What are the challenges in grant management?

Grant management is evolving in an increasingly complex global environment with growing pressure for transparency and verifiable accountability from a range of stakeholders. There is a big challenge to establish common processes and best practices in evaluating and tracking the effectiveness of a grant scheme. This is due to the unique requirements, objectives and regulations of every organisation and leads to customised processes.

The AIMS Team is comprised of grant management specialists and IT experts who specialise in grant and programme management, serving government, social and development sectors for the last two decades. Our experienced team foresees upcoming grant management challenges as follows:

Rolling challenges in Grant Management:

• to reduce the cost and effort of applying
• to improve the success rates for applicants
• to reduce the cost and effort of assessing applications
• to make transparent decisions, efficiently and effectively
• to monitor the outcome of grant investment, to inform future decisions
• to share the knowledge gained from research more widely, for better funding outcomes

Upcoming challenges in the immediate future in Grant Management:

• Data protection legislation (including GDPR) and what this means for grantmaking/fundraising organisation in particular
• Challenges to sharing data and funding research projects outside the UK
• Barriers to effective Shared services and open data
  • Government grantmaking in silos
  • Resistance to open data sharing, loss of ownership and uniqueness
  • Technical and economic challenges of working towards common platforms

Longer term Grant Management challenges:

• Adaptations to support more evidence based grantmaking
• Greater automation of process with intelligent algorithms
• Consolidation of international initiatives for transparency and open data