government grants

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

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

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, 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:

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?