SmartSimple Blog

Stop Now And Plan’s (SNAP®) spreadsheet-based administrative process needed a software solution to accommodate its Canada-wide expansion of mental health services. Not only did SNAP need a way to consolidate and track all stages of their implementation and service delivery around the world, they also needed to maintain fidelity and create a support system for their affiliate offices across the country and beyond. SmartSimple delivered a cloud-based centralized system that enabled SNAP to collect and report data across all of their locations to best serve families and support internal and external stakeholders during all stages of program implementation.

Genome Alberta’s grant funding impact reporting was getting lost in incomplete data gathered in different formats including Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PDFs. With data from various sources, it took this government-funded research corporation a lot of time to gather information about their impact. SmartSimple delivered an all-in-one fully auditable solution that accommodated their nuanced funding structures while empowering them to create very granular ad-hoc impact reports to provide transparency and gain insight into their funding strategies.

Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) was using a custom grants management system with very limited functionality. There was no ability to scale the system for new requirements without the developer doing extensive and costly programming work. It wasn’t intuitive, and lacked essential security protocols. By moving to SmartSimple’s highly flexible platform, MLSC was able to build a system that had all of the original functionality. They also gained the ability to build new features at any time to meet the organization’s increasingly complex requirements without adding a single line of code.

Photo by Drew Hays

The Harrington Discovery Institute (HDI) was using a manual grants process that consisted of vast amounts of paper and numerous emails. There was no consistency in their applications or in their process, and the constant creation of spreadsheet after spreadsheet left them open to data transfer errors. By moving to SmartSimple, HDI was able to automate not only their application process, but every other aspect of their granting cycle. They have found that having everything in SmartSimple has kept them organized, making it easier for grantees and reviewers to do their work. The HDI team can now also make changes to their system on their own.

Photograph by Samuel Zeller

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.