 Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the nonprofit show today from Ireland. Welcome, Neil Driscoll. Oh, Driscoll. Oh, Driscoll. Oh, Driscoll, I'm easy. Thanks, Julia. Lovely to be here with you. It's wonderful. OK, now listen, my friend. You've got to correct me if I say that wrong. Well, we're going to really dig down into best practices of grant management, which everybody knows how our country has been transformed by these amazing numbers of grants, some small, some massive, some private, some federal. I mean, it's really caused a lot of heartburn for so many people. And so we're really excited to get Neil's approach on what's going on and what your company Submit.com is talking about and seeing. And so we'll get into that with Neil. But again, we're super excited to have Neil here. If we haven't met before, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, my trusty sidekick, is in the South this week on vacation. So she'll join us back next week. And then hint, hint, I'm going to be taking off a couple of days. But anyway, we want to make sure that we thank and express our gratitude for all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in and day out. We were talking to Neil in the green room chatter. We are coming upon our 600 episode, which is just a mind blowing thing for me. And those, these sponsors have really helped us to achieve that because most of these sponsors have been with us since day one. They include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit nerd, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, and nonprofit thought leader. Again, thank you so much to these folks. If you want to see this episode again, share it or go back to any of our amazing episodes, you can find us on Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon Fire TV, and now on podcast, wherever you stream your content. Cue us up and we can go with you. Okay, Neil O'Driscoll, coming to us from Ireland. Tell us where you are in Ireland. I'm on the very south coast of Ireland, on the Atlantic. We're a cork-based company, but we're spread out around the south coast since the pandemic, everybody working from home. So, yeah, I mean, as you probably know, Ireland is the Silicon Valley of Europe, effectively. There's a really thriving tech scene here. And that's what Submit.com was born out of about 10 years ago. And so talk to us about what Submit.com does, because we have you here today on the nonprofit show for a very specific reason. And I'd love to give our viewers and listeners kind of some context of how you came to us. I'll try and keep it short because we do a lot. We do submission management, hence the name. We've been had a heavy focus on grant management for about 10 years, but to us, a grant starts with a submission. You need to create a form. You need to collect data from your applicants and you need to push it through a process. It's the design of the process, whether it be casting for television, whether it be hiring for a new job, or whether it be grant management. From a tech challenge perspective, they're all the same problem. I mean, we have custom tools for each of those sectors, grant management being one, but that's how we started. Amazing. You know, one of the things that we have noticed a lot in our sector is I think it's become very evident that the nonprofit sector is really way behind on technology. And one of the things that the pandemics have done is it's pushed us in the sector to be more open to adopting technology. I'm wondering if you're seeing that. I am seeing that. I mean, in the grant management sector, we traditionally, a lot of our customers would have been government agencies. Since the pandemic, I mean, we've nonprofits coming on board at a much greater rate. So we're in the lovely position of sitting in the middle with hundreds of grant management customers seeing what each of them do well, what each of them do badly. And sometimes they're across learnings to go from what governments do into the nonprofits and vice versa. I mean, broadly speaking, and obviously this is a generalization, governments, government agencies tend to be possibly over engineered sometimes. And that's a pitfall, trying to over design a process. Nonprofits tend to be on the other end of the scale, moving from paper sometimes, but I actually find it easier to move a nonprofit into the digital world than to digitize a government process because there's less to think about. A big part of what we do is engaging with our customers. So we get them to question, what are you trying to achieve in grant management? What are your desired outcomes? What steps do you need in your process to achieve that? And some of our established customers, namely the government ones, have processes that have evolved over years and years and years. They often add in steps to their process. They very rarely take them out and then they end up with a monster. So that's a good comment. Yeah, absolutely. Just that you keep adding as opposed to editing and finding it interesting. Well, let's talk about some of these things that you've learned and given this context with which you get to see both sides of the table, which I always think is the best place to be. And we're gonna be talking about best practices. And you started to kind of share with us this application management thing, how far back have we been or do we need to get to to understand application management? I mean, is this kind of a new thing or are we way under utilizing