We are currently lacking a grants coordinator and the person covering suggested we move all grant tracking from a separate software program into Tessitura. Is anyone else using Tessitura as Grant Tracking software?
Do you mean tracking progress against an awarded grant's objectives (and budget) or keeping track of when proposals, reports, etc. are due to go out? If the latter, yes, happy to talk about it.
Hi Kate,
I have minimal experience with grants myself, but assumed that we use a separate software program so we have all grant tracking in one place. Can I start by asking you what the limitations or stumbling blocks are? Also, do you use plans to track your proposals? Thank you!
Sure thing. I am our department's grantwriter and use Plans to track every single LOI, proposal, contracting paperwork, report, etc. It's great for timeline work--mostly using Steps--as well as tracking what pending proposals are in the pipeline. I have customized the options in several of the drop-downs to make the descriptors more grant-centric, but that's a fairly superficial change. With Plans, I'm a quick report away from summarizing what's outstanding, doing a year-end projection, flagging future opportunities.
At the Goodman, though, I am not responsible for tracking some of the things associated with large grants--I don't have to track the draw down on grant funds for program expenses, I let the departments who run our programs keep tabs on program deliverables, etc. You could do a little of that with Steps if you needed to (e.g. milestone tracking), but would probably want to set up custom fields and/or some external system if that's a big part of your grant person's job. Tessitura also won't do the prospecting/research part of grant-seeking for you, which I know some grant-specific software would, but you can flag prospects and timelines.
We have also just recently done an overhaul of how our grants are tracked at Arts Centre Melbourne and in addition to recording everything in plans, we have created a dashboard in Analytics to track how things are going in terms of successful grants and dollars raised, pending applications and expected income, etc (drawing from the information in the plan). We are still ironing out a few things but it has been well received so far by many people in the org.