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THE SURVIVAL GUIDE TO SUCCESSFULLY ADVOCATING FOR A NEW GMS AT YOUR ORGANIZATION

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FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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Grants management systems have helped grantmakers accelerate their impact, improve collaboration with grantees, and better access and manage data. Maybe you’re trying to further meet the needs of your community and accelerate your grantmaking; or you’re looking to accommodate best practices and implement new strategies. Either way, you’ve determined that now is the time for a change!

So how do you make the case for a new system and convince your team to invest in improved technology? In this guide, you’ll learn how to prepare a pitch for your decision makers that effectively outlines what you need, why you and the organization will benefit from it, and what it will take to get there.

And yes, asking your leadership for more resources—whether it’s technology, training, or people—can be a nerve wracking process. This guide will help you channel those emotions into a well-researched proposal, and help position you as an agent of change in your organization.

Here are the steps we will cover:

LAY OUT YOUR WHY: including your process, people, and technology pain points

1

IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS: understand who you need on board to make a change

2

OUTLINE THE VALUE: showcase who stands to benefit, and how

3

DEMONSTRATE THE TRUE COST:including financial expectations and estimated time

4

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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STEP 1: LAY OUT YOUR WHY

When building a plan that advocates for new technology (something that will certainly affect several departments in your organization) it’s essential that you start by pinpointing your problems and pain points.

These may seem obvious to you, especially if your current grants management system is frustrating, time consuming, or unreliable. In this step, you should link those frustrations and friction points to business impacts: identify the “why” for the request.

Think about your current system and the challenges it presents. If your technology was more effective, what could be gained (additional value), and what could be prevented (waste eliminated)?

We’ll dig deeper into defining total value in the third section, but in this stage, you want to hone in on the problems you aim to solve. Keep in mind that technology is not a magic wand that fixes everything—there’s frequently a number of factors, including process, people, and technology that contribute to frustration. But, adopting a new grants management system can be a perfect opportunity to streamline processes, remove silos between teams, and increase communication.

To identify the waste you can potentially eliminate, focus on time-consuming activities, inefficient processes, and team frustrations. If you’re spending your time shuffling applications between reviewers or tracking down information for other team members, you would then want to highlight the potential benefit of automated workflows, and increased access to information for both you and your team.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

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FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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Be specific and collect data, both from yourself and key stakeholders that you will identify in step two. The more you can illustrate your pain points the easier it will be for decision makers to visualize and understand them.

Use the following questionnaire as a prompt for both yourself and others as you consider why you’re advocating for this change. Not every question will apply directly to you – but the purpose is to get you thinking!

1. What tasks take up the most amount of your time?

2. Do you have visibility into what other departments/teams are doing?

3. Do you find yourself constantly repeating information, or repeatedly looking for information that is difficult to find?

4. Do you feel that the technology you use gets in the way of your work?

5. What other tools or systems would you want to integrate with a GMS?

6. Do you feel that you’re able to cultivate strong relationships with grantees?

7. Do you find it difficult to prepare board materials, or engage with external reviewers?

8. If you had more time in the day or week, what projects or initiatives would you take on to better serve our community/stakeholders?

9. Magic Wand Question: If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing about your day-to-day, what would you change, and why?

Once you’ve asked yourself these important questions, organize the responses according to the following key categories: technology, process, and people. See below for some helpful examples.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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TECHNOLOGY PAIN POINTS. AS IN WHY AM I FRUSTRATED WITH MY CURRENT TECHNOLOGY. Data is difficult to find or manage.Ex: Our team spends an average of 8 hours per month simply looking for the right data in our own system.

PROCESS PAIN POINTS. AS IN WHY I FIND MY CURRENT PROCESS REDUNDANT/FRUSTRATING.Our documents aren’t templatized so they can be re-used.Ex: The grants team spends 2 hours building new documents each month that could be templatized and instantly shared.

PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATION PAIN POINTS. AS IN WHY OUR TEAM IS BEING HELD BACK FROM DOING OUR BEST COLLABORATIVE WORK. Departments have difficulty communicating and sharing needs/deadlines within our current systemEx: Our team spends hours in meetings with other teams working to stay aligned. With a new system, we could save ourselves time and provide that clarity within a grants management solution.

It is difficult to communicate/ support grantees with our current system.Ex: Our team wants to better support our grantees. Right now we are unable to share automatic updates or send and sign documents via our current system.

As you know, you’re not the only one on your team, or within your organization, who stands to gain something from a new grants management system. In our next step, you will asked to identify key stakeholders at your organization who will also be impacted by making a valuable change.

Steps in our current review process seem to overlap.Ex: Our current system of work doesn’t feel streamlined and because of this our team wastes time on busy work that would be spent working on more important things.

Our reporting structure feels outdated and we want to streamline. Ex: We know our reports are long and arduous for grantees to fill out. We want to save them a few hours with a simple templatized report.