systems? I mean, no, nothing has changed since the days of pen and paper to a certain extent. The steps are the same. If you digitize a process, yeah, there are tools there to make things much more efficient. But on a kind of a broad level, if you're designing an application process, you want to, whether it be on paper or whether it's digital, you want to think of a few words. One is clarity and transparency, I think. You need to tell your applicants what the rules of the game are. That's something that a lot of people skip. If there's a scoring rubric, what is it? What are you looking for? What are your desired outcomes? The clearer you can be at that stage, the more applications you will get in and ultimately the better outcomes you will have as a nonprofit. Then there's a simplicity is another word that I would use. I touched on it earlier. Try not to over complicate the process. You don't want to put barriers in the way of your potential grantees. Yes, you need to ensure compliance. You need to ensure that they meet the eligibility criteria. You need to gather enough information to make an educated decision on whether to award them a grant or not. But a lot of the time when we engage with customers, we'll go through their paper forms and we'd say, you know, have a look at it. See, can you cross anything out? And that can be a fantastically worthwhile exercise. Yeah, interesting. Well, you know, it seems to me too that at the end of the day, you want to meet the expectations of everyone. And if you can't start out declaring what it is you're trying to achieve, you're going to have a misalignment between the grantee and the grantor. I mean, it sets you up for failure almost. Absolutely. People can be very covetous of things like scoring or their in-house processes. As much as is possible, you should open the doors, let people see what you're trying to achieve. I mean, non-profits have nothing to hide. They're generally trying to do good in the world. Yeah, yeah. When you talk to clients, are you seeing this process? How reticent are they to do that? I think you said something very interesting. People are fearful to, you know, open up or be transparent about this. What do you see? What are you seeing? I think the more organized and the more thought has been put into your own systems, the more open people tend to be about them. That's a generalization again, and I can only talk in general terms today, but if you're confident in your own systems and you're confident that you have systems that you've thought through the process, then you should have nothing to fear by sharing that with the applicant. And that can often be a very quick exercise. Again, it comes back to, what are my desired outcomes? How do I want to achieve them? If you believe in your own systems, then it's a lot easier to share them. So that's... I love that, you know? That's like, that might be... We still have time with you on the non-profit show, but that might be the wisest thing I've heard this week. Because, you know... Thank you. You know, Neil, no, I'm serious. That is a message that filters down through so many aspects of our non-profit sector. That's brilliant. That's cool. I'm gonna have to like, write that down and put that on a sticky note on my desk. That's a good thing. Okay, so you've already charmed me and amazed me with this first best practice, but now I really wanted to start talking about this consistent communication aspect, because at the core of what you just said, that's a communication issue. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, communication is huge in grant management. There's the first thing we touched on, tell people the rules of the game. Then there's... I suppose communication can get complicated because these days people have so many channels, whether it be social media, whether it be your website, whether it be emailing past applicants. The danger with all these channels is that you don't have one hub where people can go to get the rules of the game. So if you're directing people via Twitter, bring them back to either your webpage or a tool like a grant management platform where they can have an archive or a repository of the information they need before applying. Have a common destination. And that's before you even get into the process of managing a grant itself. I mean, within that, I can touch on what we do with submit.com, you have things like acknowledgement emails. So you've got automation built in and then any grant management platform will have that to improve your efficiency. So if you're doing it in pen and paper, you'll get something through the post, you'll have to say thank you received and update people by post every time or by email. And there's... So there's also the landing page, there's automated emails, there's a direct communication with applicants. So do you collaborate with your applicants? Not every grant is created equal. So sometimes the team will want to help people put their best foot forward. Otherwise, other systems will say no. You submit it, that's it. We're adjudicating it, ruling on it with an iron fist. So you've got direct messaging. You'll probably have a team dealing with the grant applications. So again, kind of a hub is nice if I can look at an application and see any messages sent by my colleagues to that applicant. Then you'll have group messages. Reminders are a common one. You're a week out from a deadline. I love that. You've got all these draft applications. Again, another