Knowing the difference between these sorts of things can make it so much easier to prioritize which relationships to cultivate the most in the next section of your life cycle and organize everything into the central source of truth.

I know that some folks are probably thinking, “What about the grant opportunities from outside Instrumentl that I don't find?”

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Well, in that situation, as shown above, you can “Add new” and then upload many. Here, you can just download our template where once you bring this into Instrumentl, you'll have your existing opportunities also in the central source of truth. That means everybody can stay on the same page a lot faster.

Master Tracker

Once you set up a couple of projects on Instrumentl, you'll have what we call a Master Tracker [All Projects].

And that's where you really start to see how all this comes together in which if I have 5 to 10 different fundraising opportunities that I'm pursuing, I see it all in one place.

If you're on our standard plan or above, you'll start to have a master calendar view. And now, everything is kind of organized, tidied up in the same place as well.

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The image above shows a calendar view of all your upcoming tasks, goals, and deadlines for each individual grant your organization is pursuing.

I have a couple of questions that I'll answer quickly before passing it back to you, Rachel. But Teresa is asking:

Do staff need to have an Instrumental log in or account to assign tasks to staff?

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They do. If you want to add them to your account, you go to the bottom left corner under “Account” and select “Manage Team.”

Pro Tip: Maybe you have a team member who's like a volunteer in your organization, and they're not necessarily going to need Instrumentl every single day. A lesser-known feature that folks can use is sharing a grant with their team members. This feature will just send a direct email to them that links to the funder profile they’re working on. And so, that can be super useful as well.

How many users can you have on your Instrumentl account?

All of our base plans, to answer your question Diana, support starting out three users. But if you want to add an additional user, it's $5 per month per additional user.

Does Instrumentl integrate with any CRMs, like Monday.com?

We actually do integrate directly with Salesforce right now. So, if you're looking for that sort of feature when you're creating your free account in Instrumentl, let our team know, and we can definitely share more about how our Salesforce integration works. We're also working on some other integrations in the future.

But, yeah, that should go over some of the fundamentals in terms of the tracking side of things and the management that you might be able to bring into one place, along with some of the funder research that you are referencing.

Rachel: Great. Okay. Let me go back to sharing my screen. Okay. Great. All right.

Rating Your Organization's Grants Management Processes

So, we've just gone through the demos. So, I'm just going to flip past here and get to another chat question.

So how would you rate your organization's grants management processes on a scale of 1 to 10?

I love to know this, because we're going to get to the tips now. So, I'm curious to see how people are thinking.

Will: Yeah. Absolutely. I am seeing a wide range of numbers, actually. So, anywhere, it looks like the lower end, 0. Upper end, maybe an 8. But not too much beyond that.

Rachel: Okay. Well, you know what? I think in the middle is good because that means that you already have some things in place. But maybe you need to kind of build that up and enhance it a little bit more.

It becomes a situation where you have to learn when you receive more funding. I know that some of our clients have received a lot of federal funding. And so, they have had to develop these skills out of necessity because they've had to really think about post-award management because of the greater transparency related to that. So, it could be a situation where you're sort of forced to deal with compliance when you might not have focused on that much before.

Top 5 Tips for Effective Grants Management

So, here's my top five tips that I'm going to share.

And I'm going to go through these fairly quickly because I do want to leave time for questions. But I do want to open the door so that if you have additional questions, feel free to email me. My contact information is going to be at the end, because I'm happy to discuss this. I love talking about compliance. And I'm happy to kind of share some additional thoughts.

1. Assessing Resource Capacity

So, first thing I want to talk about is your resource capacity. Because I think that's really critical to determining how many grants you’re able to manage. So the first thing I would suggest is really kind of conduct a needs assessment. Here's a couple of ways you can approach it.

Incremental Approach

It’s the incremental approach. And that's basically trying to answer the question, what capacity would enable us to grow and move forward to meet our goals? So, thinking about what it is that you're going to have to build towards in order to get to a state where you can successfully manage these grants.

Gap Analysis

And the other approach is sort of the gap analysis. So, sort of taking what the ideal situation is that you'd like to be in the future and comparing that to the current situation, and what are the differences between them, and thinking about the difference between your current and ideal state.

