Grant management has always been a tedious but significant process for most organizations. It heavily involves every administrative task needed to manage grant funding, program implementation and reporting in line with the strategic plan. The process management must also adhere not only to current standards and constant changes but to those set by the donors/development partners as well.
Key features and benefits
Competitive Edge: an effective grants management system will ensure that the organization will properly manage the grant through effective utilization of resources, tracking of performance and reporting on donor requirements and on-time. Performance of the organization will be key in attracting more funding to the organization.
One Central Location: The system provides a single, centralized location that will assist in administration of the entire grants lifecycle.
Align Grant Activities Organization’s Goals: The application ensures accountability and alignment of grant activities relative to organizational priorities, with reliable tracking of grant and project financials, goals, and performance metrics.
Standardization: The GMS standardizes data collection and reporting processes across the entire organization. This helps to drive transparency, produce more timely and accurate reports, and help comply with grant requirements.
Stay Up-to-Date: The GMS also act as an early warning system informing users of key dates and deadlines (as per grant requirements and reporting periods) and ensure timely response to relevant issues with real-time email, SMS and system alerts.
Funding raising: The GMS will help the organization identify funding gaps relating to the respective strategic objectives within the strategic plan. This will ensure that key activities not funded or in deficit get noticed early enough and fundraising efforts implemented.
Financial Management and budget tracking: The GMS ensure prudent use of resources by ensuring that resources are utilized for what they were meant for. All budgets are made available and tracked via the system, this ensures everyone is update with the implementation budgets available to them.
Imprest Management: Along with the financial management and budget tracking is a component on imprest tracking that ensure compliance with laid down imprest procedures.
Knowledge Management: It will be used for sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation.
Procurements: All procurable items are tracked by the system. This helps the organization to analyze all the inputs and create standards for value for money. This would include issues like flight costs, hotel costs, car hire, fuel etc.
Reporting: The GMS system automatically provide reminders for upcoming reports. 30 days, 14 days, 7 days and 3 days before the due date.
Mapping and Geo-location: The system will track all activities conducted locally and globally. The system will provide a visual map by of implementation for the country and the world.
Engagement with public: The GMS tracks participants that interact with the organization in course of strategic plan implementation. This information is further broken down by the following categories. Location, marital status, persons with disability, sex and occupation. This is a useful component as it can gauge the organization’s ability to engage with all participants equally.
SMS Mass Distribution and Email Newsletter: The GMS sends periodic short code messages and newsletters to all subscribers on database. The messages can be thematic based and complement the current use of Information, Education and Communication (IEC) Materials.
Recommendations/follow up tracking: The GMS system provides a tracking system of all recommendations from all activities. This ensures that recommendations are followed up to completion.
International compliance: The GMS system monitor Kenya’s compliance with international and regional treaties. This is done through tracking reporting dates for treaty reports submissions, and cross linkages with partner’s involved in drafting of alternative reports.