The SmartSimple Blog

The research you fund is only as good as the outcomes it generates. Funders have to make the process of reporting easy for researchers so they can give you the metrics you need while not sacrificing their important research time. Tracking and measuring the impact of funding can leave researchers and funders alike misaligned and out of sync, which in turn, leaves everyone isolated and in the dark. Even when there are outcomes to be tracked, gathering the data and efficiently reporting it is a different story. Based on a global  2016 survey , 36% of researchers felt they would benefit from improved systems for tracking impact. Quality data reporting, in turn, dramatically influences the confidence of their funders, i.e., you. Here are three ways you can simplify your impact reporting process Separate your key metrics into easy to access activity categories When reporting metrics and outcomes, there’s a delicate balance between what the researcher has to do and what...

Enter the term “trends in granting” into Google and you’ll get back 38,700,000 results. You’ll find a wide range of documents, including reports from well-respected organizations, blogs written by grantmakers, case studies and fact sheets. That’s a lot of information, and few have the time to sift through it all. Yet grantmakers need to keep up to date on the latest trends to learn what will be a short-term fad and what’s going to impact how they award funding in the future. How is the granting space changing? We did some digging ourselves and discovered three major topics of note that all revolve around the predominant theme of transparency in the granting industry. This is thanks to a range of factors, including the prevalence of smart technology and social media that has lead to the growing use of digital media to share outcomes. This topic is heavily influenced by the millennial generation moving into more senior, decision-making roles. We’re also seeing an increasing f...

It’s officially spring, and that means the SmartSimple Spring Community Conference 2016 is only a few weeks away. SmartSimple community conferences offer a unique experience for both clients and the SmartSimple team to come together for a day of engaging conversation, learning opportunities and networking with peers in your industry. Gain insights from other SmartSimple users, share ideas for enhancements and meet your peers from across the United States and Canada. Get On the Right Track Based on your feedback, we decided to expand this year’s conference to include more targeted sessions and client participation. In addition to adding more ways to get to know other SmartSimple clients, we’ve expanded the scope of topics, increased the number of sessions and created two SmartSimple user tracks . General User Track Industry-specific sessions for system best practices and usage This user track will be broken down into industry-specific sessions for non-developers and IT...

Creating forms, whether they be grants applications or funding status reports, within any database system is easy. Just as long as everyone is meant to see and fill in the same fields on the same form. However, in the world of grants and research management, this is not the reality. Grant seekers need to see one version of the application form when they apply for funding. Staff need to see additional fields in their version (in the old paper-based world this would be labelled “for office use only”). Then, of course, additional fields are needed for the reviewer that may not contain all the visible fields that staff need to see and use. Add post-award reporting forms, site visit forms and payment request forms to the mix and you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. It’s all about resource efficiency This becomes a full-time job for someone just to develop, design and update all these applications if you’re using what’s known as a form-based system. A form-based system uses st...