While the specifics of each challenge vary greatly between organizations, over the better part of a decade of working with grant recipients and funders, we’ve identified a handful of core issues at the root of countless other problems. These core problems include:

• Decentralized organizational structures
• A lack of standardized grant policies and procedures, and difficulty enforcing those that are in place
• The ongoing burden of a constantly evolving grants environment with increasingly complex application, compliance and reporting requirements
• Difficulty building and maintaining institutional knowledge, due to part-time or split-time staff filling grant management roles, and also due to Loss through high turnover, retirement or promotion of knowledgeable staff

Any of these issues alone presents a significant hurdle, but the combination of them creates a perfect storm that can be extremely difficult to navigate.

At AFI, we pride ourselves on building simple solutions to complex problems. With more and more municipalities and their community partners struggling to serve their communities, we felt it was time for a simple, affordable solution to help streamline grant management efforts and help these organizations gain greater capacity to pursue and manage more funding.

With this goal in mind, we designed GrantNavigator, not simply focusing on the myriad of symptoms, but targeting the core problems directly. Now, GrantNavigator offers any grant organization:

• Centralization through software - all of the benefits of a centralized operational structure without any of the bureaucratic nightmares or extensive resource demands.
• Configurable business process management tools to drive standardization, allowing each client to map the system to their unique process flows, terminology and documentation requirements
• A central platform to build a powerful and consistent knowledge base, minimizing the impact of inexperience, turnover and change.

In short, GrantNavigator is a web-based, grant-focused, project management system structured to support the entire grant life cycle, with configuration options to map the system to your unique policies, procedures, process flows and documentation needs.