And I think that some of you are probably thinking about that when you're ranking at a three. How do you get from that 3 to a 10? Or even to an 8? Somewhere where you feel more comfortable with what you're doing and what you are presenting to funders.

And the way that you want to think through your resources is kind of breaking it down into different areas. You have the personnel. And that could be people who are staff, volunteers or outsourced support. So, anybody who's kind of there to support the process. It doesn't have to be people who are in grants that are thinking about finance, programmatic, and also administrative.

So thinking about how all of those people:

• Are there sort of any weak links or areas of improvement that are needed?
• Any technology and systems?
• What kind of tools do you have to kind of get through and make sure that you're able to manage the grant funding?
• Do you have anything that's weak?
• Do you use something like Teams or Slack or some other kind of system to organize all of the information so it can be shared readily?
• What systems that you have in place to make sure that that information flows between different individuals, especially because a lot of people touch it?
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And then also knowledge. This is a big area because sometimes there's a knowledge gap between what people might know about post-award management and what actually is in-house. And so, making sure that there's enough understanding about how you need to create that sort of opportunity for your team to have the skills that they can be able to be successful in this area.

And also thinking a little bit more about leadership. And the leadership buy-in is incredibly important because it's the top down to ensure that there's a compliance culture within your organization and making sure that there's that sort of focus on reporting and monitoring.

But also, how were you documenting that to ensure that all the authorized individuals are established, know their roles, and have that level of accountability? That's important.
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Whether you receive government grants or not, it's really important to have that sort of ethos because we don't always talk about cultural philanthropy. But I think it also should be a culture of compliance because that's what allows you to sustain the funding and make sure that you remain a viable recipient of funding from any funder.

2. Developing and Updating Policies

And thinking about your policy. So, this is definitely focused on government funding. But this should be applied across the board.

Now, the policies that you'll want to have in place are dictated by the grant awards. So, it's really important to:

• Understand their current grant agreements to make sure what you must adhere to
• Think about those from an administrative standpoint of what are the different individuals and roles involved
• Think about your budget
• Think about data management
• Think about the submission and the reporting policies
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How are these policies codified within your organization? If you don't have policies in place, what are you doing, as part of the needs assessment, to figure out how you can get those in place and figure out which policies you need to develop?

So thinking through some of that will be really helpful for you because those policies have sometimes been requested by funders, even non-governmental funders. And they don't need to be extensive; they just need to be accurate. And they need to really dictate what you're doing as an organization to ensure that you're going to be a good steward of their funding.

And then here are some examples of policies:

• Travel policy
• Cash management policy
• Budget reconciliation policy
• Grant submission policy
• Procurement policy
• Time and effort reporting policy

Again, these are sort of a little bit more focused on government grants. But you can kind of see how they can be incorporated into some other policies that you might be developing, like travel policy, cash management policy. Again, some of these might not be applicable, but important to kind of think about.

And this is thinking about federal funding. What this really is is the COSO Internal Control framework. And this is part of 2 CFR 200 for developing internal controls. And this sort of outlines all of those policies I just referenced in the previous slide. It shows, what are you going to do to be a good steward of that government funding?
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And this provides that assurance that, yes, we have these controls in place that assure that we are going to minimize risk. And that's really what compliance is, is minimizing risk.

3. Implementing Efficient Processes

Let's then think about the processes. You have your policies in place for the outlines of who is responsible for what and how things are going to flow from one department or one person to another.

So, what are the processes? So, thinking about it from three different vantages:

• Administering the grant
• Tracking the grant
• Ensuring quality

So, these are thinking about systems and technology that were referenced before for the tracking and administering of the funds, as well as:

• Having people with the right skills and ability to do this work
• And also the timeframe: Making sure that you can do this within the reporting deadlines and that there are certain processes in place to ensure that you're being reminded of these deadlines
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What are those processes? This is where the leadership buy-in is important to ensure that those processes are set up from the top and that they're followed.

And these are from the three separate vantage points. First, think about it from a financial perspective. It's really important on the budget reconciliation side to track all those grant-related expenditures.

And I would honestly, definitely recommend having sort of a kick-off call post-award and thinking about what you're supposed to be doing on the award and who's supposed to be involved in the process because that could help set the right tone.

