As with most areas of CiviCRM, your grant management tools will be available through the main menu and a corresponding tab will be displayed on contact records. By default, the Grants menu is a submenu under Other. If you expect to be a heavy user of the grant tools, you may want to move it to the main menu. Visit Administer | Customize | Navigation Menu to edit the main horizontal menu.
Let's begin by visiting a contact and creating a new grant record.
As you can see, the grant record follows the flowchart workflow pretty closely. You select the desired status, type, and complete the other fields as appropriate.
Grant records are a little different from other areas of CiviCRM in that you are likely to return to edit the record multiple times over the course of the grant process. As the grant moves through the application, approval, fund dissemination, and reporting stages, you will return and edit the record to update the dates and record notes or add attachments pertaining to the grant.
As with other related record areas, contacts may have more than one grant record associated with them.
Note
FPAGM received a significant donation from a local philanthropist to help food pantries develop new healthy eating programs. The programs will educate clients regarding healthy eating and provide guidance on simple recipes using ingredients rather than processed, prepared foods.
The donation will support five programs at food pantries in the area. FPAGM decides to use CiviCRM to track the grant application and management process. They begin by sending out an e-mail to Regular members through CiviCRM with application guidelines. As the applications are received, a new grant record is created.
The application requires food pantries to report details regarding their geographic demographics, and to describe how many people they plan to reach through this program. All of this data is tracked using custom fields, and the hard copy application is scanned and attached to the grant record. In this way, FPAGM ensures that all the details of the process are stored in a centralized location.
The following screenshot shows the grant records as viewed through the contact's Grants tab:
