Government Grants Management

2023 AppMarket Solution Awards Winner - Execution Excellence These awards recognize the best of the best partner solutions on the Appian AppMarket

Overview

Grants are a vital investment for the federal government to fund programs and initiatives that benefit society. Grants are also the number one method for government spending overall, making the total addressable market for grants solutions immense. In Fiscal Year 2022, federal awarding agencies awarded $1.13 trillion in grants and cooperative agreements across 51 awarding agencies, distributed over 1,000 programs, to over 1 million applicants and recipients, with the demand for funding increasing annually by 3%.

Agencies have historically relied on custom solutions to meet this demand, resulting in an expansive and aging ecosystem. While there are some tools on the market, many have limited interoperability with manual and sub-optimal processes, leading to a fragmented user experience and increased administrative burden for applicants, recipients, and agencies. Additionally, most systems do not span the entire grants lifecycle, comply with security/FedRAMP requirements, or adapt to evolving needs of the grants landscape.

This solution has a proven track record of success with existing past performance, license sales, and production deployments to the state of West Virginia, as well as a growing pipeline with more than 10 active opportunities worth over $2M in ACV as of this submission.

Key Features & Functionality

This solution delivers the breadth and depth of functionality to meet the most stringent agency requirements, government standards and regulations. Key Features include:

• End-to-end Grants Management to improve visibility and automation of Grants Process spanning Pre and Post Award.
• Automatic Budget Creation for Grantees by leveraging Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) to extract key details from scanned or uploaded award letters and user-configurable templates to save grant administrators’ valuable time.
• User configurable business rules to automatically score applications, route approvals, and approve expenses.
• Rich and Engaging UI/UX leveraging the full power of Appian Total Experience. This solution provides an intuitive guided experience and minimizes training requirements. It is mobile ready for grant applicants, recipients, and reviewers that may be on-the-go or in the field, and offers an Appian Portal that can support thousands of online users to enable large scale open application periods or support direct engagement with the constituents served by a grant (for instance rural residents seeking broadband access).
• This solution is easily tailorable, extendable, and future proof because we focused our design on OOTB reusable objects of the new Appian Design Library.
• Applies the Power of Appian Data Fabric to enable seamless Integration with Financial Systems, Grants.gov and SAM.gov to Find new opportunities, automatically log new transactions, allocate budgets, and reconcile spending.
• Robust Reporting & Monitoring provide comprehensive records and audit trails of Grants ensure accountability of actions and enable better communication between parties.
• Flexible, standards-based Model to Support to Multiple Grant Domains and provide value across industries including: Education, Broadband, Transportation, Healthcare, Human Services, and more.

Benefits & Business Impact

This solution can be applied across a wide range of industries and business domains for both agencies issuing grants and organizations in public or private sector that are funded by grants to improve utilization and compliance, as well as reduce the administrative burden so more funding dollars go to supporting the mission and objectives. Additional benefits include:

• Increased utilization of awarded funds - Our solution enables users to generate reports on project status, budget, and performance.
• Improved Grants Coordination - Users can view real-time status on program and project progress through the use of our Project Lifecycle Trackers. Our solution provides grant applicants a ‘pizza tracker’ experience so that applicants are always a click away from seeing the status of their project.
• Improved transparency and compliance around grant audits – Auditors can access a business-friendly view of the audit data, ensuring it is easy to understand and analyze, with clear and concise descriptions of the actions that were taken, providing transparency and accountability.
• Reduce Technology Silos – Extensive integration capabilities enable our solution to integrate with existing agency systems and applications, enabling the consolidation of disparate systems, reducing reliance on fragment software, and enables the use of collaborative data.
• Streamline Data & Processes – Standardized workflows comply with Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) Data Standards and offer the flexibility to meet agency-specific needs and streamline business processes for greater efficiency and reduced manual inputs. Centralized data management ensures standardized data formats to reduce errors.
• Leverage Automation– Automation features allow users to configure workflows for specific user groups and automatically send alerts and notifications to ensure all stakeholders remain informed of upcoming tasks and milestones throughout the grants management lifecycle.