Grant Status updates adding to administrative workload
I know this has come up before, but I wonder if there's been any progress on making the grant status not immediately available to applicants.
Recently, I updated grant decisions for one of our clients and within an hour or so an applicant had emailed the program officer to ask if the new "Final Report Due" status meant there had been news. The applicant hadn't even been checking on that particular application, but had logged in to apply to another of our clients and, reaching the Status page, noticed the change.
Had we been able to keep the status under wraps until the letters and checks were sent out, we would have been able to avoid the extra email. This happens periodically and means taking time out of actually getting the letters out to answer these questions.
Also, the letters would have much more information than the program officer had at hand when contacted by the applicant.
Would it be possible to look into having the option of choosing when the decision is shown? It would be great to have just a little more control over this part of the process. This would give us a chance to get the decision letters to applicants and possibly avoid some phone calls.
Thanks
Idea posted February 16, 2012 by Mary Nicosia, GMA Foundations
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I was initially excited by the feature in Release 3.1.0 to allow applicants to see the Decision; however, I have similar concerns as Mary in that I do not want to pre-release our decision before we have the chance to send a letter through the US Mail. We ordinarily allow 3-4 weeks between the date of our grant meeting and the date grant checks/letters/agreements are mailed. During that interval, our Grants Manager enters each decision, payment amount (if approved), and uses the Mail Merge feature to generate correspondence. These actions are not all done on one day, and often times over several weeks. It becomes a cart before the horse scenario. We cannot use the Mail Merge feature without entering grant decisions, but do not want to applicants to see our grant decisions before the grant correspondence is mailed. I have been testing the 3.1 Release in Demo and in its current form I cannot use in the live system. Have you considered linking the date the decision becomes available for view by the applicant to the Payment Date? I saw a previous post where Raymond suggested adding a "Response Date." While that would work too, all I would need is for the decision to be held until the Payment Date.
This is also an issue with setting follow-ups. Currently, we must wait until a few days after the grant correspondence has been mailed before we can set follow-ups, otherwise the applicant will question the purpose of the follow-up. It's as much of an issue as posting the decision before the check is mailed. This creates an inefficiency for us because we are not able to have a continuous workflow where follow-ups are set at the same time as the decision is entered. It would be nice to have the follow-up form not appear on the applicant's dashboard until after the Payment Date.
posted February 25, 2013 by Bob Coakley, Thomas J. Long Foundation
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Mark
commented
Mary,
This issue comes up every once in a while. As online systems become more prevalent, it seems some non-profits are becoming more sophisticated and learning how to use the system to learn information not yet meant to be public. What we discussed with one client is the idea of setting a "RESPONSE DATE" field at the process level which would keep status changes from being enacted in the system until that date. If the field was not filled out or it was set for date in the past, the status would change immediately. We have not begun development on this but would welcome feed back! Do you think this would work for you?
Thank you for your continued involvement in the Ideal Lab. We truly appreciate it.
Look forward to seeing you in Montana this summer!
posted March 30, 2012 by Mark Larimer, Foundant Technologies