Case studies
A community foundation charity supporting local initiatives was running its grant-making on manual process: applications, assessment, payments and project tracking all handled by hand. I reviewed each part of the operation and produced recommendations covering an online application portal, a centralised grant management system, secure payment handling and cloud-based project management, aimed at taking friction off applicants first and staff second. Applicants now complete a grant application in half the time it used to take.
This is the kind of programme the charity digital checklist is built to tee up, walking trustees through what to settle before committing to a digital project.
A community foundation charity, supporting local initiatives and projects, was doing its core work on manual process. Grant applications arrived and were handled by hand. Assessment, documentation, payments and project tracking all sat in separate places, or in nobody's place.
That costs a grant-maker twice. It slows the response to a community that is usually asking for help with something time-sensitive, and it spends staff time on administration rather than on deciding which projects to back.
The charity wanted recommendations covering the whole operation: the website, grant applications, grant processing, payments and project management.
I went through each part of the operation and set out what it needed to do, in the order that mattered to applicants rather than the order that suited the systems.
The website. A review of the existing site identified where it failed the people using it, and recommended a responsive, clearly navigated design with online donation, event calendars and the functionality to support community engagement.
Grant applications. An online portal to replace the manual submission route, with form builders, document upload and automated notifications, so an applicant can see where their application is rather than waiting to be told.
Grant processing. A centralised grant management system to track applications, hold the documentation and let internal stakeholders work on the same record, with customisable workflows, automated approvals and real-time reporting.
Payments. Secure online payment handling for donations and grant disbursement, with recurring donation options, donor management and automated receipts.
Project management. Cloud-based software to centralise tasks, communication and resource allocation, so a project's status is visible without asking someone.
The recommendations removed manual steps across the operation: less paperwork, fewer things handled by hand, and a shorter path from an application arriving to a decision being made. That matters most at the applicant end, because a community organisation asking for a grant is usually asking on a deadline.
For the charity itself, a single record per grant replaced documentation spread across people, and reporting became something the team could run rather than assemble. Costs came down through reduced administrative overhead and less printing and mailing.
The one measured figure is at the applicant end: a grant application now takes 50% of the time it used to. The rest of the above is described rather than quantified, and it depended on how much of the recommendation was implemented.
For a grant-maker the process is the product. Applicants experience the charity as a form, a wait and a decision, so the friction that matters is theirs rather than the staff's, and digitising in that order is what makes the difference visible outside the building. The step that decides all of it comes first: work out what the organisation is trying to do before choosing a single system to do it with.
Capability work of this kind is capability development. The system that came out of this thinking is in fund management system.
At the applicant end. An online portal with document upload and automated notifications means an applicant can see where their application has got to, and a community organisation asking for a grant is usually asking against a deadline.
Because the software then decides your process, and a grant-maker's process is the thing it is actually judged on. Working out what the organisation needs each part to do, then fitting systems to that, is the order that avoids buying a better-looking version of the same problem.
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