I love the ideas offered here! I have been manually compiling history for each organization, and copy that into a report field that we built into the application, so that our board has that information as they review.

We do not see that creating bias or swaying decision making, it's better for them to have a bigger picture of the organization's competency.

The tricky part is, it may be difficult to capture Denial comments - right now I also manually go in and review the denials and paste those comments into the History report field. Not sure how you could pull that information for the "in-page lightweight view"...

Hi Michael and Amy,

First, given the "product push" currently underway, I'm a bit swamped to bit together a screenshot. After things settle down a bit here, I'll have some more time to look at this idea. In the meantime, it'd be REALLY nice to hear from other folks on whether this would be valuable or would need to be tweaked (i.e. be an "opt-in" thing so that reviewers didn't see org history unless an admin wanted them to) to be truly useful.

At this point, my thought was to just include something like the Number of Grants approved, Total Amount, and the date, project name, etc. of the most recent one. Would that be useful?

If some other folks can weigh in, I'll look at bringing this to our Product Team. Even though this should be pretty low-effort, we've got a lot suggestions in the Idea Lab we're trying to evaluate. While some things align pretty closely with work we already have planned, for other ideas, like this one, we do have to consider the number of people who are "supporting" an idea. Hopefully that makes sense.

Thanks again for the suggestion and additional details.

posted July 17, 2013 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies

Chris,

Back late to the party, but an "in-page and lighweight view" while you're reviewing an application (like you said, hovering over the organization name to show past grant data, etc) would be great!

For our purposes, I'm not as concerned about reviewers bias based upon an orgs previous grant history, but I can see how this might be of concern for some committees, especially if the commitee (reviewers) don't change too often.

So, I guess the next question is... wha't the probabality of this being developed? Chris, you mentioned that something like this "could be a pretty low-effort, low-risk and high-value enhancement." Could you provide a screenshot for what this might look like?

Thanks

posted June 18, 2013 by Michael Achterman, The Oregon Community Foundation

Chris-

For us, having access to past grant information for reviewers is imperative. But that is because we do a lot of renewal grants or grants to the same organization year after year and our board (all of our reviewers are board members with the exception of me) wants to see that they did what they said they were going to do with the previous grant or at least see their accomplishments, challenges, etc. from the previous grant. If we did not fund them previously, they are curious why.

I have my processes spread out by granting area - General fund, Arts Fund, Environmental Fund, etc. so across these broad processes it is not as important to see grant history. But if I change my process within a granting area, I would want to have access to the past granting information. I am sure that "yes, but only sometimes" answer is not overly helpful. Bottom line, it would not be bad for us to have access to past granting history and reports from all processes.

I guess I don't know how many organizations want their reviewers to be totally unbiased by past granting information. Perhaps if history was available to reviewers an unbiased reviewer could simply be asked to not access it?

I like the idea of an "in-page and lighweight view" so one could quickly access something with out having to go back and look with a full loading of a page. Would this be available for both reviewers and administrators?

thanks for listening

posted January 30, 2013 by Amy Moore, O.P. & W.E. Edwards Foundation

Hi Michael and Amy,

Thanks for the suggestion Michael, and thank you Amy for describing some approaches you've found useful - really is helpful when users comment on each others questions and ideas :-)

I have some questions:

- Do you want reviewers to be able to see the history? Just seems to me that that knowledge could bias them ... I'm guessing that other foundations would rather that reviewers didn't see this information.

- When you say "if a previous grant was funded" ... do you care that it's for a similar process? Or just that that organization has been funded before?

You're absolutely correct, Michael, to raise the issue of administrator / staff turnover. It's something we're very concerned about addressing. We're trying to provide a system that will help provide more "institutional memory" to help minimize disruption that can accompany turnover, so any suggestions for us in this regard are GREATLY appreciated.

One thing we've discussed a bit internally is an "in-page and lightweight view" of an organization's information. So when an admin is looking at application (or anything that shows the Organization's name / link), they could click on something and it would give them a brief summary of the organization (contact, summary of grants - #, total $ amount, etc.). Would this be a solution?

It would be nice to have more folks weigh in on this. Depending on the direction people want to go, it could be a pretty low-effort, low-risk and high-value enhancement

Thanks again - look forward to hearing responses to my questions as well as other comments.

posted January 29, 2013 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies

We have a lot of renewal appliations so I have a few suggestions although they still invove some administrator input and are not as "automated" as I would like. I agree that it would be nice to be able to link grants/reports across multiple applciations.

Use project names/grant titles that are similar e.g. Project Name 2012, Project Name 2013 so you can see at a glance on the organization view that the project has been repeated.

Make notes in the Organization Comments

Create a intenal report field called Grant History in your process. This would have to be filled in by an adminsitrator but since you can make it appear on all forms in the grant, evlauators would be able to at least see that there was a previous grant and, if you would like, a little bit about that previous grant.

I don't think you can link to the previous grant/report and that feature would be nice.

I have also created a renewal grant process which has questions about the previous year's grant in it so that when they apply for a new grant, they have to submit a report on the previous year's grant at the same time. The report doesn't get linked to the previous year's grant, but it is a way to have a report on the previous grant easily accessible to reviewers.

I don't know that any of these will help your situation and they are all still administrator heavy, but hope it helps.

posted January 11, 2013 by Amy Moore, O.P. & W.E. Edwards Foundation