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government grants

Madeleine Holdsworth

My organization (higher ed) is dancing around the idea of tracking our government grants in RE NXT. The team asking for this wants to follow the basic guidelines that we use for foundation grants we track in Opportunities, but are asking us, in essence, “to make it fit” their needs when it really doesn't. I've made a stab at mapping various fields but there are some things they want that I don't think can be done. I'm concerned that we will wind up with a mess of custom fields that will become a data dumping ground. Has anyone had any experience with tracking government grants? We are integrated with Financial Edge NXT but our finance department has not been forthcoming with what their capability is on their end. I'm also concerned with data integrity and security roles (but I see the writing on the wall that I will probably lose this battle)….

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Heather MacKenzie

RE is a fundraising and constituent management database. So often, it's wanted for it to be a financial database or a grant management database, which it's just not.

That being said, I'd go with one of these options, were I in your shoes.

1 - Find out everything they want, come back here for some best practice ideas for where to build out what, and build everything into a dropdown table that's possible to avoid the data mess.

2- Investigate BB's grant software, they have one. I have no idea what it costs.

3 - IF you can, push back on some of them, and compromise on others, leading to partially fulfilling these requests - what can RE do well for you? and then stick to just that.

4 - something else that someone with a better idea than me suggests!

Karen Diener

It depends on the details of what needs to be tracked, but I highly recommend this customer success webinar from Blackbaud that discusses ways to use RE Opportunities to keep track of grants as well as major gift asks.

Give that a look and see if it is helpful. They may need to “give” a little on their requirements. There definitely can be system constraints but I often find that there is fear about technology and transparency that is hidden behind demands.

Good luck, and I hope it works out!

Karen

Madeleine Holdsworth

Thanks. I've done most of that already. They are asking for things to track in RE that is just not possible in opportunities or anywhere else that I can see (for example, “requested grant length”, and grant expenditure monitoring (I would think they should be doing that in Financial Edge). I've already suggested that they investigate the BB grant software but I don't think they want to spend anymore (we just migrated to RE/FE NXT earlier this year and that was a huge deal). I'll see how it goes. Thanks for your suggestions!

Karen Diener

Ah yes - that definitely changes my answer! I would have a lot of follow up questions about “requested grant length” and how they would be using that.

The expenditure part is definitely NOT something that you should be using RE for. While you can add expenses to Appeal records and Event records, I know very few people who use that consistently. It is designed to track revenue and not be accounting software. Definitely hold firm on that part - that's an FE / business office function for sure.

Karen

Dan Snyder

@Madeleine Holdsworth just an idea. For number of years (ex. asking for $100K over 5 years) we repurposed the likelihood field in opportunities for the pledge/grant terms and a 1-5 number can be selected. This was not specific to government grants, but is something we have done and we use it to show what we expect to receive each year rather than the whole grant amount in one year and nothing going forward. This of course moves over to pledges when the grant is awarded. Not sure if this gets at exactly what you are looking to do and it could also be an opportunity custom field with a set table so you can control what gets entered.

We just started recording government grants in RE because leadership wanted it for reporting (we do not count them in any fundraising figures which is why I think finance should report on these, but I lost that one). We have a specific campaign and appeal for these gifts and for any proposals/opportunities the constituent records have a Government constituent code to keep them separate. I don't love that we have to do it, but it works for our needs.

Nicole Holt

We are also considering adding Opportunities for public grants in NXT, so that there can be one stop for project management tools (we use Power Automate to push actions into external tracking documents and planner boards so the grants team doesn't need to maintain information in multiple spots, and so staff without NXT permissions still have access to these workplans). I've been a bit adamant that we will not record grant awards as gifts, but if the team is helped by using Opportunities I want to give them that assistance.

My current plan is that we will create a table entry "Public Grant" for the Purpose field. We already have custom fields for 'grant period start' and 'grant period end' for other grants that will be useful (and while I believe our grant team is currently using these fields, I don't manage them). We'll manually update the amount funded. And we'll use the status to track approximately where we are in the cycle, with an expectation that these will stay in our ‘Stewardship/Reporting’ status for a longer time than most opportunities.

Where I think our plan differs from what you are being asked to do is that we are doing this so people without current NXT access can have some access to see these fields without being in NXT: I'm not adding accounts for other departments--we will probably have this feeding into to a live shared spreadsheet that others can use for reference only. Finance won't be making updates to NXT, but they'll be able to see when something is due (and maybe we'll be able to configure a flow to allow them to mark actions ‘completed’ through a form or other trigger).

Madeleine Holdsworth

I agree with pretty much everything you say. However, we use Likelihood for tracking the private grant opportunities, so I can't repurpose that one. Part of the problem is that I feel our Finance team has not really fleshed out what they think they want. And they do want their fingers in the RE NXT pie. It's backed our advancement team in a bit of a corner.

Madeleine Holdsworth

Just curious, Nicole, as to which fields you are using for “grant period start” and “grant period end”. We record that in the fund subrecord.

Madeleine Holdsworth

Absolutely. That is definitely not our responsibility.

Nicole Holt

Madeleine, we include the “grant start” and “grant end” as custom fields (attributes) within the opportunity. It is more for the grants team to schedule their reports with Finance.

Madeleine Holdsworth

Thanks. I may have to use that as well, although I hate going down the black hole of attributes!

Karen Diener

Madeleine Holdsworth:
Just curious, Nicole, as to which fields you are using for “grant period start” and “grant period end”. We record that in the fund subrecord.

Could you explain what you mean by fund subrecord? Is that in FE?

Nicole Holt

Madeleine Holdsworth:
Thanks. I may have to use that as well, although I hate going down the black hole of attributes!

I'm actually a huge fan of attributes. Not a mess of attributes, but holy moly do I love having that flexibility when needed.

Madeleine Holdsworth

subrecord may not be the proper term (that's just what I call it to describe it to be user friendly to my team). I mean the Fund record which is created in RE (we're integrated with Financial Edge). In database view, in Records, you will see that there is a choice to create Fund records. Each of our grants gets a distinct fund record created and we use the start/end date for the fund for the grant start/end date.

Karen Diener

Madeleine Holdsworth:
subrecord may not be the proper term (that's just what I call it to describe it to be user friendly to my team). I mean the Fund record which is created in RE (we're integrated with Financial Edge). In database view, in Records, you will see that there is a choice to create Fund records. Each of our grants gets a distinct fund record created and we use the start/end date for the fund for the grant start/end date.

Got it. It's really just a Fund record then - another type of record, like Constituent records, Gift records, Campaign records, Event records, etc.

Typically the Fund is used to identify the purpose or area of funding for an organization, like a specific program or the unrestricted / annual fund. It is interesting that you are creating one for every grant.

Thanks for clarifying. Good luck figuring out this tracking!

Karen

Madeleine Holdsworth

We assign a project ID to each temporarily restricted grant so that's why. For unrestricted funds, we use the same fund numbers.