The Common Grant Application is a cloud-based grant and scholarship management system that provides a
simple, flexible and inexpensive way for grantmakers to manage their entire grant or scholarship life cycles.
The Common Grant Application is customizable and provides complete capabilities to manage online and
paper-based grants and scholarships. It will make you and your applicants lives simpler and easier.
We were born from the experience of being a grantmaker in a parallel life. We're not as well known as the other folks,
and we don't do everything (we've left some of that for other's so we can keep things simple),
but you will be surprised by how much we can do for the price. We have been very driven by our users, and most of what we
do is the result of our conversations and experiences with our grantmakers and their applicants. We know all of our grantmakers
and are excited by the value they realize using our system.
Programs
We can support any number and any combination of grant and scholarship programs.
This provides you the flexibility to separate, organize and manage your applications differently from each other.
The programs operate independently of each other and can have different or the same descriptions, application processes (full application or LOI and full application), application questions,
evaluation scales, reviewers and evaluators, visibility rules, and open and close dates. There is no limit to the number of programs we can support.
Forms
You can use our forms system to set up applications, reports and letters of recommendation.
Our forms provide a great deal of flexibility to collect the required and optional information you need (text, documents, audio, photos, video) from your applicant. Forms are built up
as pages, with each page containing the fields you specify in the order you want them. We support a wide range of field types for text, enumerated lists, radio buttons,
tables, checklists, documents and media uploads and others.
We've added another layer to this which allows you to specify allowable answers and the format of the information you expect in some fields
(e.g. phone number, email address, number, currency, etc.). While the applicant is providing a answers to your questions, the system checks the response, and if it doesn't meet
your specified criteria, the applicant will not be allowed to submit the application. This provides an effective mechanism to minimize errors in applications and to ensure
applicants meet some minimal acceptable criteria.
A helpful feature of our forms is that a single form can be used for multiple applications or different forms can be used for different applications. This also holds true
for grant reports and letters of recommendation. Forms can be started from scratch, copied in whole or copied with individual fields edited. This provides complete
flexibility and reuse of the forms. Our system also stores every applicant answer to every grantmaker question. If the exact same question is used on another application
or at some point in the future, when the applicant gets to that question, it will already be prepopulated with their previous answer, which they can then leave as-is, or
edit and change. This can save time and work for both the grantmaker and the applicant.
Applications
You can use our forms system to set up applications and grant reports. Your applications
and grant reports can have any number of pages and fields. One application is associated with each program, and you may have up to 8 grant reports associated per application. The grant reports may
be optional or required, and due dates may also be specified. Applications may be navigated by applicants in a setp-by-step manner, or in any order between the different pages.
Recommendations
We provide a way to you to collect letters of recommendation for scholarship
programs. While constructing an application, you can include special fields that ask the applicant to provide an email address and name for any recommenders they'd like
to use. When the applicant submits their application, our system will send emails with a unique Web link to each recommender. Upon receipt they can follow the link to provide
their recommendation. The letter of recommendation they will fill out is also forms based, and like an application or grant report can have any number of pages and fields.
After they complete the letter of recommendation and submit it to our system, it will be attached to the application and viewable by the grantmaker, but all the applicants
can see is whether or not the letter of recommendation has been submitted. This is a convenient way to collect and keep confidential recommender's opinions about applicants.
Evaluations
We provide a wide range of review and evaluation options. Grantmakers may want some of
their users to simply read applications. We can do that. Others may want some of their users to read, score and provide notes about the applications. We can do that.
We can support no evaluation process to a very complicated evaluation processes.
We've seen grantmakers with no formal evaluation process. Other's may have a one step process in
which a staff member decides whether or not to fund an application. More complicated processes have a staff member perform a sanity check of the application, which is then forwarded
on to technical evaluators for the next step. This is then followed by board members of the grantmaker evaluating the application and in some cases then forwarded on for one additional step in which the board of the
overarching organization makes the final decision whether or not to fund an application.
Setting up the evaluations for a program requires a number of steps. The first step is to set up the number of evaluation steps for a program, then some visibility rules (who can see what),
the evaluation scale (either built-in or customized by you) and the evaluator groups (who will be evaluating which applications).
There are a number of built-in evaluation
scales or you can build your own, using a variety of formats and questions with different required responses. It is possible to specify a question that will allow
an evaluator to indicate if they have a conflict of interest for a particular application, and if they answer yes, they will then be taken out of the evaluation for
that application. Administrators can also do this outside of the evaluation scale as necessary.
Evaluator groups can consist of any number of users, and users can be members of any
number of evaluator groups. This provides complete flexibility of who can be assigned to evaluate an application.
Under normal conditions applicants will
never see the evaluations, although there is an option that allows you
to share the evaluation scores and notes with applicants, with the evaluators names anonymized. Any information provided by your evaluators is kept with the application,
which will provide a perpetual and historical record of why you decided to either approve or reject an application.
Grants
Once an application has been approved, in our terminology it then becomes a grant or
scholarship, although we frequently use the word grant for both. An application becoming a grant unlocks an additional set of actions that can be performed, including
managing any online grant agreements, grant reports and grant payments.
Grant Agreements
Many grantmakers require a signed contract or agreement
with an applicant before disbursing funds. If needed, you can specify up to two grant agreements per grant. A grant
agreement is created by providing the text of the grant agreement and specifying which users of the applicant are allowed to accept the agreement. When an agreement
is accepted we collect some information about the accepting user, include it in the agreement and then lock it down so it cannot be changed. We currently do not
provide any integration with online signature systems like DocuSign. Grant agreements are part
of the application and are viewable by the applicant and grantmaker.
Grant Reports
Some grantmakers, after disbursing funds, like to collect information
from the applicant about the progress of the program or activity that the grantmaker funded. These progress or status reports usually take the form of a grant
report. There may be only one required report, or possibly one or more interim reports followed by a final report. This depends entirely on the needs of the
grantmaker. If needed, using our forms, you can build one or more grant reports and attach them to applications as either optional or required with a required
by date. The applicant can then fill out these reports and as they are submitted by the applicant they are attached to the application. Grant reports are part
of the application and are viewable by the applicant or grantmaker.
Grant Payments
We provide a very simple mechanism, for tracking the amount requested,
amount approved and amount paid for any application. We currently do not provide any general online payment mechanism but we offer a simple integration with Bill.com to
generate an invoice Bill.com can use to perform an online payment.
Privacy and Security
Our privacy is important to us and we act as though you feel the
same way. We collect just enough information from you to run our site and we don't ever sell your information to anybody. We make our money from the subscription fee.
The only other companies that may have access to some of your information is our small group of service providers that include our payment processor, email provider,
and server providers, and they are also not allowed to sell your information.
We adhere to the strict data privacy regulations of the European Union and California, which afford you a number of privacy rights, which we wholeheartedly agree with
and support.
We and our service providers have a number of mechanisms in place to protect us from bad and malicious actors. This includes secure communication between our users and servers,
password protected accounts, and minimal storage of your payment information. Our service provides have a much more sophisticated set of measures to protect their assets
and your information.
