As a grantmaker in a digital world, gathering information appears to be the straightforward half. You’ve got information in your grantees flowing into your grant administration system (GMS) via purposes and their updates. Newsletters with business tendencies hit your inbox virtually day by day. Your personal historic information on grants awarded accumulates with each grant cycle.
The troublesome half is placing all the info factors collectively in a manner that you could make choices based mostly on that info. Your grants administration system has quite a lot of methods to visualise the data, however what’s the finest format for the perception you might be in search of?
Charts and lists are two of the commonest codecs for grant reporting, however they’ve totally different advantages if you end up attempting to make sense of your grantmaking information.
Utilizing Lists in Your Grant Reporting
From month-to-month budgets to a roster of occasion attendees, it’s great to have the ability to see your information organized clearly in neat rows. The essential, list-format report has a variety of advantages if you end up attempting to get a deal with in your information, particularly whenever you need to see granular information about particular person gadgets.
When you’re wanting on the grants your group made in a given 12 months or what software opinions pending, you’ll be able to simply kind your checklist to get your reply. Lists allow you to see a variety of granular information without delay so you could find a selected piece of data shortly.
Whereas lists are nice for serving to you establish a selected piece of data, comparable to a complete of grant {dollars} awarded 12 months to this point, it may be troublesome to visualise your info or clearly see a comparability of a number of information units.
Utilizing Charts in Your Grant Reporting
When you’ve two or extra metrics, comparable to grants given to totally different influence areas over time, you’ll be able to pull that info right into a bar chart and see instantly that your group, for instance, gave extra to meals insecurity applications than early childhood literacy applications over the previous two years. Charts make it straightforward to make sense of a variety of information by creating context.
With charts, comparable to pie and line graphs, you’ll be able to shortly make sense of a giant information set. Taking a look at numbers over time makes it straightforward to establish historic tendencies, comparable to will increase in purposes from new nonprofits. Charts will help you make choices quicker, with out establishing a string of sophisticated formulation.
Charts are wonderful for understanding giant information units however usually mixture the data. That makes it troublesome to seek out detailed info, comparable to whenever you final awarded a grant to a selected group. Charts additionally usually are not good for serving to you create particular duties, comparable to which candidates want follow-up correspondence. That’s the place an inventory format could be extra worthwhile.
Try our full infographic on Speaking Grantmaking Information
Studies Ought to Save You Time, Not Waste It
With the fitting grant reporting instruments and information visualization choices, you may get the data you want shortly so your time will be higher spent on the duties that drive influence to your group.
- The Formatting Time Warp: While you begin adjusting the colour schemes and font choices to your report and immediately an hour disappears
- The Outdated Report Treasure Hunt: While you had been positive you saved that one report from final 12 months, however you don’t bear in mind what you referred to as it
- The “What’s This Report Telling Me?” Guessing Sport: When unclear labels or incorrect chart sorts go away you in search of that means in a jumble of numbers
Making Grant Reporting Easy with Your Grants Administration Software program
Whether or not you might be utilizing lists or charts, you need your information to be out there anytime and anyplace so you may make choices shortly. With purpose-built dashboards in your grants administration system, you’ll be able to arrange studies that present you at a look the place approvals stand and what tendencies you need to be watching.
Be taught extra about how dashboards can prevent time with our whitepaper, 3 Methods Dashboards Assist Grantmakers Make Sense of Their Information.
