CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm curious about whether and how groups are tracking grants made to their organizations in CiviCRM (not tracking grants made by your organization, which is covered by CiviGrant). I saw an earlier thread (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1694.msg7338.html#msg7338) with some good ideas, but I don't know if those ideas were implemented. I'm considering a few different options:

• tracking grants as contributions, with a new "Grant" contribution type - this is probably my top choice right now and would work well because of the built-in financial tracking capabilities of CiviContribute, but would also lump grants into tallies of general contributions, which is not really ideal
• creating a Custom Data Group tab for Grant information - could work well but would need quite a bit of wrangling to incorporate any financial tracking, ie automatic adding up of total grants received or all grants received from one group
• using a custom activity type to track grants, as suggested in the link below - the Activity structure doesn't really seem like a good fit for tracking grants, though

Is anyone using any of these options, or something else? I'd love to hear!

Hey Jack.  Not only do we suggest what you describe to our clients but we also use it internally (since we are also a nonprofit that receives grants).

Basically, what we did is:

• We created a contribution type called Foundation Grant. I would disagree that it's a bad thing that it lumps this together with other contribution types. A grant is just as important to track as a regular donation or event fee and has all the same attributes you need to track (received date, thank you sent, notes, etc.).  You can always search by a specific type if you don't want grant money to appear.
• Created activity types of LOI & proposal (along with custom fields like ask amount, status, etc.) to track when they were sent out.  I think using activity types has worked well for us since we can schedule activities and the list of scheduled activities serves as a fundraising plan.
• Created a custom data group called "funder info" like you describe where we track things like referral source, giving range, upload docs, notes, etc.
• Use tags and groups to categorize foundations based on giving types, program areas, geographic focus, etc.
• Use relationships to track primary contacts (program officers, ED, etc.)
• Mark foundations as "do not email" so they don't accidentally get our general mailings.

So this is all pretty much core CiviCRM & CiviContribute and it works great. Our development director uses this system every day.

hope this helps
tony