Improve collaboration and communication with cloud-based software

Successful collaboration is imperative to any organization, but is especially important for grant-making organizations, such as foundations. From managing online grant proposal submissions to coordinating your workflows for staff, volunteer and committee review, there’s a lot of crucial data you need to access and discuss quickly and efficiently.  For greatest success at your foundation, you generally rely on others who might not work in the same state as you, much less the same office, so it’s important to have the ability to quickly and efficiently collaborate with them to make your processes run smoothly.  This need, of course, goes both ways.  The people you work with also have the great need and desire for easy collaboration with you and your organization.

Luckily, as technology grows more sophisticated, there is an increasing number of tools on the market that can help.

Does the following scenario sound familiar?

You and your co-workers are reviewing a large number of grant submissions but no one has a quick and easy way to know which applications have been reviewed and which ones they haven’t.  You’re relying on someone to let you know when they have completed their tasks, via a phone call, email, or other manual communication tool.  The tools at your fingertips are less than ideal and you end up frustrated because you have no totally efficient way to collaborate with your users.  You find yourself wishing for a way to gain more insight or even see the exact progress of the tasks you’ve delegated.

When you handle the grant review process using spreadsheets and various different databases, it makes collaboration very hard, if not totally impossible. If you’re unable to see the stage of completeness of your delegated tasks, achieving maximum efficiency isn’t possible either.

The fantastic news is that the tools for which you’ve been wishing already exist in the form of cloud-based grant management systems. With a software-as-a-service platform, you can log in using an intuitive interface and see all the recent submissions from your potential awardees, the progress of all reviews, applicant scores, comments added, additional information request fulfillment, awards given, and much more.

Increasing collaboration doesn’t just enhance your internal operations – it can also help you better communicate with grantees, donors, and affiliate organizations that can help further your mission. As The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes, collaboration between organizations can help them increase leverage and resources to reach shared goals.

Without a plan for process improvement, you’re operating in the dark and are hindering the growth of your entire organization. With tools like grant management software, you can streamline efficiency and increase transparency, allowing you to better support the people who rely on your organization for funding.