Why Grantmaking Technology is Worth the Investment

Nonprofit organizations are expected to keep their overhead expenses at a minimum so they can direct as much funding as possible toward their mission. Investing in grantmaking technology is an exception because it can be a mission catalyst, helping nonprofits do more – and make a bigger impact. While technology is worth the investment, it can be challenging to increase overhead in a nonprofit.

Nonprofit technology, as a catalyst, enables your organization to do more than you thought possible. This will elevate your request from simply another expense in the budget to a strategic investment in the long-term effectiveness of your programs. Here are some reasons why grantmaking technology is worth the investment:

Enhance Stakeholder Experience

We all agree that technology encourages collaboration, saves time, and generally makes our lives easier. Your stakeholders – from grantees to reviewers to board members have come to expect a better experience when interacting with nonprofits.

Your constituents will be more engaged as you remove obstacles and connect with them in a more personalized way. Make a better impression, which can translate into trust, great public relations, new partnerships, and donations down the road.

Let’s take a look at how a grant management platform can improve the overall experience of each primary stakeholder:

• Grantees won’t have to second-guess their applications when you have an intuitive, mobile-friendly application. Once funded, a single platform for their reporting requirements makes it easy to stay in touch.
• Reviewers have access to a portal where everything they need is all in one place.
• Board members or donors can see visual dashboards and reports showing key data points – so they know where the program stands and the impact it’s having.

Make Well-Informed and Data-Driven Decisions

You might already collect a variety of information about your grantmaking efforts. But if you’re like many nonprofits, it’s housed in a combination of spreadsheets, databases, emails, and even hard copy. This type of data only gives you a glimpse into the true impact of the grant. Imagine what your organization could accomplish if it had a way to look at all this data critically? How would these insights influence your mission?

The right grant management platform offers a way for grant managers to collect, track, and report on grant impact in a coordinated way. Organizations can easily and almost effortlessly export their data for further analysis.

Our grant management platform allows for a more robust review process, enabling grantmaking organizations to feel confident in their funding decisions. Create focused, automated workflows, eliminate bias and discrimination in your review process, and even monitor your impact in real-time.  These tools can ultimately help your team make better decisions.

Increase Your Impact

As you pitch the idea of nonprofit technology to your decision-makers, you may excitedly share the amount of time you’ll save through various features. And while this is true and an excellent reason to invest in technology, your argument should also focus on what you’ll be able to do with that newfound time.

This is where using the overhead ratio can mask the true value of investing in technology. For example, you may have a full-time administrative staff member responsible for fielding questions from grantees, organizing grant applications, distributing grants to reviewers, and generally keeping track of the entire process. Let’s say by investing in a grant management platform, this person’s administrative duties are cut in half.

Using the overhead ratio as a guide for efficiency, your overhead would go up, and therefore your efficiency would go down. However, this person now is free to do follow-up surveys to grantees, more in-depth grant impact reports, and can proactively stay in communication with stakeholders.

Nonprofits certainly have to make smart choices when it comes to their operations and expenses, but investing in the right grant management platform can make it easier to handle–and produce more impactful results. A well-researched purchase of powerful technology can very well be the decision that drives your nonprofit to the next level.

Discover how we can help your organization get the best return on your grantmaking process:

Distribute and Track Awards

Streamline your awards process with easy-to-use tools to notify awardees and disburse awards with a simple process. View allocated budget, top-ranked applicants, and scoring breakdown with a glance. Say goodbye to manually monitoring tracking, and monitor your funding process all within the same platform.