Agreed. We have regular grant cycles and have to make sure to manually go back in the system and mark all drafts as "abandoned" as it appears to be the only way to keep orgs from submitting after the due date.

We have had organizations submit their application after I closed the process because I am new to the system and did not recall that they could still submit an application in draft mode. Can this be turned off so only an Administrator can let them submit after deadline, if approved to do so? This is a clear hole in the system.

Yes yes yes! I just don't get why a grantmaking system allows for applicants to still submit even when you turn the process off and then they get an automatic email like everyone else that their "application was submitted successfully" when it didn't meet the time requirement. I see that it is planned so hope it is in the works fairly soon!! Thank you

I was going to post similar idea as well. I would like to see a "scheduler" added to the opening/closing of processes. That way I could simply schedule it to open at 8am on a certain date and close at 5pm on another date. This would be very helpful.

It would be ideal to close a process at a specific time (12pm, 3pm, 5pm, etc.) rather than just by date. This then requires staff to monitor timing of applications rather than just closing off access.

I've had to deal with this as well and it has led to some awkward conversations. It definitely would be helpful if this change could be implemented. Thanks!

This would work well for our grant management system but NOT our scholarship system. There are a number of things that a student has no timing control over -- Financial Aid reports, for example -- but everything else is completed. Our policy is that no NEW applications can be created, but if students have created a Draft application by the deadline, we'd like them to be able to complete that draft as new financial aid reports come in, etc. I think this change would pose a problem for us unless we could turn it on/off or request different attribues for each of our Foundant instances.

Being able to strictly enforce deadlines using our time zone would be very helpful. We rely on the time stamp right now but luckily don't have that many late applications. What would be even better would be if someone is in a draft application and 15 minutes before the 5pm deadline they get a pop up that the form is due ASAP!

This is a hard one because for us, sometimes we will extend the deadline for some reason...
We usually send 2 reminder emails, to let them know the deadline is coming up. We get between 7-19 applications per cycle, and it would be hard to call everyone to let them know the deadline is approaching. So letting an applicant be able to submit an application passed the deadline if it is draft mode, that would be helpful.

We have a hard deadline. The way we have gotten around it in GLM so far is to go in at the time of the deadline and abandon all drafts. Inevitably, one or two sneak in during that time frame. We then use the date stamp on the Status Change Log to verify the time submitted and contact those who submitted after the deadline and before we abandoned their drafts to tell them they were too late. I would LOVE it if we didn't have to do this, if no drafts could be submitted after our deadline. Not saying anything different, but just chiming in that we would greatly benefit from this feature.

I agree that a deadline date in a process should be made a hard deadline to complete and submit a qualification, LOI, Application, and not just a date by which work on the document must begin. As to time zone considerations, our instructions and our website indicate that the deadline date is by 5:00 EST. It would be nice if we could set the deadline time for our time zone and not just the deadline date.

Our grant applications are due at noon, rather than midnight. Is it possible to select a specific cut-off time, rather than just a day, so we don't have to manually toggle off the application?

We have had this issue with hard vs soft deadlines as well. As Mary originally said, we unknowingly allowed applicants who had started their applications prior to the deadline to submit after the deadline, and thus had to let them know (after the automatic "submission confirmation" email had already been sent out) that their application would in fact not be considered, despite what the other email said.

It is easy for us to include in our instructions that the deadline is for a specific timezone, so this is not an issue.

As for those applicants with extenuating circumstances to whom we offer an extension, the way we are currently handling this is to set up a new deadline but to mark the process as restricted and set an access code so that they may enter and submit their application later than everyone else. If the hard deadline function was made available, presumably the drafts would either a) be abandoned automatically after the deadline, or b) remain in drafts but the option to submit was no longer available to the applicant (meaning that technically they could log in and see their drafts but wouldn't be allowed to submit them).

In case b, the access code system for individual extensions would presumably still work and is, I believe, a viable option for those foundations who, like our own, require strict deadlines. In case a, we would need to notify those granted extensions that their application draft will be deleted and they will have to start anew after the initial deadline, which honestly is not that big of a deal for us (the majority of our application is composed of uploaded external files, which they would have already saved on their computers).

A system generated message indicating that the deadline has passed would be ideal, because even though we mention multiple times in multiple places that our deadline is a specific time on a specific date, obviously if some applicants go into the system after the deadline and see the possibility to submit they're not going to adhere very strictly to the stated deadline.

Hopefully you'll be able to update this soon, or at the very least make it more readily apparent for foundant users that the deadline does not eliminate the possibility for late submissions, because for us (and likely many others) this was something we had to learn the hard way.

