Grant Follow-Up Reports
Does anyone else struggle getting their follow-ups back from nonprofits?
What are your tips and tricks?
Answers
-
Hi @GracieMaxwell, we used to have this problem but changed a couple of things to make sure we get a timely response. In the grant agreement we have grantees agree to the following: "The Grantee shall furnish to the Foundation a detailed written report on the use of the grant, to be submitted via the organization's Online Grant Account. This report will consist of both narrative and financial sections. The Foundation reserves the right not to award further grants to the Grantee until all reporting requirements for all previous grant awards have been satisfied. A final report may be submitted prior to the final report deadline if program/project is complete."
We have had to reduce or remove future grants to organizations that did not complete follow ups for us.
I also usually send out two emails through Foundant before follow ups are due. If a follow up is due June 30th, I'll send a reminder email on June 1st and then another one on June 15th to organizations that have not yet submitted. Then, on the day after a follow up is due, I'll look on Foundant to see when they last logged on and how much of the follow up has been done.
Hope that helps!
3 -
Hi, @GracieMaxwell! Really great question as I know many do struggle to get follow-up reports back. I started in my role as Grants Officer in December 2021 and upon arriving there were several outstanding accountability reports that I needed to follow up on. These were still outstanding despite our grant agreement having language similar to what @ChiakaNwosu said. Since we were getting ready to kick off our Spring cycle, I saw it as an opportunity to email each grantee with an outstanding report to inform them our Spring cycle is about to open but in order to apply and be eligible for funding, they must submit their report first. Being able to advertise our new cycle and add the friendly reminder had such a positive impact. That day I received more than half of the accountability reports that were considered outstanding. and even had a handful of the grantees apply for another grant once our cycle opened.
To ensure this doesn't happen again, I implemented the exact same process @ChiakaNwosu mentioned...set a calendar reminder 30 days out to send a reminder email, but for me the second reminder is 1 week before the report is due. Our grantees really appreciate this reminder and since implementing this process we have not had a single late report for our Spring cycle...so far. Another thing we did was add Grant Activities to the Grant Award Letter...this was just a simple table to include the tasks, their due dates, and linked resources for completing the task.
Hope some of this helps!
2
