Case Study: Developing Grant Management Platform User Documentation
While ostensibly, KFA Nonprofit writes grants and only writes grants, from time-to- time, we have applied our knowledge and expertise to assist funders in improving their grant-making processes. During the COVID pandemic, we took on such a project.
Managing COVID relief funding threatened to overwhelm local, state and federal agencies. We responded to a request for consultants to assist a state department of education in developing user documentation for its grant management software platform which sadly lacked any comprehensive documentation designed for end- users. We were uniquely qualified for this particular project. As end-users of the platform since its implementation, we knew as much about how to navigate it (and its shortcomings) as anyone. And over the past decade or so, we have trained many of our clients to use the system and had developed a lot of our own documentation already to support training our clients.
The Platform
The grant management software solution was specifically designed to support state education agencies not only in collecting applications for competitive, discretionary funding, but also in managing formula funds, reimbursement processing, and reporting and compliance monitoring. While the software product provides the advantage of handling the entirety of the funding process from application and allocation through disbursement and reporting, some serious drawbacks included the total lack of developer-provided user documentation and extreme limitations on customization. It was designed to be a one-size-fits-all solution for massive agencies which did All The Things, and none of them well.
The Goal
According to the scope of work, the state education department sought to ensure seamless functionality and user experience of the system amidst increased usage and facilitate clear and effective communication between the department and its various stakeholders. The reality of the situation was that the state employed exactly two personnel to administer the entire system and one was about to be on an extended medical leave. These personnel were responsible for everything from building out applications, reports, and monitoring instruments and user testing their products to individual account administration (issuing usernames and passwords for all users, statewide) and providing direct help desk support. Without any documentation to support users, it was an impossible task.
From our perspective, we hoped to produce high-quality documentation to support users in navigating the system and inform meaningful improvements to the user experience along the way. We were thrilled to get the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the platform functioned to improve our understanding of it and how the backend functionality affected the user interface.
The Outcome
Overall, the engagement was a success. In twelve months, we developed the state’s first comprehensive user manual for a massive platform and are very proud of the work. Initially, our scope of work involved creating separate sets of instructions for a huge range of programs and processes. We were successful in convincing the client to allow us to instead create an indexed comprehensive guide that provided users with a one-stop resource that covered all of the topics in one place so users didn’t have to sort through dozens of program specific resources or wade through tedious step-by-step instructions that could become redundant across similar processes.
We were very disappointed to learn early on that the lack of customization available limited our ability to make any recommendations for improvements to the user interface. But, despite this constraint, we were able to gain a better understanding of how the backend of the system affected usability and weave a lot of helpful tips and tricks into the documentation to both reduce user frustration and the overwhelming support workload.
While writing winning grants is our specialty, we always welcome the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the processes that support grant-making. We have engaged in a wide range of these activities over the years. In addition to writing user documentation, we have written requests for proposals, designed applications and scoring rubrics, served as peer reviewers, and facilitated grant slate development and award processes by moderating peer review panels. We consider these types of activities to be the highest-quality, hands-on professional development activities we can engage in.