My last organization did its heavy yearly review & data collection through the application process. My current organization does it through the reporting process (and sometimes through applications on top of that!). I get that it's opposite of what some organizations do but it's absolutely essential to our process. I can't understand why an evaluation stage for follow-ups isn't provided, at least on the advanced license.

That said, if anyone has something they do outside of Foundant that works really well for them for this purpose, I'd love to hear it!! Desperate for a solution.

This would be great!

This is important.

Please address this!

Many organizations require "evaluation" of follow ups (a common use case, grantee progress reporting that needs to be reviewed). It is not as professional, clean as it could be with the current recommendation to enter questions in the Follow Up form which, in turn, requires them to be completed by Admin or GM which are not roles that the evaluators have, or should have, in many organizations. It would be great if there was Evaluation stage and forms for Follow Up as there are for LOI and Application

Yes, it would greatly help is someone could be assigned as "lead" on a grant award or if follow-ups could be assigned to evaluators. Currently the Program Officer assigned to an award is responsible for reviewing the follow ups, and determining if another payment should be processed at this time. Currently, there is no way to assign that to a person in the system. So we have to manually figure out which follow up forms below to which Program Officers when they are submitted, then collect those evaluations outside of GLM, then manually approve the next payment. Could definitely be streamlined.

A client I am working with in the sales process would really like to have Follow Up Evaluations as their committee evaluates the progress of multi-year grants against their goals prior to completing a site visit, which is ultimately used to determine if they will continue funding the grant project.

Evaluating grantee follow-up reports is a fundamental part of our process and of the work done by our grants committee. GLM just needs to mirror the process for reviewing an evaluating applications. Allow follow-up reports to be assigned to evaluators, allow us to create an evaluation form for evaluators to complete, and display it side-by side with the grantee submitted report. Hard to understand why that would be so difficult. Can't you just create another phase of the process and model it after the current evaluator process?

I should add, that the ability to display attachments submitted with the final report should also be the same as in the application review process. Currently, the only option is to download before viewing.

It would be really helpful to have an evaluation function in the follow up stage (similar to the application stage) so that staff and grant reviewers could evaluate the success of a grant. With so many people focusing on improving impact measurement we really need this sort of functionality.
Amanda Adams, PacificSource Foundation

I think this would be a great way to engage the committees and help them see the outcomes. Also I want Committee members to be able to see the follow ups as well as Board members. This is a real downfall of the software that only Board members can see them and it's even hard for them to find it going through Requests & Decisions.

We have a couple of follow-up stages that require evaluation and approval. (So first we need to say yes, the information you have us is complete (detailed enough for us to review) and then we need to say yes, we approve the request or step.

Evaluating of follow-ups would be very helpful. Please make this more user friendly.

Why hasn't this been done yet? It was first proposed 10 years ago and has had consistent support since. We're in the process of evaluating interim reports (i.e., Follow Ups) right now. We do it outside the system and it's cumbersome and error prone. I have to download each report and upload it to Dropbox, make an Excel report form, ask my fellow board members to complete the form, and return it to me. I mistakenly didn't get all the reports uploaded to Dropbox and now 2 days before we're going to meet, I'm having to ask them to go back and review a few more reports. It shouldn't have to be this way. I've seen too many new ideas get implemented while waiting for this one.

This would be a huge help!

We are collecting a huge amount of qualitative data, and reporting is turning out to be quite daunting. We are trying to find a way to code the data for analysis and having an evaluation side-by-side with the monthly or quarterly follow-up report would be super useful for us to do that. That way we can assign the coding form to the appropriate person. We are currently working with "tags" within the form.

Being able to evaluate follow-ups reporting on grant outcomes has always been a missing link in the GLM in my opinion, so thank you Larry for raising this issue.

To me it makes sense that our evaluators should be able to be notified when a followup form from an applicant has been received so they can view it within the system. Currently our work-around solution is to save their report as a pdf and place it in Shared Documents for our evaluators to view. This is not a very intuitive nor seamless process, and our evaluators are not happy… I hope Foundant will consider reviewing this in the future.

This would be very helpful to alert Officers that a report has been submitted and requires their attention. The work around we've found thus far, is to push the Follow up back to incomplete once the applicant submits it, then assign it internally to the respective party and get their approval through Administrative questions at the end of the follow up form. The problem of doing so, is that once the follow up is set to internal, it is no longer accessible for the applicant. Having this function could simplify our workflow and fully transition our approval process into the system, which we are doing on paper as well at this time.

I think this is an excellent idea. Additionally, this could allow easier access to follow-ups for which each staff member is responsible. My colleagues and I have multiple grant processes in each of our portfolios and I always need to use the filter to find which follow-ups I need to review. It would be great if they were more apparent on the dashboard.

I would like to make a strong second to this idea. We're trying to move toward better practices, including emphasizing the review and evaluation of grantee's use of our grant and their general status and capacity at grant's end. It would be great to be able to assign certain staff and trustees to actually READ and digest the grant reports through Foundant, as part of this effort!

We are very much in favor of this idea. Having an evaluation at the follow-up stage is sound grants management practice. Having the documentation all in one place makes sense from an efficiency and audit perspective too.