Overview
Use Kindful to enter and track grant applications. You can track donations and other interactions with your current donors, and also use Kindful to help manage your grant applications. This article provides a recommended solution along with suggested steps for tracking grants within Kindful.
Linked Articles:
- VIDEO: Adding Contacts & Transactions
- Adding a Note to a Donor Profile
- Pledges
- Assign a task (to yourself or other users)
A General Understanding
You can utilize Contacts, Campaigns(s), Pledges, Notes, Tasks, and Transactions to track grants.
To start, we recommend creating a Campaign called "Grant Tracking" to which the activities will be assigned. This will be helpful for filtering and running reports on these activities.
You can enter a new contact in the database to serve as the source of the grant, and then enter a pledge for the amount of money your organization hopes to receive. When the grant money comes in, you will be able to enter it as a transaction and apply it to the pledge. This makes for easy reporting.
In between the initial grant ask and the money coming in, you can add in Notes (+ Add New > Note) to track the communication you have had along the way. You can also use the Task feature (+ Add New > Task) to set due tasks that are assigned to the contact created along with dates and reminders for yourself and your team.
From tracking the grant ask amount to the fund(s) received, to all communication and due dates, this is a proven process that does an effective job. Additionally, when assigning everything to the same campaign and contact record(s), you can report on the progress, too.
How to Track a Grant
Create a Campaign
The first step is to create a campaign to track any and all activities related to the grant. This will be used to assign all notes, pledges, activities, etc., towards and can also be used for filtering. It can be as simple as this:
Create a Contact
Next, you will want to create a contact record for the entity to which you are applying for a grant. We created the "Fantastic Foundation" for this example.
Once you have these two items setup, you can begin the process of tracking all of the steps of your grant application. These steps are more fluid, and can be entered in any order.
Track Non-Transactional Interactions
You will want to be sure to track any communications throughout the process as it pertains to the communication. We recommend beginning the grant tracking process with a Note that represents the application being filed. We recommend adding notes throughout the process to create a log of all communication.
Enter a Pledge
We recommend creating a Pledge that represents the amount for which was applied. The Date should be the date you add the Pledge, and if possible, set a Due Date that represents the date you hope to receive these funds. You can also set up a Campaign Custom Field that adds an additional layer of "Grant Step" to track instances along the way. This is not a requirement.
If you are tracking other pledges in Kindful, you will want to be intentional when filtering for these, which is outlined further on in this article. If you use a Pledge to track this initial ask, when running a report for your Pledges, we recommend setting up the filter like this. You will need to be sure to look for Pledges that are not to the Grant Tracking Campaign.
Alternately, you can choose to create Contact Custom Fields that can represent the stage of the Pledge. These can be applied to the Contact record (Fantastic Foundation in this case). The benefit of this approach is that there will be no overlap between general pledges tracked alongside your "grant tracking" pledges.
Filtering for the contacts in this stage would take place on the Contacts page, and would look like this:
Create Tasks
The Grant process is filled with deadlines to submit items. Use our Tasks feature to best manage this. Create a task, assign it to the Foundation record, and be sure to set a due date. This will create automatic email reminders to the Admin that is assigned.
Enter Transaction(s)
As the funding comes in toward the Grant application, you can use Transactions to enter these in your Kindful system. When you apply these transactions to your "Grant Tracking" campaign, you can apply these funds to the open pledges to show a completion of the grant.
The Contact Profile
The benefit of tracking everything to a singular profile (e.g. Fantastic Foundation) is that all entries will be tracked on a singular profile. You can see tasks, recent activities, open pledges, and even related contacts.
In the event you have contacts in your Kindful database that are related to the organization, you can create relationships between those contacts and the entity. This can help you bridge any potential relational gaps you may have between the grant organization and your organization.
How to Filter For It
Filtering for the activities related to the grant process can be easily accomplished based on how you track things. Our recommendation is to track all activities (Notes, Pledges, Transactions) to a singular campaign (e.g. Grant Tracking). When this is done, you can use a singular filter on the Activities page to find all related activities. Looking at the example below, you can see that one simple filter (By Campaign: Grant Tracking) displays all activities tracked towards the entity from which you applied for the grant.
You can use this list of relevant activities to create your own custom report. We recommend also setting up a Scheduled Report to track regular activity to make sure you stay on top of things. This is an example of how to filter like this before you create the Scheduled Report.
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