Pay Attention to the Why, Not the How By: Jason McGill, REI Systems’ Business Development...
Jul 16, 2020
The disbursement of grants represents a meaningful portion of the Federal budget. With more than $600 billion in grants disbursed each year, grants represent more than 20% of Federal Government spending. Grant-making organizations are responsible for driving mission outcomes through their recipients, which can be difficult when grantors do not have direct control of grantees. Despite a lack of direct control, agencies must comply with laws and regulations requiring strong financial controls to minimize fraud, waste, and abuse while also measuring performance outcomes and compliance.
Together with the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy at the George Washington University and the National Grants Management Association, REI Systems conducts an annual survey of grant managers, identifying their key success factors, concerns, and challenges.
REI’s job is to understand your agency: its mission, methods, and expectations. We also know that your success depends upon your grantees; you won’t achieve your mission and beneficiary needs won’t be met if your grantees do not succeed. At REI, we help you get the best results by building solutions that align your agency mission and expectations with both grantee needs and legal requirements.
In 1996, we worked with NASA to support the first Federal grant application on the internet. We supported the first enterprise-wide grants management solution at HRSA. Today, we are supporting a number of states as they deploy the first set of enterprise-wide grants management solutions across all of their grant receiving and grant making agencies. We also help our customers go mobile, go cloud, and engineer solutions that take advantage of the rapidly evolving technology landscape in a cost-effective way. To address the Government’s shift towards configuration-driven, productized solutions, we offer GovGrants, a quick-to-launch, configurable SaaS-based solution that supports all phases of the grants management life cycle.
In light of the Uniform Grant Guidance (UGG) and DATA Act, agencies (especially those at the state and local level) are automating their grants processes to better track and assess grant outcomes. Furthermore, the Government has shifted towards configuration-driven, productized solutions. In response, REI has built and deployed GovGrants, a cloud-based, enterprise-level, off-the-shelf automated grants management solution, which offers an alternative for agencies who don’t need the scope or scale of a traditional, custom-built product.
Each year, more and more grants compliance and reporting work becomes digitized. As a result, grantee users who receive awards from several agencies must deal with multiple systems, remember separate usernames/passwords, navigate different user interfaces, and struggle to remember what needs to be done for their post-award commitments. REI Systems proposes a solution: a Grantee Post-Award portal that would save time and trouble for grantees.
REI’s customers have moved beyond just making grants. Agencies like NASA (including the Small Business Innovation Research program), the DOJ Office of Justice Programs, and the HHS Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) offer expertise and advice, applications and award capabilities, and gather data about mission results – all online.
REI’s technology, solutions, and expertise have helped many organizations – Federal, state, local, and non-profit – build and implement their grants management tools, including:
REI and the George Washington University bring you the Grants Management Breakfast (GMB) Forum, where professionals from Government, academia, and industry come together to discuss first-hand experiences in managing the full grants life cycle, resulting in real-world opportunities for process and performance improvement.
Learn MoreTo help contracting officers and program managers determine what will best meet their agency’s needs, REI offers example Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Contracting officers may find these helpful in determining the requirements they wish to specify and in defining evaluation criteria they may want to include as they procure support for their agency’s grant-making efforts.
The examples include:
REI helps grant making agencies define and improve processes, train staff and grant recipients, plan and implement systems that work with Grants.gov, and leverage cutting-edge technologies to achieve mission success. Contact us to learn more about how REI can help you with your grants management needs.