• When a recommendation to install an online grant application reached the staff at one foundation, their jaws dropped. “But that is going to kill our poor copier! It is going to take forever to make three copies of every application!”
• When the data file from an online grant system arrived at a foundation, they realized that the data quality was inferior and that it would require manual editing, (e.g. Telephone numbers formatted every which way, school names misspelled, duplicates, non-standardized fields, etc).
• By the time all of the questions and fields were added to one implementation, the resulting screen forms were so long as to be un-wieldy, and validation errors nearly impossible to decipher.
• After spending years agreeing to a “standard application,” grants managers realized that each program was fond of asking its own special question, or required its own document attachment.
• At the end of the day, when it came time to post applications to the back end system, operators discovered that no such facility existed. It all had to be re-keyed.

 A Holistic View

• Allow funders to publish searchable information about strategic initiatives.
• Enable grantees to find funding opportunities that match their needs.
• Make possible the online preparation/ submittal of applications.
• Facilitate the application review and award process.
• Efficiently distribute funds to the grantees.
• Seamlessly evaluate grant program impact.
• Allow funders to provide additional resources.

 That is how it should work, but in practice it falls short. 

There is no system or combination of systems today that supports such an ecology.  The current generation of products was designed piecemeal.  There has been no easy way of exchanging data with back end systems, no best practices established for measuring impact, and no clear requirements established for online applications.

• A lot of hard work went into the forms, but at the end of the day they are designed by committee and institutionalize doing things “the way it has always been done”.  The result?
  • Applications are too long. Applications are a burden to applicants.
  • Length makes them expensive to copy.
  • Length makes extracting information from them difficult.

• Accounting systems are not known for capturing fuzzy qualitative data. 
  • They are designed around quantitative measures like numbers and codes.  If a text field is included, it is a label designed to make the system easier on the human eye, such as fund name, or used as a blob of data to put on an envelope to mail a check.
  • Only a very small percentage of information contained in a grant application is used by the accounting system.

• The purpose of the review process is to choose a set of “the best” application(s) to meet the intended purpose of a grant program.  But this review process has several moving parts:
  • The intended purpose and qualification criteria are often stated in vague terms designed to give direction and flexibility.
  • The applications themselves do not directly address the requirements of a given program. Relevant information often is extracted by staff in an application summary.
  • The review process is conducted by a variable circle of stake-holders of different levels of expertise.
  • Depending on the grant program, different levels of governance approval and validation of an award is required.
  • The systems used to support this process consist of spreadsheets and documents largely isolated from any database. 

• Measuring the outcome of grant making and maximizing the effectiveness of foundation programs is a universal strategic goal of foundations.  But it too has moving parts:
  • At its most basic, grant reporting is designed to make sure funds were used appropriately.
  • Outcomes measurement is also about listening for stories that can be passed on to other practitioners and donors.
  • It is also about understanding the “return” on the grant, of knowing if a difference was made through use of key metrics.
  • It is also about evaluating whether a given investment was the highest and best use of funds.
  • The systems used to support outcomes measurement consist mainly of paper reports that are logged and then filed.

In reality, there are no arrows connecting the major phases of the Grants Life Cycle as shown in the figure above.  The consequence is an ecosystem that constantly demands intervention to save its vital parts, and such involvement is expensive.