Every grant program is created to make a difference. Investments are made to achieve important social impacts for our communities, economy and environment as well as important initiatives like international development. How to demonstrate progress on your program’s mission and understand the impact achieved challenges organisations of all sizes yet is critical to attracting and encouraging investment.
Your grant management software is at the centre of your impact infrastructure. It is one of the most important tools in supporting how you measure impact and tell your story. It connects your grant recipients and projects and delivers the information on results demanded by program stakeholders, including your investors.
Here are 5 key grant management software features that support your impact infrastructure:
1. Supports a Program-Project Relationship
Your software must reflect how work is done. Grant funded projects deliver outputs to a program. Sometimes one or more projects contribute to the same program. Many organisations have a portfolio of programs that deliver to an overarching mission.
Managing each project in isolation is not an option. Your software has to support these relationships otherwise it is nearly impossible to efficiently and effectively ensure on-the-ground progress data is captured and can be rolled up or combined to understand program wide performance.
Enquire’s portfolio-program-project hierarchy means program managers can make the linkages to ensure all data is aligned, aggregated and targeted to the overarching plan.
2. Connects Data to Performance KPIs
Setting up planning goals and key performance indicators for projects establishes the framework to support impact measurement.
Establishing this framework up front ensures that project delivery agents and other stakeholders are aware in advance of their obligations and can ensure their systems deliver data relevant to performance measurement.
With Enquire set up key results and KPIs for milestone reporting directly in the system. The program-project hierarchy ensures projects that deliver to multiple programs are reporting relevant results without extra data entry or reporting processes.
3. Captures the Right Data
Your grant management software needs to capture the right data on contractual obligations, milestones and progress reports to inform impact measurement.
Data capture should include the ability to validate and verify information to avoid unnecessary errors. Reports should allow interaction for comments, queries, or even a request to rework the report. Offering alerts and notifications ensure everyone is aware of their obligations so reporting stays on schedule.
Using Enquire’s online form builder program manager can quickly create and publish online surveys, assessments and data capture forms. Enquire’s client portal provides an easy to access online system to securely submit data, whether reporters are in the office or out in the field.
4. Targets Your Communications
Every stakeholder has different information needs. Delivering the right information at the right time is critical to enhancing relationships important to your mission.
Your software should allow you to create and publish reporting templates that eliminate the time and effort needed to personalise reports by automatically populating the data needed for each stakeholder.
With Enquire create your own branded templates and connect the data needed to populate reports automatically all within a single system. Plus, benefit from innovative features to enhance impact communications with geo-location mapping of data.
5. Automates Reporting
Most reporting is predictable and scheduled, yet it always seems to be a last-minute rush to get it done. Time starved program managers can realise big benefits by automating scheduled reports.
In addition to automated scheduled reporting Enquire makes it easy to support ad hoc reporting or special inquiries. With Enquire you can search and interrogate any data in the system. Using filters, you can drill down to the information you need and save searches so you can quickly access the data again.
At Tactiv we designed Enquire to be the technology that supports your impact. It offers a single system that securely connects program managers with their grant recipients, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. It delivers the visibility, control and capability program managers need to manage their relationships, data and reporting for impact measurement.
Interested to see how Enquire can power your impact infrastructure? Contact Tactiv for more information and register for our free one-month trial.