So as you're thinking about:

• Who's your financial point person?
• Who's your programmatic point person?
• Who's your operations point person?
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If you're all in the same room or virtual room, how are you sort of getting on the same page about the deadlines and the responsibilities and managing that award? And these different lanes can really help you sort of ensure that you're on the right track.

Financial: So, financial is really making sure that the budget is intact and they're coded correctly. And if people's time is reported on grants, that's going to be organized correctly in your system of record.

Programmatic: Your programmatic is making sure you're thinking about the performance measurement and how you're actually doing the work, and making sure if you are using funds that they're going to be reported to financial.

Operations: The operation is going to be that sort of project manager person who is reporting to the awarding agency if there are any updates. And also, just making sure that things are running smoothly and those reporting deadlines are being met.

And so, sometimes, that person is a bridge between programmatic financial. Sometimes that person could be financial or programmatic. So depending on the size of your organization, I understand. So, it's just important to clarify the different components of the process.

4. The Importance of Tracking

And this is where we get to tracking. And I'm going to bring in Will back in a second to talk about some of the tracking that needs to take place.

But when you're thinking about tracking, a lot of times people ask: Well, what system should I use? How should I be tracking these grants, outcomes, etc.?

These are the things I want you to think about and reflect on with your team:

• Is more than one person tracking key deliverables?
• Are you going to be the one? Are you the project manager? Is there going to be more than one person?
• Is there a system that you already use for grants and fundraising functions?
• Can you leverage that for tracking?
• How many people are involved in the process?
• If there's going to be someone who's checking, who is that person? How are they involved?
• How do we ensure that they're a part of the process?

Also, think about your budget. If you don't have a lot of additional funds to spend on a separate tracking tool, try and leverage what you already have. I'll say that those responses are going to determine the system that you use.

Now, I've seen all different kinds of things. I have seen grants that are:

• Managed in manual systems or databases
• Excel files
• Slack
• Basecamp
• Google Sheets
• Asana
• Monday.com

So, all of those things. It really depends on how you use them. And again, it depends on how many grants you have and how many people are involved in the system.
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But if you're already using something like Instrumentl for your research, it seems a natural segue.

And again, there's no right or wrong approach. Somebody asked me before: What's the best project management tool out there?

It really just depends. You really have to figure out what are the important components of your organization. Because so many of them are cloud-based and they're more cost-effective. So, I think that you can find a solution that fits you if you're looking to get something that's a little bit more cloud-based or user-friendly, perhaps, than a manual spreadsheet.

And so, Will, is there anything else you wanted to share about the tracking?

Instrumentl Makes Tracking Easy

Will: Yeah. The main thing that I'd say, aside from what I shared earlier on different tasks that you can create for a team member, is that we also have customizable reports where, in the case where a few earlier questions were made on what about people that may not necessarily need Instrumentl every day and whatnot, we often see our folks who will generate custom reports and then attach those for different weekly or bi-weekly team meetings.

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And that can be a great way—whether it's your board that’s involved or your executive director that you might be reporting to—to keep them informed on how your grants are doing in the loop in terms of all the different things you're working on. The biggest thing, though, is what you said, Rachel, figure out the system that works for you.
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What's really nice about bringing your work into something that is fully integrated like Instrumentl is that aside from the discovery of new opportunities you'll be getting from your matches, you'll also get those auto reminders of path and deadlines all in the same place.

And so, we have a separate workshop. It's actually also free and available on demand where we dig into different considerations when you're assessing different tech tools. And so, I can definitely provide that as a follow up resource for folks that just want to explore that further. We go through just a helpful decision matrix of factors to consider when making that sort of evaluation of some of the different tools that you've outlined.

Rachel: Right. All right, thank you. And Instrumentl has a lot of great resources out there. So, definitely take advantage of some of them. I think there's a lot of things that could really help you throughout the process. And so, the last thing that I want to say is my last tip is making sure that your team has the skills who are able to manage it.

5. Building the Right Skills within Your Team

Now, first of all, it's really important to identify who's involved in the grants process. And that could be pre and post award, thinking about who's involved in this. Because, likely, the people who are involved pre-award are going to be involved post-award.

You need to determine: Is there a knowledge gap?

• And can that be filled by someone in house?
• Or do you need to outsource?
• Do you need to look into other trainings?

Now, there's a lot of training out there on federal grants management. I've seen a lot of things on that. And there's also training on grant requirements. So if you have specific questions about resources, again, you can email me because I know a lot out there. I just didn't want to bombard people with information that might be specific to your organization.

And just thinking about what are the greatest needs?

You need to have more on the financial management because there's a lot of financial accounting, or programmatic, which is more evaluation, and that's a whole different area. And then also thinking about it from an administrative standpoint, which is thinking about the tracking and the management.
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What are the things that you need to think about to help make sure that you're up to speed and have the right resources and skills available to do the work successfully?

And so, the last part is really thinking about the ongoing maintenance and thinking about what you have in place. Is it working? Is it not working?

 So thinking about the tracking, especially when we look at the protocols and the systems:

• What is working right now?
• What's keeping you on track?
• What might need to be updated?
• Where do you want to go?
• Are there other priorities that need to be addressed?
• Could this be part of a larger organizational initiative that you're doing to improve technology across the board?

When you have meetings with your team to talk about the deliverables—are all the right people there? Ensure there is someone from:

• Finance
• Programs
• Administrative

In regards to administrative, consider a monthly touch-point meeting. Ask them: “Hey, how's this going? We have a report. Do we need this level of information?” What I've seen working with different clients, especially those that have more siloed departments, is that there's not as much communication about where they can contribute to the reports.

Consider:

• Are they given a schedule in advance to know when those reports are due?
• What information do they need?
• Is there a template you need to use?

Pro Tip: If you had a system, like Instrumentl, to help track some of those things, then you could just tag those people and make sure that they're in the loop. Ensure that those things are updated because sometimes, especially if one person's doing it, it can be a bit tricky to have one person who's managing all the different components.

But if that's their role, perhaps they're more of a project manager, then that could be systematized across the board and be part of the process. Other times, if there are other people involved, then make sure they know that they're going to be updating and tracking in the same way.
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And just make sure that you update your processes and policies, especially if you receive government funding, because there's always new updates from OMB and always new information for awarding agencies. You just want to incorporate it into the work that you're doing.

So, just some considerations. Make sure that you focus on the top-priority grant management needs. If it's going to be technology, focus on technology. If it's going to be training, then focus on that.

Don't try to do everything at once because then it’s just going to be overwhelming. You're going to feel like you're not doing enough. And so, it's really just part of that review of what is going to be critical. And thinking about it from a risk-based perspective because that's what compliance is. If you don't address something, what is going to be the riskiest thing you can do?

Ensuring Ongoing Compliance and Management

So, think about how you can minimize that risk through some of these solutions. Try to make sure that you're covering the bases, that you're not missing any key deadlines, and that you're in compliance.

Pro Tip: With the federal grant funding, just make sure that you're aware of any updates related to 2 CFR 200 because there are always some new things. And there are a lot of great resources out there.

If there's going to be a final roadmap to kind of pull this together, then I'll go with the key takeaways:
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Really understand your grants management requirements. Understand those notices of grant awards and make sure you know what the reporting requirements are, any other monitoring, any other updates, and who's the point of contact. Just making sure that that information is available.

Then, you determine what kind of needs you have and update your policies and procedures, and other tracking mechanisms. Make sure that the team has the knowledge and skills that can be trained to move forward and address these areas based on the need for updated policies and stuff.

And always, just part of the checking and tracking is the continuous review to make sure that the systems are working. And if they're not, how can they be tweaked?

And so, my three learning takeaways are:

1. Identify what your organization has the capacity to manage. I think that's the number one thing. It's sort of that go, no-go assessment, when you're thinking about going after an award from a pre-award perspective. Look and see what the requirements are post-award. Can you manage that? Can you ensure that you can provide that information that's accurate?
2. Prioritize your grants management needs, and making sure that you can think about them in these different buckets of financial, operational, programmatic, which areas are most in need of support right now and what are the things that you can do to build into that.
3. It takes time. When we start working with clients on building out policies and procedures, it can take time because some things are in different places. And also, just understanding from an organizational perspective that we can put together great policies and procedures documents, but if it's not followed, then it's pretty useless.

So, figuring out what makes the most sense within each organization because each one is completely different. And here's my contact information. And I will leave it to any questions that are in the hopper because I'm happy to answer them.

And in addition to that, I also have a takeaway here so you can feel free to snag that as well. It's a logic model template that you can use, which I think are very, very important from a pre-award perspective, because that can be used for the data gathering and management for post-award. So, I love a good logic model.

So with that, I will defer to you, Will, to see if there's any questions I can answer.

Q&A Wrap-Up

Audience Questions

Will: Awesome. Diana had a question of, just in general:

How often should folks be communicating with a funder throughout the year or after a grant is received? And what sort of communication would you recommend, personal email, a news article, or something else?

Rachel: Oh, that's a great question. My rule of thumb is that for every sort of financial request that we send out via an application, I suggest three other touch points.

Now, that could be a report with an article. That could be a phone call. That could be an email. But I think it's important to understand how the funder likes to be contacted. Because I think that it's very different for government funders than family, corporate, or private foundations.

So, I think that I would really understand how they want to be involved in the process. Other times, if it's a corporate funder, they might want to have a volunteer day with some of their other employees. And so, that could be a great way to have a touch point or a site visit. So, it really just depends on the funder because some might say, “You know what, that one progress update email is enough.” So, I would say to understand your funders and to know what works for them.

Will: Awesome. And Julia asked:

Is there a layman's version of 2 CFR 200?

Rachel: Oh, gosh. You know who has a book on it? It’s Lucy Morgan and MyFedTrainer. And she has really developed some wonderful training on the topic. And there's even a book that she wrote.

So, it's myfedtrainer.com. And there's information that can really help guide you through. Because if you were to just go on online and look up 2 CFR 200, it's just going to be a lot of jargon. And that's helpful to kind of understand if you're looking at a specific issue or topic area, like matching funds or program income, or something like that.

But if you're trying to get a full sense of what's involved with 2 CFR 200, the internal controls, that's a great resource. The National Grants Management Association does a training every year, and they have a conference. So, that's another great way to learn more about it.

There are some other specialized webinar trainings as well that they have once a month. And also, is it the Council of Financial? I have to look up the name. But they always provide updates on 2 CFR 200. And they have them available on their website where you can access these webinars on various different topics related to it.

Will: Awesome. To Julia, if you're looking for some of those extra resources, Rachel's email is on the screen as well. I'm sure she'd be happy to share those along with you. If you have any other questions, feel free to type them in the chat. Also, I just wanted to let folks know that I put that freebies resource page in the Zoom chat. If you click in there, you'll be able to get access to the planning resource that Rachel shared, as well as a few of our resources.

And then also, if you enjoyed this grant workshop, we'll be back in two weeks for project budgets, what to do and what not to do with Margit Brazda Poirier. But we also will be back tomorrow where we will have a customer spotlight. So, we're going to be sharing about how a director of giving raised a million dollars in under a year on Instrumentl. So, if you’re curious about those, I'll leave the events calendar in the Zoom chat as well.

But, yeah, if you have any questions, I'll give it another minute or so to see if any new ones come in. I think we've covered most of the ones so far. Theresa asked:

Are there any tips for getting other staff on board to help with grant management?

Rachel: Yeah. So, that can be a challenge.

And this is why in the beginning, leadership buy-in is so important. And this goes without saying that in order to get people involved, it really needs to be a culture of support. Because I've actually had a client that said, “Compliance is not important.” And this was a large healthcare association, which made me very nervous.

And so when you have that kind of ethos, it's not going to be translated well when you're actually delivering the work, when you're actually trying to do the work of grants management.

I love the book Atomic Habits by James Clear because it's about developing slow and steady and small incremental changes in your daily work. So, what I would want to think about is perhaps the first step is to have that initial kick-off call when you're thinking about your grants calendar for the year and thinking about what the opportunities are that you want to pursue. And then in addition to that, if you can have a monthly grants meeting to kind of talk through the different opportunities that have been awarded, and thinking about separating them into the different functions of financial, programmatic and administrative, who has the role on each different component, and understanding why it's important.

