Our site provides a built-in and simple workflow that to process an application through its entire life cycle, from its initial receipt until it is closed and done as either a completed, funded grant or a rejected or withdrawn application. The workflow has a number of easily configurable options that can be used to add or remove steps for processing applications (1 or 2 steps), evaluations (up to 4 steps), grant agreements (up to 2 agreements), grant reports (up to 8 reports) and payments (any number).
As the grant or scholarship applications move through these steps communications are provided to the various affected users thru email (depending on user preferences) or the user dashboard and listing pages. Some of workflow steps that we support are described below.
Owners and administrators can easily and quickly add, delete and manage user accounts associated with their organization. They can also easily assign users to evaluate applications individually or in bulk. Immediately after a user account is created the new user can log in and start working. There is no limit to the number of users we can support.
Other than initially opening the account, there is nothing else we do behind the scenes. Everything we do, you can do, so there is no waiting for somebody to do something or additional charges for set up. There is a lot to learn so our approach is to help get things up and running. We've had situations in which a grantmaker decided to use our system and we've had them up and accepting applications within 5 days. We try to match how quickly you can move in responding to our questions and reviewing our work. As time allows we will then train you how to do the work yourself.
We are committed to providing support during Mountain Time business hours, but it is not unusual for us to monitor our support email during non-business hours. Our goal is to respond to support requests within the same business day, although we try to respond more quickly. You are not alone, we are here to help, and we have a great reputation among our users for the support that we provide.
You can set up either a full application or LOI and full application process. In a one step process applicants can submit a full application, it is reviewed and evaluated and either approved or rejected. In a two step process the applicant will first submit a LOI. It is reviewed and evaluated and either approved or rejected. If rejected, that's it. If approved, the applicant will receive an invitation on their dashboard to submit a full application. Only applicants with the invitation can submit full applications.
It is also possible to set up whether you will accept unsolicited or solicited applications. Any applicant can submit an unsolicited application. Only invited applicants can submit a solicited application.
Your applicants can find your application in a couple of different ways. You can tell them you use our service and point them to our Web site. They can then register, search for your organization and program and then start, build and submit an application. We will also provide you a Web URL with some embedded information that you can post on your own Web site, with instructions to your applicants to click on the link. The link will bring them to our site where they will register, and after they register, they will land on the first page of your application.
The applicants will then be able to move through the application answering your questions, pausing and coming back easily if they must walk away from the computer for a while. At any point while they are working on the application they can perform a check to make sure the application is complete and ready for submission. If they've missed answering questions, or provided improperly formatted answers, we'll let them know so they can go back and correct things. When all is good they can then submit the application. Once submitted they will go back to their own dashboard, which will list their application, and receive a confirming email depending on their email preferences. Similarly, the application will show up on the grantmakers dashboard, and they will also receive an email depending on their email preferences.
Evaluations can be assigned automatically as received, or you can wait until your grant cycle is closed and then assign evaluation scales and evaluator groups to applications as you see fit. As the assignments occur evaluators will see the list of applications they have to evaluate appear on their dashboard, and receive a notification email depending on their preferences. Evaluators have various filters they can apply to filter the applications they are assigned to review. The application will open up side by side with the evaluation questionnaire. The evaluator can review the application, enter their scores and notes, and move on to the next application. Depending on the visibility rules the evaluators will see only their scores and notes, or all of the other evaluators scores and notes.
Administrators can follow the progress of evaluations and keep track of who has completed what, and what is still pending. As evaluation scores are entered, our system automatically does math with the scores to calculate total, weighted and average scores. This information is exportable for analysis and reporting, and can be used as a starting point, based on your own processes, to judge which applications should be approved or rejected.
If our built-in listing and report pages don't provide what you need, you can also create custom reports, which allows you to pick and choose what information you'd like to extract. This information can be displayed in the Web browser, printed out to a PDF, exported to a Zip file or exported to a CSV (i.e. Excel) file. Exported information can be used by external bookkeeping, check writing, mail merge, analysis, report writing and visualization applications. Multiple reports can be created, saved and run by administrators and others. Each report has a series of filters that can be applied to restrict which applications, etc. are included in the report. All of the fields in the application, grant report, letter of recommendation or evaluation along with an additional set of built-in fields can be picked and used to build a report.
Many of the site generated emails are fixed in their format, although certain emails offer some flexibility to replace text with your own text. Communications can be tied to applications, organizations or users.
The history of most of these communications are recorded in administrator viewable logs. On a somewhat related note, for a given application, if the applicant for that application has previously submitted other applications to the same grantmaker, they will be listed as part of the application.
Thankfully, there have only been a couple of occasions in our history when we've had to perform a restoral because of a server hardware failure, and in both of those cases the restoral went fine. As a matter of design, although we do frequent software updates, we do not bring our system down to do any updates, so our general site availability is very high.