General Discussions

Thanks Brandon! We have an internal grant template built in Vena, but our users have commented that they find it easier to work directly in a donor provided template, which can vary donor to donor, and feel like they end up having to do double entry to get data back into our Vena template so I'm curios if you've found a good solution for that where the end user only has to enter data once? Sounds like you start with something internal and then add a tab for the donor view, which is a route we're considering.

Our next challenge is in getting the awarded grant data formatted the same way as our operating budget data that includes our flexible unrestricted funding, and which makes up a significant portion of our overall budget (roughly 50% in total). Those operating budgets are based on our FY so our process had been to manually add awarded grant lines to those templates, but that was tedious, required double entry and created more work if the donor budget needed adjustments later. For the past year, we've been combining those separate data sets in our data warehouse for reporting purposes, but we're giving up the real time, consolidated view of the overall budget within Vena. I guess some organizations that are mostly/only grant funded might not have this challenge of managing two datasets/templates, but it could also be that we're making things unnecessarily complicated so I'd be curious to see how others handle this.

For the forecasting, our fundraising teams provide some sort of confidence estimate as to the likelihood of winning a grant and we take a portion of the pending grant to include in the forecast. I.E. if a submitted proposal totaled $500k and our confidence in winning the proposal is 50%, then we include $250k in the forecast. We're able to model that now at a high level, but we're thinking that we could drill down a level deeper if we're capturing grant proposal data in detail within our Vena template, which could help us better plan which future grant opportunities to target or where to shift our flexible funding to cover key gaps in our operations.

Maybe we can connect on a call in December to do a quick walk through of what we've each built and talk through some of the challenges? 

Thanks Brandon! We have an internal grant template built in Vena, but our users have commented that they find it easier to work directly in a donor provided template, which can vary donor to donor, and feel like they end up having to do double entry to get data back into our Vena template so I'm curios if you've found a good solution for that where the end user only has to enter data once? Sounds like you start with something internal and then add a tab for the donor view, which is a route we're considering.

Our next challenge is in getting the awarded grant data formatted the same way as our operating budget data that includes our flexible unrestricted funding, and which makes up a significant portion of our overall budget (roughly 50% in total). Those operating budgets are based on our FY so our process had been to manually add awarded grant lines to those templates, but that was tedious, required double entry and created more work if the donor budget needed adjustments later. For the past year, we've been combining those separate data sets in our data warehouse for reporting purposes, but we're giving up the real time, consolidated view of the overall budget within Vena. I guess some organizations that are mostly/only grant funded might not have this challenge of managing two datasets/templates, but it could also be that we're making things unnecessarily complicated so I'd be curious to see how others handle this.

For the forecasting, our fundraising teams provide some sort of confidence estimate as to the likelihood of winning a grant and we take a portion of the pending grant to include in the forecast. I.E. if a submitted proposal totaled $500k and our confidence in winning the proposal is 50%, then we include $250k in the forecast. We're able to model that now at a high level, but we're thinking that we could drill down a level deeper if we're capturing grant proposal data in detail within our Vena template, which could help us better plan which future grant opportunities to target or where to shift our flexible funding to cover key gaps in our operations.

Maybe we can connect on a call in December to do a quick walk through of what we've each built and talk through some of the challenges?