Connecting External Assessors to the Grant Management System
Engaging external grant assessors often introduce challenges for program managers. Especially where multiple assessors are providing highly detailed and technical assessments that involve substantial documentation. Too often external assessment reports are paper based, are provided in emails or delivered as PDF style attachments. This increases delays, raises administrative costs, and introduces the potential for lost or misaligned evaluations. Additionally, it can cause data loss or errors when inputting the assessment figures into your grant system.
Effective external assessor participation relies on grant program managers. They need to ensure assessors there is a system in place that is configurable to support the needs of the evaluation approach. This includes effective administration processes for engagement and accountable interaction tracking. Without a solution to manage assessors and assessments the administrative burden can result in higher costs and significant program delays. Consequently, this increases the change of mistakes undermining the integrity of the entire grant program.
Configurable and Standardised Assessments and Evaluations
Grant assessments must have structured and common evaluation criteria. Assessors must all be aligned in both their qualitative and quantitative inputs. This makes compilation, scoring and comparison from one assessor to another, and one application to another simple and fair. Confident decision-making is the positive outcome of this.
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Even where assessors are responsible for evaluating different aspects of an application, common evaluation criteria ensure aligned input and interaction. This avoidss a mess of individual responses to different application sections. A grant management system must target assessments to the relevant assessor and compile their responses into a single application assessment within a single system.
Interaction is the Key to Effective Relationships With External Grant Assessors
To deliver their verdict and insights many assessors need to engage applicants and program managers during the assessment process. These evaluations often are staged, forming a part of an overall evaluation compiled with results from other assessors. Each assessor is often individually engaged, making them blind to other inputs. Depending on the program this might mean a long process where each assessor is involved individually and at different times with program managers struggling to support their needs.
Enquire’s interface showing the assessment workflow
Where a review process is conducted in stages, assessors should be aware of the status, and notified when their engagement is demanded. A grant management system should allow assessors to follow a clear and concise workflow, so they understand and engage at the right time, without delays. Assessor workflows should promote efficiency and support assessor responses in parallel to reduce time needed to arrive at decisions. This means multiple assessors can deliver their evaluation on the same grant application at the same time. As a result, the time needed to complete an assessment will significantly decrease.
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Assessor Relationships are part of the Grant Lifecycle
Engaging external assessors directly in the grant assessment process on the same grant management systems is critical as they are central to the full grant lifecycle. With secure, auditable, and always available technology a grant program manager can configure a role-based access approach that provides interaction capability to the right information at the right time. Many grant making systems provide services to post online applications, deliver evaluations and award grants. Few, however, offer the ability to securely support interaction of all 3 parties and manage this data on the same system.
An Enquire notification of a new task
Enquire Fund Management Software provides a client portal so that applicants and assessors can access and interact with the same grant management system that the program managers use. Using Enquire, program managers can configure and manage all internal administration and functions through the management portal; the core of the Enquire Fund Management system. Here they can set the assessor roles and access, and monitor, track, and report on any aspect of the application, and the assessment.
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Fund management software needs to be more than an online application and awarding system. The integrity of a grant or funding program depends on effective relationship management alignment with the needs of all parties, from applicants and assessors through to program investors.
Find out how unified, streamlined assessment processes improve your programs, book a personalised demonstration with our team below. Alternatively, read more about Enquire here.
