Grants managers are adept drawback solvers. We conduct equivalency determinations and arrange expenditure duty reporting. We overview wire switch kinds for the worldwide distribution of monetary sources. We’re customer support specialists working in a number of languages, normally with the assistance of Google Translate.
Upgrading and updating know-how techniques to maintain up with the digital world are obligatory evils. These migrations gradual us down significantly and distract us from the high-risk compliance and risk-mitigation work main to our grants supervisor job descriptions. Writing RFPs and managing know-how migrations detract from grants managers’ means to course of grants.
I feel this drawback, RFPs vs. Impression, is solvable, however we have to discover new approaches to partnering with technologists who’re answerable for contributing to the event, utility, and development of social sector applied sciences.
What Is a System Migration?
A system or know-how migration is the method of upgrading and updating know-how techniques to enhance effectivity and effectiveness. It could contain shifting information or software program from one system to a different, or from one working atmosphere to a different.
A know-how migration challenge usually includes a number of key steps, together with defining a challenge scope, assessing the present tech stack and gathering necessities from throughout the group, evaluating know-how distributors and implementation companions, and finally planning, constructing, configuring, testing and coaching employees on the brand new system.
The particular steps and their order might range relying on the challenge’s measurement and complexity. Moreover, efficient communication, danger administration, and stakeholder involvement are essential all through your entire migration course of. It’s foolhardy to anticipate one individual or one division to supervise a challenge of this scale, and but that is the development I’ve witnessed in our sector.
Defining Scope and Required Performance
The method of defining the challenge scope and gathering system necessities are sometimes conflated. The scope is roughly outlined by the directive to “discover an ample GMS improve that can end in parody, plus…” after which the necessities gathering work begins.
The grants supervisor asks supervisors, heads of departments, and senior employees what performance they could want from a GMS improve. Within the olden days, one of many first selections we would have liked to make was cloud or server-based platforms. Now grants managers are anticipated to digest the trivialities of API integrations, foreign money alternate protocols, and language translation instruments—for a complete group and for his or her main grants database.
Philanthropy’s main administrative operate is grantmaking. You would possibly assume the migration to a brand new grants database could be a main focus for almost all of the group whereas the work is underway. This isn’t the case. Grants managers outline a challenge scope (migrate instruments, protect information, tweak workflows), accumulate system necessities throughout the group, after which they start vetting know-how and implementation companions to information the technical facets of the GMS migration journey forward, which normally spans six to 18 months. As soon as necessities are collected, grants managers have historically been instructed to solicit Requests for Proposals (RFPs) from distributors.
And we have now arrived at a chasm of disconnect.
The RFP Disconnect
An RFP ought to be a solution to clearly talk to potential distributors what you want on your subsequent tech challenge. What are your challenge specs? What is crucial and what are nice-to-haves? What are your expectations total? Sitting down to jot down an RFP is overwhelming. How do you convey what you want with out writing a novel? How do you talk what you want so potential distributors will perceive, particularly when you’re not a technical individual?
Grants managers and philanthropy employees don’t typically communicate the identical language as know-how distributors. The RFP is an try and bridge that chasm and elevate transparency. Nevertheless, this strategy is transactional and limiting within the over-emphasis on necessities and under-appreciation for the relationship-building, values alignment, and shared objectives that accompany profitable know-how initiatives. How can we evolve as a sector, after we apply outdated data sharing practices, particularly round sophisticated subjects like know-how and information migrations?
Our sector is a close-knit neighborhood constructed on relationships that drive affect and never merely transactional useful resource exchanges. Within the social sector, our values and organizational cultures matter. Technologists agree, the deliverables are simple, the technical necessities are achievable, and navigating the ability and privilege inherent in philanthropy is the place issues get difficult. RFPs exacerbate energy imbalances by prioritizing transactional data exchanges over deeper, and extra impactful relationship-building practices.
RFPs are insufficient options to foster transparency and construct a extra inclusive sector. Ours is a sector constructed on values of belief, accessibility, and generosity. Individuals remodel concepts into actuality. A set of shared values is a greater place to begin when aspiring to construct new know-how techniques to help communities, stakeholders, and companions than an extended checklist of technical necessities.
Reinventing Relationships between Grants Managers and Technologists
I like to recommend, within the curiosity of holding our concentrate on producing affect, that we spend much less time writing RFPs and extra time nurturing relationships with social sector know-how builders and implementers. We have to share our imaginative and prescient for a way know-how helps relationship constructing, cultivates deeper partnership with our grantees, and scales affect.
We have to clearly articulate our north star, why we’re going there, and what help we have to make it occur. For instance, as a substitute of detailing the kind of foreign money conversion performance we want as a part of the RFP, we articulate our imaginative and prescient to ship cash to XYZ nations effectively and securely and facilitate multi-currency reporting for varied inside and exterior audiences. By this strategy, we clarify to the seller our anticipated end result—smoother wire switch workflows from the GMS—and the way the performance is anticipated to drive affect—clearer reporting for stakeholders. We’d like to have the ability to articulate WHY in order that our know-how vendor companions may also help us decide HOW.
Growing Relationship-Primarily based Practices
Answering why is tougher than you may think. The reply is usually, “As a result of we’ve at all times finished it this fashion.” In case you have had roaring success along with your tech implementations, please do hold writing detailed technical necessities into your RFP.
Or you could possibly attempt a special strategy and double down on relationships as a substitute of transaction, the place your know-how companions perceive the place your group goes and the right way to most successfully and effectively convey you know-how that will help you get there. Grants managers are adept drawback solvers. Let’s take again the time we spend writing RFPs and generate affect by investing in relationships with companions and stakeholders.
The social sector is greater than transactional exchanges and technologists selected this house as a result of in addition they need to generate affect. Let’s discover new practices that help transparency and effectivity. The aged resolution of spending days writing an RFP is lifeless.
To discover these concepts additional, take a look at our webinar, Down with RFPs: Bridging a Chasm, the place you’ll find out about sensible methods to reinvent know-how vendor choice in service of relationship constructing and affect technology.
