How do you work with Grants in Tessitura? any advise

Hi Sharon,

We enter grants as plans in Tessitura. We track all the steps in the grant application process and store files on a separate location, in our case SharePoint. Happy to discuss this further if you're interested.

Hi Sharon, I'd be interested in hopping into this thread as well, as i just arrived eight months ago as DD and we are tracking our grants in progress for FY23 via google docs. (StageOne Family Theatre, Louisville, KY)

I'd also be interested to learn more. We are hoping to use Tessitura to track our grant deadlines in the future. One of my previous employers did this - i think using Plans but it has been a long time since I was there and I could use a refresher. 

I am our resident grantwriter and do all my tracking in Tessitura. Plans for each RFP and steps to track the various deadlines. I also created a few custom step types (e.g. "contracting") to keep tabs on various other components. Like others, I keep the documents themselves in our SharePoint file server. 

I also have "Research" steps which say things like "Look for RFP" scheduled for around the time I know the RFPs generally come out.

Hi all,

We use Plans in Tessitura to track deadlines for grant proposals, reports, calls, meetings, etc. We also use them for forecasts projecting income from foundations, corporations, and government agencies with Analytics. Generally, we create a campaign for each fiscal year for each type of institutional donor (e.g. FY23 Foundation, FY23 Corporate, FY23 Gov, etc) that we expect to contribute to the annual fund. We have a separate Capital campaign type. Then within each institution's record, I create a plan for each grant we intend to pursue, so if they generally give us 2 separate grants I create 2 separate plans. Within each plan, we create steps for each major action item, e.g. submit proposal, submit report, etc. I also try to record that we completed significant cultivation steps like meetings and phone calls, but I prefer to record notes from those meetings in the Research tab so they are easier to find years later. Every week-2 weeks, we run a Step Detail report covering open steps with deadlines up to about 6 weeks in the future to create a deadline spreadsheet that can be printed out. 

Whenever we get a new grant, we immediately enter report steps in their plan, and make sure we have a step to reapply in a future year plan. We try to create the reapply step when we submit the proposal so we don't forget, and I do an audit 2-3 times a year to make sure we didn't miss creating any steps.

For forecasts, we use the "Goal" amount field in the plan as our projected amount (my real goal may be higher), and then have created a Analytics report that pulls that info as well as actual contributions/pledges to date, the ask amount, and the prior year's amount from that funder. 

I generally don't attach many files to plans - plan steps are more reminders to work on something. We save emails, award letters, proposals, etc. outside of Tess.

I find plans particularly helpful for keeping projects with soft or no deadlines alive, like moving forward cultivation for prospects; otherwise, they tend to fall off my to do list. For renewing donors, it is helpful to keep all of their deadlines and info in Tess so everything is in the same place and accessible to all Tess users current and future. And I love Plans for keeping track of steps that need to happen several years in the future, e.g. for foundations that make you wait 3 years between applying. 

Hi Sharon,

We are new to Tessitura this fall and working with version 16. I found this thread and wanted to see if over the past year you had any headway. I am trying to find the best way to apply grants that the Museum has already received to apply to student group Tessitura ticket orders, rather than track the actually development process of applying for grants. We have a number of different grants that are set up as payment tenders in Tessitura and our finance and Education team keep track of balances in Sage and spreadsheet tracking. Our auditors require the grant payment tender to be applied on the school visit date. Our issue is that when we send out the advance confirmation/invoice to the schools detailing the balance due, the grant funding is not applied, and therefor full balance appears in our HTML confirmation. We currently write a note in the booking notes field that details the grant and what the school REALLY owes, but school payable's staff pretty much hate this and we have had to create a few "faux" invoices manually in Excel which can show the exact amount due in order for the school to approve. The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk who we chatted with also uses the Booking notes option to much the same response from schools. We are working with our onboarding team to see if there is a way we can use either a dummy Grant Payment tender type for the confirmation, send, and then reverse back i the order...or somehow play with the HTML code to allow a negative fee to be applied so we get a true balance due. Just wondering if in the last year you came up with a workable solution. Thanks for any insight you could provide.