When it comes to research grants in all fields, serious gaps exist related to technology, structure, organisation and bias that substantial progress from developing within actual research.
When the systems used to evaluate grants are insufficient, we leave unresolved problems that impact more than just the grant awarding process.
In this article, we outline the top problems in the grants management marketplace, how they hold us back, and what we can do to advance the mental health field despite these challenges.
What are the Biggest General Gaps in the Grant Management Marketplace?
-
Time: Typically, researchers spend roughly 40 percent of their applying for grants, which equates to around 800 hours per year.
-
Learning curve: Learning how complicated and insufficient grant management systems work can be extremely time consuming. 75 percent of organisations report this as a serious problem.
-
Affordability: A nonprofit without ample funds will often sacrifice getting an efficient and user-friendly grant management system in exchange for a cheap, poorly managed grant management system.
-
Inequity: Often, awards are intentionally or unintentionally given based on identifying characteristics of the researcher, thereby placing the research at a higher priority than the research study and the science.
The problem isn’t a lack of grants.
In fact, there are currently over 900 federal grant programs offered by 26 different grant-making agencies.
These numbers just account for the grants associated with the government. When we include the number of grants offered by private, unaffiliated institutions and organisations, the numbers double.
Even more impressive still, the global grant management software market size is expected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2019 to $1.9 billion by 2024.
A study on inefficiency in the grant management marketplace by EY Parthenon made the following suggestions for improving the marketplace:
-
Hire more staff with program management skills
-
Work with other grant-making agencies to avoid overlap
-
Create a centralised grants management office
-
Increase staff training
-
Make grant systems user friendly
-
Automate the grant assessment process
-
Standardise and streamline the process
We’ve come up with a solution that fixes all these gaps.
What are the Biggest Technological Gaps in the Grant Management Marketplace?
Our article on tech innovation and nonprofits addresses critical technology gaps, including the technology knowledge gap, which is an organisation’s lack of knowledge on how to use new technologies that could help meet their needs.
Here are some of the most significant challenges organisations face within insufficient grant management technology.
-
Bias: There are multiple forms of bias both implicit and explicit that occur throughout the funding process. There are not adequete checks in place to prevent that bias from occurring.
-
Time waste: Applicants (i.e. scientific researchers) spend over 40 percent of their time applying for funding because of the variety of systems, the multitude of questions, and the lack of user capabilities within each system. Expert reviewers consistently report being frustrated by the excessive amounts of time they must dedicate to navigating each system during a review process.
-
Lack of customisation: A majority of respondents report that their organisations use automation technology, but only 27 per cent see significant value from it.
-
Bugs: Since so many grant management systems are outdated, over 60 percent of organisations that use them report significant bugs.
-
Navigation: Only 10 percent of survey respondents say that eligible grantees can always find available grants.
-
Analysis: For nearly a third of respondents, quality data – and the technology to analyse that data – is insufficient for all parts of the grant funding marketplace.
-
Lack of security: Again, many systems date back to the late eighties and suffer from several security vulnerabilities, which have been targeted by many attacks aimed to break the underlying communication protocol.
A System that Closes All Gaps in the Grant Management Marketplace
What funders, applicants, and reviewers are not yet aware is that 1907 Foundation has developed the software and process to close these gaps.
Our revolutionary system, Atala, checks every one of these boxes.
Now, it’s just a matter of scaling the GMS’s capabilities to use across the grant management marketplace beyond our organisation.
How is Atala Revolutionary?
Atala is a GMS toolkit designed to streamline the applicant, review, and award process.
Atala creates collaboration opportunities between funders to ensure that the point of nonprofit work (aka getting the money into the hands of those who need it and can create progress) is realised more ethically and more equitably.
It will also serve as a repository for data collection by collecting and analysing application data on the research, the researcher, the reviewer, the funders, and the entire grant funding industry.
Atala will be up to date and current with the newest efficiencies in the for-profit industry, relatively affordable and accessible, and it will be catered specifically to nonprofits while addressing the concerns that have been highlighted with other GMSs.
Not only will Atala give researchers valuable time back to conduct their work, but it will also streamline the overall process.
Using blinding during the review process, Atala will close the gaps we currently see in access and resource allocation to scientists, making the opportunity more equitable and ethical.
“In the traditional grant management system, there’s one funder and they have their own process with their own team that goes in and reviews applications.
“It’s siloed to this grantmaker and we want to totally open that up so applicants are applying to many grantmakers and there are all kinds of tools we can use to get money to the people we want to be researching the things we want to be researching.
“And, grantmakers would be able to rein in their process to customise their individual grant with the way it’s been built,” says Atala developer and 1907 Foundation Chief Technology Officer, Blair Kelly.
By ensuring a large sample size of reviewers, Atala will be able to guarantee a higher degree of ethical decision making.
By providing a platform and process for reviewers to make decisions solely based on the purity of science, Atala will allow for more effective and more results-focused selections of studies.
Kelly added:
“Reviewers have found the UI very simple and very easy to use. They said it’s much easier and a pleasure to use.
“Our researchers and advisors also like our process. In our process, we have an initial lightning round – not bogging everyone down with every detail of the application.
“We’re not sharing the person’s name or what schools they went to.”
If you would like to learn more about Atala, would like to book a demo, or would like to help support the scale of this revolutionary software, we appreciate your interest and support and look forward to hearing from you.