Our technology does not integrate with other important finance or CRM tools.Ex: Our organization relies on a minimum of 4 different software platforms to complete our work. If we adopted a new grants management system, we could do this work in one platform.

Our current technology is difficult to customize (I can’t adjust my own system and have to reach out to the company for help).Ex: It’s frustrating that I don’t have the necessary administrator privileges and controls to adjust my platform according to my specific needs.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

FLUXX.IO

STEP 2: IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

Change is hard, even if the change you’re preparing to advocate for will significantly streamline your work and improve collaboration internally and with your grantees. To effectively advocate for change—like investing in a new grants management system—it’s important that you start by identifying the folks whose buy in you will need.

This means you need to identify the leaders who will green-light your proposal, make the final decisions on tools, and sign the checks—and from there, identify how they prefer to be approached by regarding new projects or ventures. If you know, for example, that your IT Director prefers detailed proposals and is often worried about cyber security, or your Programs Director likes high-level proposals that emphasize how new tools are aligned with your organization’s mission—you can (and should) use that information to craft proposals that meet those specific needs.

Culturally, it will also mean identifying what peers and team members are the change champions at your organization. It’s helpful to look for folks who have a great deal of social capital—these may be people who have been with your organization for years, have a lot of institutional knowledge, and are seen as reliable and able to get things done. These team members have seen it all, and therefore can help you expertly navigate a process that can feel stressful if you haven’t done it before.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

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FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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Look at your team and make a couple of lists:

• Who will need to approve your proposal? (i.e. leaders, executives, board members, etc.)• Who will be most impacted by the change? • Who has a lot of social/cultural capital? • Who may push back on the proposed change?

Once you’ve created your list of key stakeholders, it’s time to create a communication plan to present your proposal and gather buy-in and key insights from each decision maker.

Think through what you know about the folks on your list—their working styles, their openness to change, the type of work they do, and what they care most about. This will help you know when to approach each stakeholder with your plan. Some you will want to include in the planning process, while others will expect a finalized proposal to be shown to them. See below for two example stakeholders:

• Suzy, an executive and visionary thinker: Suzy wants a proposal that showcases the value of investing in new technology, and wants to understand with this will mean for the organization for years to come; she doesn’t want to be bogged down with small details and minutia

• Bob, an analytical IT Director: Bob is curious about making a change to new technology but he wants to know exactly what this mean for his team, including show much time will need to be invested in building and implementing new technology, and who exactly will be affected by the change

Now consider when you should approach these stakeholders. You will likely want to meet with Bob as you build your proposal, as he will want to examine the details of the proposal, and will likely have some helpful insights and recommendations being that his role is in IT. Suzy on the other hand, will be expecting a more finalized proposal, one that takes into account all the details that stand to affect different departments, but presents a high-level value and benefit analysis first, saving the details for further down the document.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

FLUXX.IO

STEP 3: OUTLINE THE VALUE

Now that you’ve outlined exactly why you’re searching for a new tool, and who will help champion this endeavor, it’s time to define the overall value of shifting to a new system.

Adopting new technology is an undertaking, so the value you showcase will need to be impactful not only for your work and processes, but for your teams and your community (this includes grantees and external stakeholders like board members or key project partners). You will need to prove how the adoption of this new system will provide significant value both internally and externally.

In this step it will be important for you to reach out to your previously determined change champions and key stakeholders. Work with them to capture the potential value of making this change. This is your moment to justify the cost (both time and financial) that you will lay out in step four.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

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FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

WHEN THE HELMSLEY CHARITABLE TRUST WAS LOOKING TO MAKE A CHANGE, THEY CREATED A DEDICATED GRANTMAKING 2.0 INITIATIVE TO HELP THE TEAM DETERMINE KEY BENEFITS THAT THEIR NEXT SOLUTION WOULD NEED TO PROVIDE, INCLUDING:• Increase transparency across

the organization• A more efficient utilization

of staff resources • Increase collaboration

(both internally and externally)

• Improved grantmaking operations• Engage broader staff in buy-in• Allow flexibility for continuous

improvement as a result of ongoing learning

Break down the value according to internal value (within your organization) and external value (grantees, your board, partners). See below for examples:

ORGANIZATIONAL (INTERNAL) VALUE:Save staff timeIf staff no longer have to spend hours a week or month on redundant busy work, they will have time for more meaningful projects, improved grantee support, and be able to uplevel their work.

Eliminate work silos A streamlined GMS systems will provide teams with much needed clarity that will in turn improve communication, collaboration, and eliminate work silos.

EXTERNAL VALUE SCENARIO: Grantees and our relationship with them is supportedA new GMS system will allow us to deepen our relationships with our grantees by providing them important clarity (about grants status, updates, etc.) and support through consistent and accurate communication that saves them time and stress.

Increased transparency and collaboration amongst our sector Being able to easily measure and access our team’s data will make it easier to in turn share and collaborate with other funders doing similar work.