advantage of having a digital platform. You want to see the drafts. You want to send a reminder to them in bulk and you want to send the same reminder to everybody so you've got no favorites. Right. Right. That's a good comment. You know, Neil, one of the things that I am fascinated by with all of the guests that we've had on, you know, we've had well-passed 500 guests. And when we have foundation folks or people that are granting money or resources, scholarships, whatever, they always say, please don't be afraid to call us or contact us. That there seems to be this fear level of the relationship between the funder and the nonprofit. And what I hear you saying with your orientation of your product, maybe this helps eliminate some of that fear because if there's a portal or there's a place to go to get communications, that makes it easier. I mean, is that part of your process? Or is this just... Absolutely. And I mean, a lot of the time you'll have questions asked by one person that somebody else will be afraid to ask. It's the same question. So having your FAQs on that landing page is a very, very beneficial thing. And you touched on that communication between the grantee and the grantmaker as well. When the process, as the process pre-grant assessment, post-grant process concludes, get feedback from your grantees. They're the people with their ear to the ground. Ultimately, they're the people that you want to help. You'll probably be running a similar grant again next year. Get their feedback. Did they enjoy the process? What were their issues with it? Is there anything you could do better? All of our customers were most successful. Listen before, during, and after the process to their grantees. And I agree with that. But it seems to me like there would be fear to be that transparent with somebody who you want to do business with or get money from. I mean, how does that work? I mean, yeah, you're right in saying nobody wants to insult the hand that feeds them. But I mean, constructive criticism isn't an insult. And if you build up a rapport with your grantees and they know they can trust you, they know that you're on their side, then they're confident in giving constructive criticism. That would be my take on it. Yeah, no, I think that's a more emotionally mature place to be. I also think too that sometimes, and I'd love your feedback on this, sometimes it seems like we have funders who might not have a realistic expectation of what their money can do or their investment can do. Do you see that and is that part of a communication flow? Yeah, I mean, I'm slightly outside of my kind of area of expertise talking about funder feedback where it stops with us really is giving the nonprofit the tools to give meaningful and robust reports to the funders. Where it goes beyond that, I'm kind of out of my depth. But I mean, we get a lot of feedback from our customers asking for up-to-date reports because I think that's the key. Information, again, is key. Similar problem to dealing with the grantees. If you're giving regular reports, you establish the cadence of the reports between yourselves and your funders, but we'll say once a month as a process is underway. How many applications are coming in? What's the quality of those based on the current state of assessment? And so on and so forth down to allocation of funds and draw them, you may have a phase on a process. You might have an application phase, drawdown phase, post-grant phase. You can report on all of those. And I mean, there's nothing like facts on the ground to satisfy your funders. Kind of feeling that more could be done. If the more information you give them, the less doubt they'll have. So let's drill down a little bit about that because I agree with you. It seems to me like we have more success when we can, if you use the overall word communicate, but it's really about what is it you're communicating and providing the metrics and the data, what are you seeing? Obviously with a portal situation, you probably have an amazing opportunity to help everybody understand what the reporting requirements are and that they can funnel it through your system. But what are some of the things you see? As regards reporting, let's suppose there's depends on which relationship you're talking about from the perspective of the nonprofit, first of all, you want to see have we got enough suitable applications coming in? There's no worse position to be in than to have a fund and not have the quality of applications coming in to spend it effectively. So you want to have a live view again of, and that's where being able to see drafts as they come in is very valuable. Again, you don't want somebody sitting at their kitchen table or multiple applicants sitting at their kitchen table, you don't know about them. They're coming up to deadline day, you suddenly your fingers across that will get enough in. If you move, if you go digital, you'll see what's coming down the tracks much more effectively. So that's one constant report that you'll be running. What's coming in? Are people completing their applications? Do I need to remind them? You may want to tag those even before they're completed. Say, okay, it looks suitable. It's eligible. You want to be tracking or is it junk coming down the track or is it quality coming down the track? So that's one type of tracking. The next type of tracking is I suppose you've got an applicant who's completed an application. They want to know what's the status of my application? Some