This is something our foundation has wanted Foundant to do for at least 3 years. Right now we export all grant reports and upload them to Dropbox because our Board Members who aren't administrators would have a hard time finding the grant reports. Also, there's no point in them even trying because they can't evaluate them in Foundant. Then we email out an Excel spreadsheet for each Board Member into which to enter the scores. Then I have to copy and paste all the scores into one spreadsheet and summarize. Surely Foundant could do this easily if they wanted to.

100% agree that this needs to be possible. This is one of our biggest challenges with Foundant... It is what prompts our program officers to keep "clandestine" paper files and keeps them from being fully bought into the system.

To add to what I said earlier, I don't think it would be necessary for the reviewers (Board, staff or Committees) to do a full evaluation of the follow up, but it would be good to have them check a box that indicates if they consider the follow up commitment fulfilled or not and to make comments if they want more information. It would be good to track who is seeing the reports and creates accountability for the committees/board and helps to track outcomes.

I too think this would be a wonderful way to give the Board/Committees access to the follow ups for any given process. Then if they have their own questions they can refer back to the application and review each and we can also be sure they are seeing the follow up.
Thanks,
Andrea

Just chiming in to this conversation - we'd appreciate any improvement that allows sharing completed follow ups with our board easier. The current steps board members have to do to find and read a completed follow up means they never do it. Downloading, renaming and emailing dozens of pdfs is onerous. We don't necessarily require another form for reviewing, just an internal comment box would be enough. Thanks.

Yes! A review stage would certainly streamline access to each of the follow ups received. Having to access Requests and Decisions for each report is a time consuming and very cumbersome process. For now, I'll be printing all of our Mid Year Reports and scanning them to each of our board members. Help, please. :)

This is something that would be incredibly helpful for us. It would make it easier to track which Program Staff has already been sent the report and we could include any feedback they have for the report in the evaluation as well. It would help both for collecting the follow up approvals and for tracking which ones have been sent out.

It would be helpful to have a way to evaluate grant reports. Currently, we use an excel file to keep track of program performance against the original grant request. We require grantees to disclose benchmarks, objectives and measures of success. It would be helpful to have a form in Foundant that allowed evaluators to review and track outcomes within the system for consistency and historical purposes.

The ability to review follow up reports would be very helpful. We are looking at implementing a multi-year grant process and this would allow us to use follow up reports in year 2 instead of a full application. We could review the follow up in the same way that we would an application, but include more impact reporting. Great idea!

Chris,

Let me see if I understand... I assign a follow up to a reviewer (board member) to review an applicant follow up (Post Grant Report) is that correct? If so, I think that would work for us. We need a way to keep track of which Post Grant Reports (follow ups) have been reviewed by board members.

Looking forward to having some of this capability.
-Lynn Larson

Thanks for the additional feedback. I've talked to a couple people about this in more depth and have a question. Would being able to assign a follow-up to a reviewer (staff evaluator, board member, or an administrator) be useful? The idea is that if an applicant completed a follow-up, the reviewer would then complete their own follow-up that could be used to evaluate the applicant's follow-up.

I know this probably is not the solution that some folks are looking for. However, it's something that is less complex. I certainly don't know if it would meet the needs of the majority of you who have commented on this thread, but it'd be great to hear your feedback.

Thanks,
-chris

We are also using Excel to evaluate follow up forms mostly grant reports. It would be very helpful to assign an evaluation to these follow up forms AND have a way to flag them as an interim report or final.

Thanks for the update, Chris. I just found this thread by searching this same question. We really would love to be able to assign follow-ups (reports) to program officers for approval after the initial review. Just to add one more voice to the peanut gallery!

Hi all,

A couple things ... first, some of the work we did this spring with the 5.0.0 release was a prerequisite for looking at this feature. Second, we are currently starting some user interface work that we feel is another prerequisite.

As is evident by this thread, there are definitely folks who recognize the value of this functionality. While we are not at a point to start implementing this, we are continuing to look at the things that this would impact, including the additional complexity it would add to the user interface, reporting, merge documents, configuration, etc. While we have a lot of the individual pieces in place (and it might therefore make it seem like this shouldn't be that hard to do), we have to consider the impact it would have on the system.

Thanks for your feedback, and we'll continue to consider when, and how best, to look at this in more depth.
-chris

Is there any progress regarding evaluation for follow ups
for Board members and or committee evaluators?This would be tremendously
valuable. At the moment we have to either email a pdf of the evaluation or
attach the follow up to the application as a request document so board members
can see it if they log back into the history. However, most of our grant
evaluators are NOT Board members and cannot see the history of an organization
so they couldn't access the past grant applications.

This is becoming more critical as we start to award our first multi-year grants using GLM. I am concerned about having to kludge together a weak method for accomplishing what could be simple and efficient if it were built into GLM.

I agree with everyone here - we took a step backwards and are using an Excel spreadsheet to evaluate Follow Up reports since the feature is not available in the Online Grants Manager. My team would love to be able to evaluate Follow Ups the same way they do applications. (BTW - super excited to see that Follow Ups can now be automatically assigned in the approval process!!)

We are seeing a need for this ability in one of our grant programs. At first we though we could assign the board member security role to followups, so the evaluators could at least see the followup without us having to export data and send in email, until we saw the Board Elevator role can search for any grant within the system, not just ones that they are assigned to. Changing that security role would be helpful to us also.

I agree, being able to assign evaluators for followups is essential. Our need could also be addressed by being able to create internal followups.

We, too, have our Executive Director and/or Grants Manager review our one current follow-up, which is a final grant report. They can both view it and make comments, which has worked so far. However, I can think of times when an evaluation process would be helpful--both for our grant report follow-up and others that could be added in the future.