Grants tracking and management

Good morning Lorraine,

At my previous employer (Tulsa Ballet), I set up our Grants worker with Plans and we added some custom fields in Plans for them to use as they worked and tracked their grants.

There are definitely some downsides to this because you can't get a calendar view with upcoming grant due dates or report submission dates (though we've submitted this as an enhancement request for future consideration), but it seemed to be the best way to have the worker track their efforts on Plans. I'm also really excited about the upcoming Tessitura Analytics update coming later this year because there are Plan-specific widgets that you'll be able to report out that might help solve the issue of upcoming due dates and all of that.

The nice thing about Plans is that it's really easy to do mass updates as well, which I found out and took advantage of when our Grants worker departed the organization and a new employee joined; I was able to very quickly find all of the Plans that the previous worker was assigned to and assign the new employee to those Plans in one step so that there wasn't any downtime in the tracking.

Happy to answer any additional questions you may have.

Thank you,

Brian

Aloha Lorraine!

Similar to Brian's response, we also use Plans to track most of our Grants. I also have several scheduled reports (fund activity, new contribution, pledge balance detail, plan summary) to help our Grant officer manage his pipeline. Tracking everything in Plans does require constant maintenance to correctly reflect progress and standings, so this was a change in workflow for him. We also heavily use Reminders to track deadlines, acknowledgement letters or other misc. details that need attention. 

I'm also happy to answer any questions you might have at kbarber@honolulumuseum.org.

Mahalo!

honolulumuseum.org

Aloha Katy!

I know this is an older thread, but it is the closest I could find to the issue facing my organization. I am the grants manager for a theatre, and we have used the ticketing side extensively and we are now delving into using it on the development side. Plans & Portfolios work great for individual donors and corporate relationships - but grants are a bit fussy! :) Since the order and components vary between funders, I had hoped to set up a basic plan and then adjust steps for each funder. I've read about people using status, steps or both to track the progression through the grants pipeline. One question I have is how to connect a status change to a reminder. With steps, the reminder is a big part of the setup - but can you set up a reminder to trigger when a status changes? Perhaps there is now a better way to do this now? I would be so thankful for any guidance, advice or resources around the issue of grants management through plans & portfolios. 

Hoping ALL are safe and healthy!

Best, 

Joe

Hi Brian,

Would you mind explaining how you set up grant programs in Tessitura? Happy to join a zoom call. 

Hi Sharon,

If it's helpful, I am both the theater's grantwriter and the Development point-person for Tessitura configurations. Happy to be a resource on how I've/we've used the system if a second take would be appreciated.

Kate

Great, thank you so much Kate. 

Do you have some time tomorrow to meet during a zoom call? 

My direct email is schoondassery@intrepidmuseum.org

Hi Kate,

I'm new at our theater and the first grants person here. My first Tessitura training just started and on the side I'm digging into its capabilities That's how I found this recent thread about grants support. Could you find some time to help me envision how it applies? It doesn't have to be right away, especially since I'm just now learning the system.

Thanks a million!

Doug

Hi Doug,

Sorry to leave you in a lurch; you happened to reach out just after I went on maternity leave. I am back now. If you haven't already solved your issues some other way, please feel free to shoot me an email and I'd be happy to chat.

All best,

Kate