Having the best grant management system simplifies the whole grant funding process and makes it easier for non-profit organizations and grantmakers to expedite grant proposals.
Grant funding is the primary source of funds for non-profit organizations. These funds are needed by non-profits to cater to various tasks spanning from operation funds, startup costs, and employee allowances to getting new technology.
However, the complete lifecycle of discovering grants, processing, and completing the grant application can be daunting and time-consuming.
This is where a grant management system comes into the picture.
Let’s talk about some of the best grant management software for non-profits so you choose the best one according to your requirements.
What Is Grant Management Software?
Grant management software simplifies and manages the complete fund granting and management process. From discovering, prioritizing, and drafting to regulatory compliance, financial tracking, and completing the grant, this software assists non-profit organizations in every step.
This software becomes useful for organizations to centralize all their grant proposals and effectively manage each step of the grant proposal process. These platforms help organizations track every step and grow their grant portfolio.
Modern grant management software has advanced capabilities like helping organizations research different types of grants, collecting them, and then applying for them. They also borrow many features from non-profit fundraising software, making it easier for you to find open grant opportunities that coincide with your organization’s criteria.
The software has the right features and capabilities to guide you throughout the process, including preparation and achieving the grant you want. There are many grant management software available on the internet on a stand-alone basis or as a part of a non-profit fundraising software suite, so it becomes easier for you to choose them.
Benefits of Grant Management Software
The benefits of grant management software are:
#1. Opportunity to Find More Grants
Grant management software can bring all the available grants before you. It spares you from manual searching and shows you all the relevant grants that cater to your criteria.
#2. Streamlined Process
Non-Profit organizations rely heavily on grant management software as it streamlines the entire process of the grant application. It stores all documents, assets, and templates so that you can reuse them or tweak them according to a grant’s requirements. It accelerates the process, so you don’t have to spend hours on grant applications.
#3. Minimizes Deadline Issues
Managing the deadlines of grant applications manually can be difficult, and in many cases, organizations have missed them. But by using grant management software, you won’t miss a deadline as it can provide you with alerts and prioritize the process.
#4. Boosts the Chance of Success
With grant management software implemented in your system, the possibility of achieving success in grant applications increases. This software finds all the vital elements of your proposals and highlights the ones you should eliminate or correct.
#5. Refines Team Communication
When non-profits integrate this software, the communication between grant seekers and grantmakers improves as both parties can collaborate and track all the activities. Through the centralized system, you can assign tasks to different team members, enabling each member to access them.
How Does Grant Management Software Work?
Grant management software works efficiently to assist you in every step of the grant management process.
- Discovering grants: The first thing it does is discover funders and grants depending on your requirement and the organization’s criteria.
- Funder identification: The software then helps in researching and identifying the funder that will fund your non-profit organization. During this time, you can also track the finances of the grantmaker with the help of the system.
- Grant management: Once done with the discovery part, the software assists you in managing the grant opportunities and tracking them while complying with the rules of the grantmaker.
- Outcome assessment: In the end, the software helps you assess the outcome of a grant proposal and also highlights all the elements that need to be revised in your bid. While going through the process, the software alerts and notifies you about the deadline and other developments. Through automation, it helps you to keep up with the pace.
Next, explore the features to consider before choosing grant management.
Features to Consider Before Choosing a Grant Management System
To ensure the grant management system offers you the best results, it should have essential features, such as:
- Grant discovery: The system should automatically search for various grant sources and alert you on appearance.
- Grant request: It provides you with the facility to easily submit requests to grantmakers.
- Reporting and tracking: This feature helps in tracking the application and also reviews the status of the process.
- Proposal writing: This software comes with a tool that makes it easy for you to create proposals, including the necessary information.
- Risk management and compliance monitoring: It helps in monitoring compliance and managing non-compliance issues with legal procedures.
- Deadline reminder: The software must remind at regular intervals regarding the deadlines of grant processes.
- Financial reporting: It analyzes your grant acceptance percentage and how much fund you will get from the grant provider.
Now, let’s dive into the best grant management software for non-profits.
Salesforce
Salesforce offers one of the best grant management systems available in the market that can help you in every step of the process. The Outbound Fund Modules serve as the base of this system, so it makes it easier for you to track, manage and deliver funding programs from grantmakers.
Through its effective management, it connects non-profit organizations to grant providers and simplifies the application process. It also assists in completing each step with due diligence and improving the grantee experience. Completing due diligence is beneficial in helping grantmakers understand whether the non-profit is good for investment.
Salesforce has designed its grant management system in such a way that it provides you with all the required resources you need to ease up grant management. The integrated platform lets you connect with your team, grantmakers, and policymakers. Using the software, you can also look for solutions that will help integrate it with your CRM.
Workday
Popular among non-profit organizations worldwide, Workday provides a streamlined approach to grant management through its platform.
The software offers a well-laid-out interface with a complete view of grant revenue by quarter, award balance, terms & conditions, and other factors to ensure you meet all the requirements. This panel also helps you get an insight into each team member’s effort towards the project, giving you the authority to pay their wages depending upon their work.
You can easily manage all the grant compliances by meeting the grantor’s requirements for account, billing, report, and compliance. The software can also mitigate all the risks associated with non-compliance and eliminate all reporting errors.
Besides offering vital features, Workday provides you with the resources you need to improve your grant management process.
Good Grants
Good Grants is a powerful online grant management platform that helps you save time and resources while streamlining your grantmaking process.
From initial planning, assessing the grant, and application management to final submission and distribution of funds, Good Grant helps you in every step. It comes with tools like application management, eligibility screener, and contract management to increase your chances of getting a grant.
Good Grant’s management dashboard gives you a complete overview of everything happening in real-time and allows you to track everything from submission to progress. You will also get features like filter + search, broadcast email communication, triggered email notification, and content management.
Moreover, Good Grant utilizes intelligent plagiarism detection to ensure originality and manage duplicate applications smartly. With grant reporting available on its interface, it will get easier for you to keep the funding process on track.
Replicon
If you are looking for an effective grant management system designed specifically for non-profits, try Replicon. One of the main highlights of this software is its simplified management system, which lets you create multilevel segregation of all the work and extract the required grant information.
You get a centralized view of all the work where you have sourced the fund. You can store fund details and can access them easily. It also lets you track the spending of the funds in real time.
Furthermore, the highly intuitive dashboard lets you set up timesheets and expenses to track the volunteer hours as per the requirements. With Replicon’s comprehensive reporting capabilities, you can easily track volunteer hours against grant sources and ensure the funds are appropriately spent.
Clockify
Clockify is a free-to-use grant management software that lets you efficiently perform grant tracking and management. Top organizations like HP, Sony, Disney, Toyota, Amazon, and others use this software, although it’s free to use.
This system comes with a large interface where you can track many essential things, including timesheets of grant workers, projects, and deliverables. Using the interface, you will get an insight into all the expenses through invoices put up by your team.
Clockify lets you monitor resource utilization and set estimated time and budget for grants and deliverables. You can also predict the grant’s progress based on your assignments and funds while keeping up with the requirements.
Instrumentl
Make your grant process effortless using the user-friendly platform of Instrumentl. It utilizes advanced matching algorithms to find appropriate active grant opportunities for your organization’s specific grant projects and allows you to spend time on deep research.
This system provides a centralized panel, so accessing eligibility criteria, grant amounts, 990 reports, and other details is easier. Using these details, you can easily research and determine the grantmakers that will fit your project’s requirements.
With Instrumentl, you won’t ever miss deadlines because it will let you track all your grant opportunities in one place and showcase the tasks you need to accomplish. It enables you to create custom reports easily to showcase your funding accomplishments and grant pipelines to your teams and superiors to maintain transparency.
This grant management software is available under four plans – Basic, Standard, Professional, and Custom Plan starting from $179 per month.
Optimy
Once you start using Optimy for your grant management, you won’t have to keep looking for other alternatives to streamline your grantmaking programs. It saves hours of manual work by automating most of the administrative work and lets you focus on important aspects of grant management.
This highly configurable grant management solution enables you to standardize your grantmaking process and ensure better reliability. This software helps reduce human error and other issues common with manual processes and traditional tools.
Optimy can automate your recurring tasks and lets you efficiently track your funding allocations to projects, ensuring everything is on track. It provides role-based permission to each grant worker, which is essential for grantee evaluation and remains secure.
Using the single interface of Optimy, you collect applications for volunteering, sponsorship, and different social impact programs. You will also be able to track all the payments from the grants through budget management and ensure they are wisely spent.
Blackbaud
Considered a leading grantmaking software for funders, Blackbaud is a meticulously built grantmaking system that can enhance your non-profit organization’s operations and philanthropic activities.
Blackbaud eliminates all the manual, repetitive tasks and automates them to simplify the whole grantmaking process. It is one-of-a-kind software that can cater to all types of non-profit organizations and is scalable.
This grant management system can easily integrate with your CSR platform. It will allow you to make an informed decision on grant applicants by assessing their tie-up with your organization.
Anyone in your team with appropriate permissions can effortlessly log in to the application through any device and manage the grant workflow. It also offers you with GrantsConnect tool, which has an ad-hoc report manager that you can use to get a complete idea into your proposals.
OmniStar
Enhance the accountability, efficiency, and affordability of your grant management using the OmniStar grant management platform. Starting from submission and review to execution and closure, OmniStar automates all the steps and ensures simplified grant management.
Applications are tricky for every grant seeker, but this software makes it simpler for you by allowing you to make informed decisions. By helping you with project setup and automating time-consuming processes, OmniStar takes care of these difficult tasks and enables you to focus on your grant projects.
The purpose-built SaaS platform of OmniStar can help you with fund and budget management and ensures their proper distribution. As a grantor, you can schedule payments and evaluate the grantee’s progress based on the grant agreement.
Sage
Sage is a renowned grant management software designed to cater to non-profits and enable them to succeed by simplifying every process. It empowers you to ditch tedious, repetitive processes and automate each grant step with speed and accuracy.
Using this platform, you can easily report and tally your budget in accordance with the grant. The innovative grant tracking capability helps you collect all the accurate charges for reporting and billing. It also helps you bill indirect costs depending upon the approved rate.
In addition, you can correctly track employees’ efforts and reimburse them according to the grant using the Sage Intacct feature. Sage also helps you stay on top of your deadline by enabling you to collaborate with other members and stay updated with budget plans seamlessly.
With centralized records and reports, this software lets you stay compliant and allows auditors to get a clear trail of all the expenses in one place.
Final Words
Finding the best grant management software for non-profits can be a complex task with many options available in the market.
The above information guides you and simplifies your search. All the tools I’ve discussed above have valuable features and functionalities to streamline the grantmaking process, increasing your chances of getting your grant application approved quickly.
Thus, choose the best grant management system for your non-profit organization that can cater to your specific needs.
Next, check out the best donor management software for fundraisers.