people, I'm a big fan of communication, but if you send too many update emails with minimal developments, if you like, people tend to ignore them. And you can often have an email that follows which requires an action. We need a particular document, for example. And if that's one of 20 emails that have come from a system saying, hey, we're now considering your application. It's now moved on to phase two, phase three, phase four. It can get lost in the heap. So keep them up to date. Again, what we often do is get the non-profit to tag applications. You can make tags visible to the candidate. So they can log into the portal and see the status of their application without you filling up their inbox with a status update. That way, when you require additional information, they know to action it straight away. Right, yeah, that's smart, that's smart. Because again, too, you started out this conversation with a really good point is a lot of times it's not just one person, it's a team working with us. And so you really need to kind of understand what that chain of command is gonna be, I guess, if you will, going both directions. Really an interesting thing. And this gets down to another question that we kind of wanna talk to you about, and that is managing workflow. Because, and we already identified this amazing amount of money that's coming through into the non-profit sector because of the pandemic and understanding that there are going to be people that maybe this is a new process to them. So it's been more challenging. Can you talk to us about workflow and kind of some of the things that you're seeing? Yeah, so I suppose on a high level, you have three phases, the pre-award phase, the evaluation phase, and the post-award phase, very basic terms. A common workflow that people would have would be, you'll write your grant, okay, make sure you don't overcomplicate the form, you'll release it, you'll publicize it, applications come in. You'll then want to do some triage, maybe eliminating ineligible applications, maybe ensuring compliance and so on. A very common thing after that is that you might have a panel of evaluators. Might not necessarily be the same people who are doing the triage. So you want to add the short list of applications to a folder, share that with your evaluation committee. Ahead of time, you want to decide, do we need a scoring rubric of some sort? And that can serve a few purposes. One is obviously assigning rules to what you're actually looking for, making sure they fit your corporate goals. But also it gives you a nice kind of a track record to share with unsuccessful applicants. You'll often have unsuccessful applicants then, why? And if you have your score bars set up, you can say, well, if you scored very highly in section A, B and C, but you didn't in section D. Again, don't over engineer it, but simplicity is key there and making sure your team all understand the workflow. A lot of the time you'll have people giving their own free time, either pro bono or for a nominal fee for evaluation. You want to make this simple as possible for them. You want to make sure they come back to you again. You know, so these evaluators, you want to mind them. You want to make sure they can log in, see all the information they need to see, assign the scores or comments that they need to assign with the minimum of fuss and to do it in their own time. So that's another thing to think about. How do you want to make it as easy as possible for your evaluators? And a step that an awful lot of people skip is the final step, a post award review, particularly if your grant is running year to year. You want to learn from what you've done this year and try to make your incremental improvements for next year. But don't go down the route, don't make the mistake I made earlier of adding bits and not taking bits away. You know, that's a really... So I got to ask, I love that you said that, but do you see that people are doing that? Because that's a heavy lift for a lot of organizations. The feedback? Yeah. Not necessarily, you see, it's a survey. You might have saved 100 applicants. Okay, you won't get a huge percentage of them completing a post grant survey. But if you get 30% of people doing a simple survey, again, treat them like, at this stage, you have to treat them like pro bono evaluators. They're going to get nothing out of this. So it's simple questions with an option for comment. Keep it as short and sweet as you can. You don't, you hope that we won't need to redesign your entire process, but you might pick up one or two pointers. So it's a link. Send them a bulk message. Thanks for participating. Whether you were successful or unsuccessful, we'd love it if you could complete this short survey. And again, if you have an online platform, not just submit.com, I mean, go to g2.com or one of those grant management review sites. If you want to compare and contrast different offerings, most of them will include a facility to do that. I think that's brilliant. And I think it's even more imperative for us to be doing this because this grant process is picking up speed. And I don't know if you think that and if submit.com, I mean, you have a global landscape to review, but it just seems like this is a process that funders, donors, organizations are really comfortable with. They like this. And it seems like it's just picking up speed. It is, I mean, particularly in the States, I think the Build Back Better program has accelerated it hugely. We've always