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1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

FLUXX.IO

STEP 4: IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

The total cost of a new grants management system will be made up of a number of factors, including:

Now that you’ve identified the true value of a big change, it’s time to outline what this change could look like for your team. Take a moment to outline the following: the total cost of the technology, what internal resources will be required, and an estimated timeline for the project.

Make sure you do your research and present a realistic overview of the total investment—it’s better to explore all possibilities and present them accurately than it is to run into surprises partway through your implementation, so be sure to present a realistic budget.

TRUE COSTS STARTS WITH THE TOTAL COST

• The initial fee from the vendor, and the yearly licensing costs. Some vendors index their licensing costs on the number of users (including grantees), others don’t. Make sure you have a reliable count of your expected user count, now and over the duration of the contract.

• The cost of implementing and configuring your new platform – depending on the complexity of your system, you may also want to recommend hiring additional implementation support to help with the project, testing and training, and more.

• Ongoing support for the system – whether it’s hiring a system administrator, leveraging the support packages offered by the vendor, or engaging with external consultants to help you maintain and optimize your system. One factor will impact this cost: is the system intuitive enough to be configured by the internal users and admins to accommodate future changes or will it require additional developments that often translate into additional spend.

• Be sure to explore any potential extra costs, such as purchasing additional data storage, integrations, and additional portals for your external reviewers or board members.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST+

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FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

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Use the above bullets as reference points for what to ask your chosen vendor. Your vendor should be able to openly and honestly communicate not only the licensing costs, but the cost of ongoing support, potential updates, and other miscellaneous costs. Your vendor will likely have established partnerships with trusted implementation specialists who can then also advise you about additional implementation costs.

QUANTIFYING INTERNAL RESOURCE NEEDSFor a successful transition, your organization will also need to prioritize certain dedicated internal resources.

These resources will need to: communicate your processes to the vendor, test your implementation in order to confirm that the processes you’ve put in place not work for your team, but are also efficient and streamlined, and train staff and grantees so that everyone understands the system.

Internal resources needed will likely include some or all of the following:

• Executive buy-in and project sponsorship: a leader who will help steward the project. • Project management: a member of your team (or outside consultant) who will keep track

of activities, timelines, etc. • Access to stakeholders from key departments including: IT and team members who can

speak to the cross-functional needs of the team and technology.• Access to external stakeholders (i.e. board members, reviewers, grantees): they will

help determine that your new system provides a good user experience. • Testing and training: you’ll need to engage with a few team members to help test the

system as it’s configured, and train all staff and grantees on the new system as it’s rolled out. • Ongoing maintenance and optimization: someone will need to maintain the system,

onboard and train new users, resolve issues and bugs, and implement any new features, improvements, or integrations.

Keep in mind that the folks who will be involved in the project are likely still performing their usual duties. So once again, use these bullets as a reference point and share them with the change champions and key members of your leadership team that you identified in step two. Ask them to provide recommendations on each of the above bullets in order to ensure that you’ve highlighted any and all potential resources in your plan.

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

FLUXX.IO

OFFER A REALISTIC TIMELINETo create an estimated timeline for the project, we recommend asking your vendor for references of organizations with a similar size and complexity of your needs, and ask them how long the implementation process was.

Many funders will aim for a specific timeline based on their next grant cycle or review period. If this is your approach, make sure that your timeline is doable by explaining this goal as early as possible to your vendor to see if they will be able to build your project within that time frame, and set an expectation with your team that the only way a specific timeline can be met is if your internal resources are prepared to dedicate the time and effort that they agreed upon.

To make sure that you’re considering all elements of the cost of a new system, take the time to talk to peers. Our sector is extremely generous with knowledge, and a few candid conversations with others can be very helpful. Ask your vendor for references, reach out to folks in your network, or post questions on any association forums you’re a member of.

To get a more accurate sense of your timing, send your references the following questions:

• What was the scope of your project? • How long did it take you (think from the moment you selected your vendor all the way

to the go live and stabilization of your new system) to complete this project in total? • We’re there any hiccups that added time to this project? • Is there anything you would have done differently?

1 LAY OUT YOUR WHY

3 OUTLINE THE VALUE

2 IDENTIFY YOUR STAKEHOLDERS

4 IDENTIFY THE TRUE COST

FLUXX GUIDE | The Survival Guide to Successfully Advocating for a New GMS at Your Organization

FLUXX.IO

TO SPEAK WITH AN EXPERT VISIT FLUXX.IO

For questions regarding project scope, implementation, and build, contact our implementation partners at Grantbook.

SO, ARE YOU READY TO ADVOCATE FOR A NEW GRANTS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM? This guide was built to leave no stone unturned and to help you think critically of every element and resource you will need to successfully advocate for a new system within your organization.

The process can seem daunting, but the resulting impact on your organization and grantees are exponential.

If you’re ready to implement a streamlined system that provides grantees with the communication and support they need, and enables you to work more efficiently, reach out for more information:

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