Anyone use Airtable to manage grant applications and programmes?

Hi Pundarika,

Yes, we (Moonland) built a grant management solution in Airtable for a foundation.

One thing I'd strongly recommend is spending some time mapping your process before building. We've found that the biggest challenge is usually not Airtable itself, but getting clarity on the workflow, the data you want to capture, and how different parts of the process connect together.

In my experience, many people jump straight into creating tables and automations, only to realize later that the underlying structure doesn't quite support the way they want to work.

Every organisation is a little different, so the right setup really depends on your application process, review process, reporting requirements, and future plans.

Happy to have a short chat if you'd like to compare approaches and share some of the lessons we've learned along the way.

Best,
Max

We’re not currently using Airtable for Grants Management, but I would echo what Max said. The Airtable piece will usually come together more quickly when there is a good understanding of each process and who is involved at what stage. 

I’ve also used both Miro and Visio to make diagrams of how processes work, which is helpful in making sure that everything is taken into account in the design process. 

I 100% agree with ​@Max. Look at Airtable as a blank canvas where you can built almost any workflow that you want. So figure out your process and workflows and then customize Airtable accordingly.

I’ve worked with different businesses across different industries and I’ve observed that even if two businesses are doing exactly the same thing, their internal processes and workflows are different. There are nuances to each and every business that calls for a customized design. And the good news is that Airtable offers that capability to you :)

Hi ​@Pundarika We’ve set up a lot of grant management databases before! I recorded a demo some time ago on grant management and it could be helpful for you to see as you get started! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1bHeAkEpI

It has a lot of the tables that you might need to start with! :) 

We are tracking grant applications and reporting schedules in our fundraising base. We have a people tab, an organizations tab, a donations tab, and a proposals & reports tab. We track whether the grant is prospective, committed, received, etc, how likely we think we are to get it, and all the deadlines associated, eg LOI, proposal, interim reports, final reports. We have a zap that links the deadlines to an Asana project because Asana handles the reminders for the tasks, so i didn’t have to build any of that. Though the connection between Zapier & Airtable does break fairly regularly & i have to go in & reconnect for all my zaps to keep working. Most of our grants are unrestricted, so we don’t track any allocations in Airtable (though you’d probably want to do that in your accounting program instead). My only other tip (agree with folks above that getting clear on the process is helpful!) is to make sure that a thing doesn’t occur in 2 places in your base at the same time. So like we used to have a tab that was all electronic payments that zapped in from our online giving platform and it copied over to the tab for donations because i didn’t need things like membership dues in that donations tab. However, over time that created a huge headache that i am now building myself out of (with great time commitment) to use filters instead of copying over, so that you don’t have to make changes in multiple places to the same object! 

Hi ​@cori_parrish1 so interesting you use Asana and zapier to handle the deadlines. I think you could set those up reasonably easily in Airtable as well but it does sound like 5/6 different reminders so perhaps Asana saves time in the end. It caught my eye because that’s somewhat unusual and very creative.