And this is where the training comes in as well. So, I would say that those meetings and sort of identifying the reasons why compliance is important is because you don't want to end up on the Washington Post. And I've seen that happen. And it's not a good situation, especially if you receive government funding.

Will: Awesome. And then another question was asked:

Do you have any ideas for templates or other easier data collection methods from program managers?

One thought I'd say before you answer, Rachel, is I think probably a simple Google Forms of sorts, or some sort of form field would probably make input a lot easier than potentially having some sort of unwieldy spreadsheet that might not have as high of adoption. So, that might be something to consider.

Rachel: Yeah. Absolutely. Especially because chances are, if you receive funding for similar programs, the outcomes are going to be very similar. So I would think about from program vantage, what information you're trying to collect. And those metrics, I think, kind of similar to what you were saying, Will, should be aligned.

It could be a Google Doc. It could be something simpler. It doesn't have to be extensive in order for it to, at least, be successful.

Will: In the next question, Elsa:

Is the logic model to be done as a team? Or is that something that the person overseeing the program would complete?

Rachel: I love that it could be a collective exercise. The program lead would be great. Now, if there's anybody else who supports the program I think that it's important to get different vantage points.

Now, the program side could definitely lead it. But it should definitely be reviewed by others because there could be other things that might be missing or that can be built upon when you're doing that process.

Will: Cool. Dora asked the question of:

How are you able to determine or research what foundations or grants are giving to new organizations?

I think that's a question for me.

Rachel: Yeah.

Will: The biggest thing that we do is we sift through all the available public data from the IRS Business Master File. And we essentially cross reference the differences between years.

So whereas, historically, you might have gone through an old directory listing or a PDF file of the form 990s that you have to sift through yourself, what we're doing is we are canonicalising every single record and essentially comparing year by year, who is a new grantee versus who is a repeat grantee, and so on. And so, that is how we are able to parse that sort of information. In my knowledge, there is no other tool out there that does that level of analysis in terms of figuring that out.

But my general benchmark that I share with folks is, if you can find somebody who's giving 30% or more to new grantees, that's a really good funder typically to prioritize. And that's a very useful benchmark in general when it comes to, let's say, you have three to five different opportunities on the table to pursue, and you want to make the most of your time.

So, definitely, look for that sort of metric, especially when you're creating that free account with Rachel's link, just because all of our free trials do have full access to the platform. They're not restricted in any way there.

Nicole asked the question:

Do you have any resources to share with the leadership team about the importance of building a culture of compliance or accountability with funders?

Rachel: That's a great question. And I'm trying to think of resources that might be good. I’m wondering if the National Grants Management Association might have some information about why it's important to attend their conference. I know that the Grant Professionals Association does, because those are the kinds of things I could see being brought to leadership’s attention, just why that kind of professional development is important and that speaks to that sort of culture of compliance.

And if you're talking about government grants, that's a non-issue because they are required to administer government funding. So, I think that it depends on the type of funding you have. But that's where I would look to start. I don't have any resources at my fingertips. But if I do some digging, I could probably try to locate a couple of things. So, you can follow up with me separately if you want.

Will: Awesome. And that email for Rachel is Rachel@rbwstrategy.com. If you have any final questions, I'll give it a sec. But otherwise, we're all caught up on questions so far.

Rachel: Great.

Concluding Remarks and Contact Information

And I just wanted to thank everybody. I know that, as I said, compliance is sort of the broccoli of the grants world. So, a lot of people don't want to talk about it. But I love talking about compliance. So, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. And I'm happy to answer them because I can dig in and I can get into 2 CFR 200 or not. So, let me know.

Will: Awesome. And Diana just asked for my email. My email is will@instrumentl if you want to reach out to me. We will have this workshop replay sent out to you guys in the coming days. I will be hopping onto a flight. So, I'll get to it later this week. But I promise I'll get it to you guys. And we will be back tomorrow.

Actually, Kimberly, for your question in terms of a nonprofit that was able to secure a million dollars in a year, join us for our customer spotlight tomorrow where we will feature that story. But other than that, thanks so much, everybody. I'm going to start working on getting this out to you guys. And hope to see you at one of our future events.

Bye, all.

Rachel: Thank you.