Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth

Our entire grant system is online now, from application to award and continuing through management of the grant award. Our files are all “virtual” and can be accessed from anywhere. One drawer in the file cabinet maintains the original signed contract. Proposals are now submitted

on-time and complete. The turnaround time to get the proposals to reviewers was only 3 hours, which is much better than the previous 2-3 days it would take before we made the change.

Pain Points 

Previously, our biggest challenges were finding a system that met our needs since we award a small number of grants annually. Also, price was a large factor and often put online systems out of our reach. Our two most painful activities were:

1) Receiving, logging, and organizing grant proposals.

2) Coordinating mailings of paper proposals to reviewers around the state and collecting their responses.

Solution

The reduced turnaround time to get proposals to reviewers is great. The process took much less time than anticipated. Also, the ability to print-out summaries of reviewers’ comments for the review teams was helpful and appreciated by the reviewers. We have found additional uses for the system as well. We conduct conferences and now have presenters submit abstracts online through GLM. Conference planners can review the abstracts, rank them, and make decisions all online. In conjunction with our conferences, we offer scholarships for registrations and have developed applications for them through GLM. It centralized the applications and provides for an efficient review by the committee.