had more of a culture of federal grants or government grants on this side of the Atlantic than you have in the States, but it's the pandemic has changed that, whether that will remain the case or not the future will only tell. Well, it's an interesting thing because I hear people all the time saying, well, we are starting a family foundation and it might be small now, but it could be mighty later on or we're pooling our sources or corporations saying, our employees want this. And so it just seems like this grant language is really, really an important thing. I've got a question that's come in and it's a really interesting thing. I don't know what part of the world it's come from, but it says, is this product appeared to serve the grantor organization and or can it be worked through recipient? So meaning submit.com with all of the different products and platforms, are you really more geared towards those funders or is this something that a nonprofit might be able to engage with to help them steward their own grant management? Yeah, I think the nonprofit rather than the funders would be our primary customer base because ultimately you'll be the grant writer, you'll get your part of money, you'll be designing your grant form for your desired outcomes. I mean, we've had people turn it on its head. At the end of, as I said at the top we're submission management platform. You could have a nonprofit with a website saying, click here if you want to be a funder and you've a, again, a process that you want to put those through, but realistically you want to have a more personal touch when you're soliciting donations from your funders. So yeah, the person administering the grant is our customer. And obviously it's in their interest to benefit the donors and the grantee as well. Well, and this is one of those interesting things too is that we're seeing a lot of nonprofits that are now umbrella organizations that are then funding nonprofits. So they're a nonprofit themselves that maybe had their own mission, vision and values for a certain area and they've grown to such an extent that they might become an expert in their field or they become collaborators with a lot of other small or regional or nonprofits outside the area. And then they are starting to funnel down. And I think this is a new thing that we're starting to see. It's kind of like the United Way methodology in so many aspects that we have here in this country, but I'm starting to see it with other, institutionalized size organizations. If you will, they're larger. You've touched on something there. They seem to be facilitating real grassroots nonprofits. Yes, exactly. I think that's the change that I'm seeing. Yes. Whereas in the past it was, mind my language here, but gray men in suits, I'll leave it at that. But you know what I mean? I'm seeing a much more diverse leadership group in the nonprofits that we deal with than we used to. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm seeing two people that are saying, we love culture. And so we're gonna gather a group of people and we're gonna support culture, as opposed to just saying, oh, we only support our opera company or our ballet company or whatever. But like again, amalgamating money and resources and then turning themselves into granting agencies. It's a fascinating thing. And I don't see it going away. I mean, I think that the pandemic has accelerated things, but yeah, it's really an interesting time. And the key then is there's more money being funneled in through nonprofits for grants. How do you give that money away effectively and efficiently? It can be very costly to give money away, you know? And I've come across, I won't name names obviously, but I've come across government agencies somewhere in the world that have spent more on administering grants than they have in actually getting the money to where it should be. Right, and that's brutal. Well, hey, Neil O'Driscoll, coming to us from Ireland today, we're just, I could talk to you all day long because this is fascinating. And I feel like you are on the cusp of seeing this major snowball that's gonna be coming across our sector. And so it's really cool to see and hear from you about what is going on and what we can be thinking about. Certainly best practices, but really understanding how this landscape of funding is changing. And so here is Neil's information, submit.com. Check them out, their website is incredibly robust and it has all of these different sectors that they serve throughout the world. If you joined us in the Green Room Chatter, submit.com is doing a lot of work in Africa. And again, I'm a big believer of learning what other organizations and cultures are doing. And so it's like a world tour by going to their website just to see what's going on. It's been an amazing conversation, Neil. I'm so delighted that you would join us. Thanks for having me, Julie. I really enjoyed it too. It's been a lot of fun. Hey, I'm Julia Patrick, Jared Ransom, my co-host. We'll be back with us shortly. Again, we wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in and day out. So we're gonna have a conversation like we've had with Neil O'Driscoll here today from submit.com. Boomerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit nerd, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, and non-profit thought leader. As we like to end every episode, we want to remind ourselves and we want to remind you stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here.