No. of Grant Schemes
No. of Applications Per Year
No. of People in Grants Team
Case Study
Royal Academy Of Engineering
The Academy runs a programme of grants and prizes to support and celebrate the pursuit of engineering activities and to enable closer contact between academia and industry.
The Royal Academy of Engineering provides leadership and promotes excellence across all fields of engineering, to the benefit of society. The Academy’s activities are shaped, led and delivered by its exceptional Fellowship, which represents the nation’s best practising engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs, often in leading roles across business and academia.
The Academy runs a programme of grants and prizes to support and celebrate the pursuit of engineering activities and to enable closer contact between academia and industry. These schemes support engineering professionals, academics and students in numerous ways including study bursaries, business start-up funding, research projects, knowledge transfer partnerships, public engagement and prizes recognising significant feats of engineering.
The Challenge
Flexi-Grant® was selected as the Academy’s new grant
management system with the goal of ensuring that, as much as
possible, a standardised workflow process was implemented across
all schemes. Considering the varied nature and number of Academy schemes this was not an insignificant task. In addition, Flexi-Grant® was to be integrated with the Academy’s new website and CRM system (MS Dynamics™) to allow for a single sign-in and sharing of user information across all three systems.
The Implementation
A series of structured workshops were held with all key staff involved in the management of the Academy’s grants and prizes leading to the definition of a single, standard process for the management of an application through to award, payment and eventually to post project monitoring. This standardised process was adopted for all grant and prize schemes. Template grant management application forms and schemes were set up in Flexi-Grant®, enabling these to be used as the basis for all schemes and ensuring greater consistency in how questions are managed and asked across all application and reporting forms.
The Solution
As the Academy makes extensive use of its Fellows as external reviewers on applications, it was essential to configure Flexi-Grant® to ensure that the Academy could assign Fellows, whose details are held in the CRM system, to applications. Following the integration of Flexi-Grant® with the Academy’s website and CRM system, external reviewers can log in and score (grant/prize) applications independently with these scores then being available for the subsequent panel meeting. Feedback was received from the reviewers and their ‘user journey’ was improved based on this. Reviewing and refining any new approach is essential to the successful introduction of any new working practices.
Flexi-Grant® is now being used to manage over 30+ grant and prize schemes and 1,500+ applications per year in a more consistent way.
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