Skill 4 of 6: Managing
Post-award “management” is one of six primary skills you need to have if you want to be certified as a grant professional: seeking, project designing, writing, managing, ethics and professionalism, and relationship-building.
This article will focus on 3 reasons why management on-the-job experience is critical to grant writers and 4 top job skills you need “after” you receive your funding award.
3 Reasons Why Management Job Experience Is Critical to Grant Writers
Why is grant management experience important to grant writers?
Here are three primary reasons:
- Reason 1 – Save Money With More Accurate Budgets – By tracking and reporting on how money is actually spent, a grant professional is positioned to do a better job in budget estimating for future grants. For example, knowing 3 things – 1) actual fringe benefit costs, 2) matching funds, and 3) indirect cost formulas … allows grant writers to more accurately estimate budgets for 1) personnel-related costs, 2) in-kind contributions, and 3) how to reimburse the agency for costs that are not readily identifiable but nevertheless necessary for the overall operations, such as maintaining buildings, grounds and equipment, and administrative staff costs.
- Reason 2 – Avoid Harm - If grant writers are unaware of the requirements involved in implementing and managing a grant, they may unwillingly be setting up recipient agencies to fail, negatively affect future grants, and even cause an agency to pay back the money. I saw this happened to a large institution in my state; it was not a pretty site for the agency to have to return $100,000. Because the money had already been spent, the organization had to come up with the funds from another source. Two ways to harm an agency are to give unrealistic numbers of clients to be reached and underestimate costs and risks to the agency to implement the grant.
- Reason 3 – Improve Your Project Design – By being involved in implementing your action plan (conducting your list of activities), sustainability plan, and evaluation plan, you can modify your project design as you go. For example, I managed all 48 post-grant awards and every penny of $6.3 million. Why? I wanted to monitor the day-to-day activities and operations. By evaluating performance as we progressed, we positioned ourselves to make critical adjustments in real time – like more or fewer classes at a particular time and location – as we progressed.
4 Skills for Grant Management
According to the Grant Professionals Certification Institute, the 4 top grant management skills are:
- Understanding the key elements of regulatory compliance;
- Know best practices and key functions of grant management, such as delegation, evaluation and reporting;
- Manage various project and management staff and a grant management team that also includes coordinating and timely communication with key stakeholders and other grant project affiliates; and
- Establishing transitions to “post-award implementation that fulfill project applications (e.g., document transfer, accuracy in post-award fiscal and activity reporting).”
