Using CiviCRM To Manage Grants That You Receive

Recently I worked with Grantmakers In The Arts, a national association of private and public funders making grants to artists and arts, to provide training on how they can get the most out of their CiviCRM database. In this post I am going to explain one specific bit of functionality that I helped them think through: managing grants that they receive (as opposed to give). The CiviGrant module of CiviCRM is designed to keep track of the grants that an organization gives out. It is fairly basic and rudimentary in its features, but does allow you to track the giving of a grant, some key data information and amounts, as well as some dates and reporting. I have not met an organization for which CiviGrant actually meets their grant administration or tracking needs. We often have to add custom fields for installment amounts, grant cycle dates, additional reports and grant proposals.  This was my first experience with an organization that wanted to use CiviCRM to track the grants that they received. So here is what i suggested to them: I recommended using CiviGrant to track all the grants they apply for regardless of received or not. Each grant application submitted would would have a civigrant record that is associated with the grantmaking organization (a contact in CiviCRM). To meet the needs of this (and probably any) client, some custom fields would need to be added to the CiviGrant object. These fields should probably be in a single field group, and would include (though not be limited to): Grant Term (the number of years the grant will cover) this could...