DevSummit07:Towards an Open Source Grants Management Platform

Facilitated by Jason Ricci, SolPath

Funders have software needs just as much as the nonprofit organizations they support. Open Source Grants Management tools are not plentiful, and SolPath's efforts to create such a tool are the starting point for this discussion. Jason will map out the offerings, discuss the challenges of generalizing the grants management process, and demo the Solpath platform.

Included in the dialog will be the following set of questions:

Grants Management Questions For Nonprofit organizations

• How do you research and discover who to send your proposal to?
• How do you organize your research and writing?
• How do you collaborate with others within your organization to write your proposals and reports?
• Once your grant is funded, how do you communicate with your funders (submitting reports, etc)?
• What frustrates you most about the process?

Grants Management Questions For Foundations

• Do you accept online Letters of Interest and Proposals?
• How do you manage and track incoming proposals?
• Do you use any tools for internal collaboration and communications?
• How do you manage communications with grantees and (potential grantees)?
• How do you generate board books and dockets?

The resulting dialog will focus on feature prioritization mixed with anecdotal sharing of grants management processes and pratfalls.

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SolPath website: http://www.solpath.org/

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Some complementary software being used by Meyer Memorial Trust for organizational knowledge management is Wagn. See http://ourpla.net/Wagn%20one%20pager.pdf and http://wagn.org/ --John Abbe 02:09, 21 February 2007 (CST)