How we help grantmakers evaluate SmartyGrants
In our experience, most people prefer to evaluate how a system is going to work with their own program details, application forms, assessment processes etc. rather than from a generic product demonstration.
SmartyGrants offers a free trial which is ‘’converted’’ to your live account if you sign up which means the effort that you put into setting up the trial system is reused in your live setup. SGM can tailor the trial to your program/s and walk you through the prototype to fast track your evaluation and help you answer the following types of questions:
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Will SmartyGrants meet our needs? Are there any shortcomings?
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What are the benefits of using SmartyGrants?
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What is involved in setting up SmartyGrants?
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How does SmartyGrants compare with other systems I have looked at?
Our clients say it best
Director, State Government Agency: The walk-through of the trial, assisted by the documentation that Lesley provided, was a very efficient and effective way for me to validate that SmartyGrants is fit for purpose, affordable and realistic for our grants program.
Program Manager, State Government Agency: I have not used SmartyGrants and at the end of Lesley's 2 hour presentation of the trial that she set up for us, I felt confident that it was suitable for our program and had significant benefits over our manual system. The trial gave me a good understanding of how SmartyGrants would be used in the end-to-end process, what business decisions we needed to make and where our ''knowledge gaps'' were. It saved me about 4-8 weeks in learning SmartyGrants and 4 weeks in evaluating it, which would have significantly delayed using SmartyGrants for the next round. I highly recommend doing a tailored trial to fast track the system evaluation and implementation.
Senior Project Officer, State Government Agency: I have used SmartyGrants to manage a program in a previous role, mainly for applications and assessments. The trial showed how to make the best use of SmartyGrants tailored to our specific program. From Lesley's trial presentation I felt confident to set up Contact Types, Stages & Tasks, Financial Periods, Funding, Payment, Acquittals and more. The trial used all the latest features. It saved about 20 hours in learning the new features and areas I didn't know, and 20 in evaluating SmartyGrants for this program, and we have been able to re-use a lot of the set-up in the live system. I would definitely recommend it for setting up SmartyGrants in an optimum way.