How to Improve Pre-award Processes

The pre-award phase of any research project — typically covering the search for funding, proposal development, and working with internal teams on grant applications — is an important first step for transforming an idea into an active, funded project. It decides whether or not a project will ultimately go ahead, and requires careful planning and consideration to achieve success.

In this blog, we’ll look at some of the common challenges teams face in the pre-award stage, and how process improvements can help overcome obstacles while saving time for the administrators involved.

Pre-award challenges

The pre-award phase is full of challenges. Many organizations try to manually manage the entire grants lifecycle with paper-based reports, spreadsheets, and silos of information. While the organization may eventually complete all the required steps throughout the cycle, there is often wasted effort, administrative bottlenecks, and duplicate data entry.

During the pre-award phase, this approach can quickly break down. That’s because the pre-award phase involves many internal parties and departments that need to collaborate.

For example, a typical Office of Sponsored Research at a research university is usually tasked with pre-award activities that cover the “cradle-to-submission” process for proposals. Tasks include looking for funding opportunities, tracking the approval process for grant submissions, managing commonly requested information for grant applications, and managing forms and policies.

An Office of Sponsored Research may help develop the proposal and budget, provide background information and documentation for audit reports, help obtain or provide institutional approval signatures, and solve submission problems. When the office uses spreadsheets, paper, emails, Access reports, or other standalone systems, the complex pre-award phase can be extremely time-consuming and prone to error.

Improving pre-award administration with grants management software

Leading research institutions avoid the problems of manual administration by using grants management software to handle the pre-award phase. Administrative software is perhaps the single most useful tool for any pre-award office looking to improve its processes due to the wide range of benefits such a system can introduce on its own:

Centralizing proposal and award records

Collecting your proposal and award records on a single digital platform with integrated solutions like Proposals (S2S) and Sponsored Projects yields several immediate benefits. For one, a single system of records prevents data duplication and ensures all project information is accurate and visible to all stakeholders. Additionally, centralization enforces standardized data and creates a searchable history for all proposals and awards to make audits easier and more accurate. Similarly, the practice improves reporting capabilities with easier access to data, helping administrators and leadership better understand the status of an institution’s projects and more effectively plan for the future.

Automating workflows

By automating each step, documentation flows from one central source of truth, rather than a disparate collection of documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Approvals and proposal review can all happen electronically with minimal manual intervention and without time-consuming back-and-forth emails. Grants management systems can even automate the preparation of financial reports mandated by federal agencies, which are due at specific times during the lifecycle of a grant award.

Clarifying task ownership

Similar to automated workflows, grants administration software can expedite submissions, reviews, and approvals by giving all stakeholders a clear view into the status of a proposal or project. User-based dashboards provide an up-to-date view of these statuses and any outstanding tasks, while automated notifications remind stakeholders when their action is needed to keep a project moving. This can add up to enormous time savings, as delays between steps can quickly add up to weeks lost on a project.

Finding and maintaining funding

With new limitations on funding opportunities, many researchers resort to a “shotgun” approach when applying for grants, submitting several applications even if the grants aren’t the right fit for a project. This approach wastes time for both the applicants and reviewers. Funding search software like Fund Finder helps reduce the time spent searching for grants and ensures better matches with projects by combing through a larger database of opportunities from one location and automatically notifying users when relevant grants arise.

Grants management software like Fund Manager also makes it easy to ensure you’re maintaining an adequate funding pipeline. Monitoring future proposals requires tracking the number being submitted, who is submitting them, the amount of future funding, anticipated start dates, etc.

Increasing proposal success rates

Successfully submitting a proposal on the first attempt saves time by avoiding revisions and gets a project moving faster. Features like autofill and smart validations both speed up proposal creation by decreasing manual effort and ensure first-time success by flagging issues that may require revisions, like sensitive language or missing details. An automated system can also help measure success rates by investigator and by funding agency to identify who may need help with proposal development.

Managing resubmissions

It’s a best practice to centrally manage documentation and financial reports associated with resubmissions. This helps encourage the modification and resubmission of rejected proposals when appropriate, and, as mentioned earlier, creates an easy-to-follow history to better understand how a submission has changed, and why. In the event of an audit, this documentation will also save significant time and guarantee better accuracy to avoid noncompliance.

Automating current and pending support

Tracking current and pending support is necessary for the creation of Current and Pending Support or Other Support pages needed for the submissions to NSF, NIH, and other federal agencies. Automating their generation speeds up proposal development. Like in post-award administration, these areas involve different administrative functions and can be streamlined with grants management software solutions like Cayuse Sponsored Projects.

Grant lifecycle next steps

Manual processes and homegrown management systems may have worked in the past, but with pre-award offices everywhere, strained by resource limitations and a continuously increasing institutional demand for research, outdated and slow workflows can mean the difference between achieving success and falling behind. That’s why it’s more important than ever to consider modernizing your pre-award lifecycle with trusted software like Cayuse’s Award Management solutions.