The Devil’s in the Details When it Comes to Grants Management
Monika Bochert, Consultant II specializing in grants management and stakeholder engagement
Boulder, CO
In the world of federal funding opportunities, process reigns supreme. When government agencies follow established grants management processes, they successfully award millions of dollars to innovators seeking to further their research. However, not adhering to the recommendations set out by relevant legal and regulatory offices could jeopardize a whole funding competition, invalidating winners – or worse, having to start the entire endeavor over again.
Therefore, the key to success for agencies that support federal funding opportunities like grants and cooperative agreements is understanding the grants management process.
The grants management process may include the development of the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), to the internal review phase, through the selection, award, and post-award management. This grants lifecycle is grounded in concrete, repeatable, and optimizable steps that, once established, set government agencies on the course for successful programmatic implementation. However, defining these steps and establishing tools for each phase, while maintaining quality assurance, takes diligent time and effort. Successful implementation is predicated on remembering the devil is in the details.
It's hard to know exactly how many applications an agency will receive or what their quality will be like when the review phase comes. Nevertheless, planning and preparation is essential to avoid administrative obstacles and facilitate timely awards. To achieve this, Corner Alliance streamlines aspects of the pre-award merit review process by automating the creation and maintenance of records for each completed review. Understanding the nuances of established regulatory processes like this saves Federal employees time and effort, and helps ensure applications pass through formal review in an accurate, and complete manner.
For agencies planning to award federal funding opportunities, it's more important than ever to:
Understand the process before beginning. Learn from other agencies about what works and doesn't work in the world of federal funding opportunities. Establish relationships with relevant legal and regulatory offices to ask the right questions before it's too late. This is not the world of “move fast and break things.” Asking upfront ensures bases are covered down the line.
Take notes. Conduct meticulous record-keeping, both in terms of process documentation to withstand internal and external audits, as well as for measuring impacts in order to communicate quantitative and qualitative results to stakeholders.
Know your audience. Market effectively to stakeholders to cast the broadest net possible with given resources. Agencies can't receive good applicants if stakeholders don't know a funding opportunity exists.
Do research. Keep track of what other agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are doing within their funding opportunities areas. How are they innovating the process for public-private partnerships? How can an agency innovate its own NOFOs to achieve the greatest impact per taxpayer dollar spent?
Think big. Don't set limits to what the agency or program needs right now. Explore the possibilities of what will be needed five or ten years from now. The more an agency plants the seeds for basic research and development (R&D), the stronger the foundation will be when a program is ready to expand.
For more information about how we support federal funding opportunities for our government partners, follow us at @CornerAlliance, or contact us at bd@corneralliance.com to set up a meeting for discussion.
Author
Monika Bochert, Consultant II supporting the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division, has a mission to enhance emerging technology through public-private partnership. She has expertise in grants management and stakeholder engagement, most recently supporting NIST's Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program 2022 funding opportunity that awarded over $10M in cooperative agreements.