In this blog series, we look at the role of grants professionals in life science companies, the challenges they face working with internal stakeholders, and how technology and data-driven insights can help.
So you’ve set up a grants program and are receiving applications and taking action on them. You are communicating with grant requestors and recipients. Grant managers are categorizing requests. Reviewers are entering decisions in the online workflow. Payments and product donations are going out and reconciliations, milestone updates, and outcomes measurement reports are coming in.
What do you do with all the data generated by these activities? Or rather, what can you do?
- You can analyze the data in a multitude of ways if you’ve captured what you need in the system.
- Dashboards can be updated in real time; reports are static and reflect a given state at a particular point in time. Both are useful depending how the information will be used.
- You can export it to merge with data stored in other systems for customized views.
Okay, all that sounds great. Where do you start?
Potential report types
Historical reviews
Giving history with an organization
Program types supported over a specific period of time
Regional grant activity compared to disease prevalence and incidence
Audience and attendee types
Simple reports
Total amount spent to date
Total number of organizations supported, sorted by type, location, or activity
Total number of products donated
Advanced comparison reports
Average grant amounts given for specific program types or for a therapeutic area (time-based or not)
Total grant dollars by therapeutic area out of total budget
Total grant amount given to one organization as a percentage of the whole budget
Total potential numbers of HCPs reached by program type
Compliance reports
Transparency disclosures
Missing reconciliations, late LOAs, late or missing milestone reports
Step 1: Determine the end point(s).
- What would you like to know or demonstrate about the value of the grant program? What questions are people asking about your organization's grant activities? These probably range from relatively easy requests, e.g., how many programs have we approved and how much budget have we spent so far, to more complex activity analyses such as what program types have had the greatest impact on HCP education. External parties may be interested in reading about grant activities too, especially those focused on environmental impact or programs targeted to specific groups.
- Who are your stakeholders? What are their interests? What information would they be most interested in seeing? In blog post 1 and in our white paper, we reviewed each stakeholder group and their perspectives on the grants program.
Step 2: Identify the data you need to capture to get to the desired end point(s).
- You can start with the application form fields, but the data gathering process really begins when someone views your grants website and reads about the required information for submission. These instructions should be clear and concise to make sure you can collect what is needed for application review and grant program activity analysis.
- Consider the information you gather when a requestor creates an account in your system. Can you gather anything useful here?
- Grant requests usually require a budget submission. If you are using an online template, you can capture a lot of useful data in this form.
Step 3: Design a way to find and analyze the data you collect.
- Reports and dashboards are very nice, but if they don’t pull the right data or show the relevant view to the user, then all the effort and time you put into designing data capture processes are lost. Role-based views enable users to see what they will be most interested in when they want to see it.
- Consider data export requirements. If your grants system – which is really a workflow management tool – doesn’t have the capabilities of producing the reports you need, or the grants data needs to be combined with other data from different systems, how easy is it to export the data fields you need?
Summary
Using program data can help showcase the value and importance of the grant program through reports, dashboards, and other data analysis tools. It requires a balance of time and effort with the expected benefits. However, this is usually a one-time investment spent mostly on setting up the data capture processes (or optimizing existing ones) with minimal time required for maintenance and updates. Don’t overlook opportunities to capture new and different information or combine it in unique ways for customized perspectives based on stakeholder interests and expectations.
View all posts on this five-part Grants Program Management blog series or download them as an eBook here.
