WHCCD Acquires More Grants with Cayuse

Challenge

The West Hills Community College District (WHCCD) serves an essential role for learners across California’s San Joaquin Valley, providing educational services for an average of 10,000 students a year across two brick-and-mortar campuses (Coalinga College and Lemoore College) and online programs. With attendees ranging from dual-enrolled high school students to adults without college degrees, WHCCD seeks to improve their employment prospects and career trajectories through training and continued education.

As a district serving relatively rural communities, faculty at WHCCD work hard to attract and engage students who otherwise may not consider seeking higher education. These efforts are currently supported by 77 grants worth roughly $16 million, including workforce development grants and CCAP (College and Career Access Pathways) agreements for dual enrollment.

Brian Boomer serves as the Director of Grants for WHCCD. While faculty in the district do not conduct research grants like they would at an R1 or R2 university, they do support Brian’s team with handling the dozens of grants that fund student enrollment and enable many of WHCCD’s services.

The WHCCD Grants Division serves three main functions: handling pre-award processes like writing grants and developing budgets, managing post-award duties including compliance and risk management, and operating grants through case management.

The grants team, currently comprised of Brian and just one other full-time employee, formerly relied on a mix of paper forms, PDFs, and spreadsheets to manage the full grant lifecycle. However, this created several problems related to transparency, workflows, and documentation.

Without an established submission process, grants often arrived at the board without the correct paperwork or approvals, and missing crucial information. This would further delay their approval with time-consuming re-routings and addenda. Sometimes, these delays meant missing a grant’s window of opportunity entirely. At other times, faculty and staff would not pursue certain grants, knowing that approval would likely take longer than the grants’ deadlines.

In addition, the lack of a centralized repository system for grants meant that records were difficult to maintain. This further lengthened the approval process and created confusion when stakeholders could not easily recall the details of previous grants.

“There’s a lot of need in our communities, which is why we develop a lot of grants to support them.”
Director of Grants

Solution

When WHCCD’s board passed a new resolution introducing more stringent grant approval processes, administrators saw an opportunity to overhaul the district’s existing grant management workflows and storage practices. They had three primary needs: a standardized grant management process, more transparency and accountability for faster submissions and approvals, and a centralized storage system for active and completed grant information.

“The question was, can we find a uniform place where everybody can agree that this is what we’re going to do; this is what it’s going to look like,” Brian recalls, “then people can reference this single-stop system, even if they’re new to the district.”

After considering different options, the district chose Cayuse Sponsored Projects to serve as its new centralized grants management system, impressed by the transparency, configurability, and ease-of-use it offered. “It’s not hard to use, it almost feels tangible,” Brian notes, “you can learn how to use it as you’re using it.”

Brian engaged teams across WHCCD’s campuses to determine what they needed out of the new system, including how it could help simplify processes and make their jobs easier. He then worked with a Cayuse Customer Success Manager to configure Sponsored Projects, with features like boolean logic workflows to determine the type of proposal being submitted and the specific requirements for that grant.

“[Cayuse] brings transparency, and it brings a level of accountability to who signed what and when. It’s a singular place where we can store documentation, so that 20 years from now we can go back in there and see what we actually did on a project.”
Director of Grants

Results

Following the launch of Sponsored Projects at WHCCD, Brian’s team and the faculty members involved in grant submissions and oversight have been very happy with their new management system. “We were able to build a system for the problems everybody routinely encountered,” Brian summarizes, indicating that they were pleased with the software’s level of configurability, which both met the requirements of existing processes and helped improve processes that hadn’t worked as smoothly in the past.

Where there was previously no standardized communication chain for submissions, WHCCD has now established simplified submission and approval workflows that ensure each proposal contains all necessary information—no more, no less—and receives timely attention from any stakeholders involved. Proposal forms that previously took days, weeks, and even months to complete can be finished within five minutes and sent for approval.

Additionally, grant revisions that would also take months to address are now flagged for correction immediately and can even be fixed remotely. This means faster turnaround times, more grants secured, and more funding for more students.

Sponsored Projects has also made it easier for faculty to assess from the start whether they qualify for an opportunity and whether it is worth submitting a proposal. This helps to avoid grants that are not appropriate for their district and gives more time back for faculty to work on proposals that are more likely to succeed.

Cayuse has been a tremendous help with CCAPs, or California dual enrollment agreements, one of the school’s larger sources of funding and students. Previously, the district often couldn’t get CCAP agreements vetted and approved in time because the handoffs to stakeholders were too slow and could too easily be ignored. Now, the workflow has been simplified and standardized to the point that when the board receives a CCAP proposal for review, they know it has already been vetted through Cayuse and is safe to approve.

Centralization and transparency, two other primary aims in the move to Cayuse, have also seen significant improvements since the launch of Sponsored Projects. Integration with Ellucian Colleague means that the faculty and staff information stored in Cayuse is updated daily, saving time on data entry and ensuring that personnel records are always accurate.

During implementation, the team was also able to load legacy proposal data going back to 1999 into Cayuse. Now, these records are easily searchable and reliably stored for access and reference at any time. Teams no longer need to spend hours digging through paper records or scattered files to see how a previous proposal was handled, and can instead find this information directly through Sponsored Projects.

Overall, WHCCD has greatly benefited from implementing Cayuse. “This isn’t just grant management software,” Brian points out, “It’s truly enterprise software.” On a final note, he mentions a former colleague who helped implement Cayuse but has since moved to another community college district. While the district is larger than WHCCD, the administrator is, in Brian’s words, “bemoaning the fact that they don’t have something like Cayuse.”

“Sponsored Projects addressed all of the challenges we had because it became a singular point of truth for grants… it made sure that everyone had everything in order.”
Director of Grants