We just started and would like to chime in that having a hard deadline (maybe even for each stage i.e. LOI submitted by noon on a certain day, and application submitted by noon on a different day) would be very helpful for government agency clients. We award city tax and federal tax dollars out and if people miss deadlines even my seconds it becomes an issue.

Hi all,

Given some of our recent work on making our handling of dates and times more consistent, we are now ready to improve our handling of deadlines. At this point, we still need to fully define the behavior and options for this feature. How I see it now, based on feedback I've heard from others and read on this thread:
Some people want users with an application in DRAFT to be able to submit after the deadlineOther people want users to have to have actually submitted their application before the deadlineBeing able to set a time as well as the date would be usefulIt seems like, as I mentioned above, a setting for "Strictly enforce deadline" or "Prevent submission of DRAFTS" (wording suggestions anyone??) would allow administrators to control whether or not they accept applications that are in DRAFT prior to the deadline.

Finally, a couple questions:
What if someone has an LOI form that has been submitted (or may be in DRAFT) - under the "soft deadline" approach, should they be able to start the application that comes after the LOI?Would administrators want to set some kind of message for users, or is a system generated message that "The deadline for this program has passed." (or something similar) sufficient?
The more feedback I can get on this - and soon - the more likely it is we'll be able to implement this functionality in a release this spring.

Thanks,
-chris

Hi Mary and Meredith,

So it sounds like

- neither of you are overly concerned about time zone considerations

- a hard deadline will work for you, Mary

- a hard deadline will not work for you, Meredith.

We can consider an approach that would allow for both - i.e. a "Strictly enforce deadline" type of setting that a foundation could use. Does that sound like something that might be useful? And as you think about that, would it be something you would want for ALL processes, or would you like to have that kind of setting on a process-by-process basis?

Also, I see that Meredith marks Drafts that miss the deadline as "Abandoned". I'm not sure what the eventual implementation will be like yet, but in general, what status do you think a Draft application (or LOI) should go to if it cannot be submitted due to missing a deadline?

Thanks,

-chris

posted July 20, 2012 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the response. I'm not as concerned about the EST vs PST issue as I am about the fact that drafts can still be submitted after the deadline date has passed (in all time zones).

While it would be great to get the time zone issue worked out, my main concern is the fact that the drafts can still be submitted at any point after the deadline, so it's not an actual deadline if a draft exists.

Thanks,
Mary

posted July 9, 2012 by Mary Nicosia, GMA Foundations

Hi Chris - thanks for your response, which is timely since we just had a deadline close over the weekend and I am sorting through draft LOIs this morning.

In my opinion, the time zone thing is an issue as long as we as Foundations/administrators clearly commuincate deadlines in terms of what time zone they fall in. Genuardi Family Foundation states on its website that the LOI submission deadline for its Core Grant Program, for example, is June 30, 2012 11:59 CST. I had anticpated getting a lot of questions about this since we are located in EST. I considered whether it made sense to express the deadline in local time zone but ultimately deicded not to since it would bump the deadline to the next calednar day (July 1, 2012 at 12:59 AM), which seemed a lot weirder and more confusing. And no one has ever questioned the CST thing. I think that most people get that technology spans time zones.

Having a hard-and-fast deadline would be both a mixed blessing and not for me. As I said before, I use the system as currently configured (that allows submissions as long as a draft is in place) to allow grantees to go back and rework a part of their LOI or application after deadline if I think it needs it, or to grant an extension in extenuating circumstances. I would need to figure out an alternate way to deal with these special cases.

THANKS!
Meredith

posted July 2, 2012 by Meredith Huffman, Genuardi Family Foundation

Hi Mary,

You certainly raise a valid point. One challenge to the enforcement of the "end date" is that currently in our system it's stored in a particular time zone. Therefore, it could be past on the east coast while the west coast still thinks it's a valid time. Before we try making any changes, I'd want to understand how administrators feel that should work. Please let me know how you think it should work in that type of scenario.

At this point, depending on the level of effort (and considering other work we might need to do on dates within the system), this is probably not something we'll be tackling in the short-term, but it is on our product improvment list.

Thanks,

-chris

posted July 1, 2012 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies

Mary -- yours is a good point. This would be helpful for me too, with one caveat -- that as administrator I would have the flexibility to allow specific applicant(s) to complete and submit their applications after the deadline.

As info, what we do now once the deadline has passed is mark those applications in draft form "abandoned," and send those applicants a standard email (a template we created) advising them that they missed the deadline and that their application won't be considered. However, I carefully review all the drafts before doing this (sometimes they are totally complete and the applicant just didn't hit "submit" -- I let these in. For those who clearly didn't get close to finishing, it is an easy call to abandon their apps.

Good luck!

posted June 4, 2012 by Meredith Huffman, Genuardi Family Foundation