Posted by Geoff Hamilton, April 22nd, 2008

So, today is Earth Day and the push for green technology is as alive as ever and getting more notice on a day like today than most other days. For us here at ZoomGrants, every day is Earth Day.

ZoomGrants is a paperless grant proposal website technology for foundations. Using ZoomGrants on their website, an ecologically conscious foundation can avoid the mountains of paper proposals and receive those proposals electronically.

How many reams of paper come through a typical foundation in a given grant cycle? From making their own internal copies of proposals and evaluations papers, to requiring a nonprofit grant applicant to submit additional copies of their proposals, the amount of paper involved can add up quite a bit.

Let’s do a quick math project…

Let’s say the Little Nonprofit Agency submits a ten page grant proposal to the Big Foundation who has a ten-member funding committee. Either the Little Agency or the Big Foundation makes copies of the proposal for each committee member bringing our paper count up to 100 pages used so far.

In this case, the Big Foundation received fifty grant proposals, all from worthy causes. That adds up to 5,000 pages, or ten reams of paper for this grant cycle.

We haven’t added in any pages for reviewing and scoring sheets for the committee. We’ll be nice and say they can do this with one page per proposal, but that is still 50 pages.

Over the course of four grant cycles per year, this foundation would be going through over 40 reams of paper, just for their grant process.

We haven’t talked about any of the administrative headaches that went along with all of the paper. Didn’t mention the time it took to make the copies…to distribute the copies…to organize the copies for their records…

We also made the Big Foundation into kind of a small foundation. How many proposals do you thing the really big foundations go through?

ZoomGrants eliminates all of this.

The Big Foundation receives the grant proposals on their website and they are instantly available to the entire funding committee. No copies. No time delay.

Their committee reviews, comments and scores each proposal. Again, no paper used, and comments are instantly available to the other members. No delays, either.

The grant manager finalizes the decisions of the committee and sends out notifications to the applicants. No paper.

All of the grant proposals are stored in the database. No filing. No paper. Instantly organized. No delays.

Maybe it sounds too good to be true. Nope, it’s true…and it’s good.

Maybe it sounds like it might be complicated to install, integrate, and operate. It’s not. That only takes a couple minutes.

ZoomGrants was designed to solve the ‘paper problem’ from the beginning. We can eliminate the paper and the headaches of running an effective grant program, and we can have you up and running within a couple minutes.

With a solution like this, every day is Earth Day at ZoomGrants. For more information or to start using ZoomGrants on your website, take a look at our ZoomGrants home page.

Posted by Geoff Hamilton, April 16th, 2008

An interesting observation hit me while I was getting into the gear of marketing ZoomGrants - this technology is a piece of cake to put onto a foundation’s website. I built it, so I should know, but the reality of the power of this technology combined with how easy it is to install just makes me sit back and say ‘Wow’.

An example of what I mean is the digg button/technology included with this article. I copied a line of code from their site and put it on my site. Done. That is the same way the ZoomGrants works. Copy a line from ZoomGrants to the foundation’s website and now they have everything they need to put their grant process on their site. It is just as easy putting digg on a site or Google Ads or any other little widget or gadget.

Another example is the blog technology that is managing this post you are reading. The previous version of ZoomGrants was known as GrantAnalyst.com,
and in addition to the grant tools it offered, it included a blog that
was custom built…by me. Hours and hours of painstaking effort went
into building it. I had no idea there was anything better out there.

This time around, I came across WordPress
and installed in about five minutes, just like their
famous-five-minute-install said I would. Not only was it up and running
in mere moments, but it is ten times more powerful than the
version I had built previously. They thought of tools that I never would have thought of.

ZoomGrants works the same way. You can install it within a couple minutes and then end up with powerful tools at your fingertips.

Wow.

Posted by Geoff Hamilton, April 11th, 2008

ZoomGrants™ is launching a new service that places grant proposal technology directly on foundation websites. Grant seekers submit grant proposals, funding committee members review and comment on each proposal, and grant managers finalize decisions and send notifications. All of this happens without leaving the foundation’s website.

Fort Collins, Colorado April 10, 2008 – A new web service has arrived that promises to make the grant process easier and more efficient for both grant makers and grant seekers. Using technology from ZoomGrants™ on their websites, foundations can receive and review grant proposals, while nonprofits gain better access to grants and a faster way of submitting proposals. Integration takes only a few minutes and transforms a website from an electronic brochure into a powerful grant making tool.

“We built ZoomGrants™ to manage the routine administration involved with grant making so foundations can focus on building relationships with their recipients,” says Geoff Hamilton, President and Founder of ZoomGrants. “Putting their existing website to work for them is the most obvious way to improve the grant process.”

Complete integration is accomplished within minutes, beginning with signing up for a grant manager account with ZoomGrants™ and obtaining a line of HTML text to be included on the foundation website. This single line of HTML does all the work for the foundation on their website.

Grant managers can then post a Request For Proposals (RFP) as well as set up their funding committee member accounts. With an active RFP on the website, grant seekers can login with (or create) a ZoomGrants™ account and apply for funding.

Once a completed proposal is submitted, committee members have instant access to it on their website. Members review the proposal, comment on it, view their fellow member’s comments, and score it based on the custom scoring scale their foundation uses.

Grant managers then finalize the decision based on the committee’s recommendations. With saved email templates, the grant manager sends out approval and decline notices as well as funding instructions to the accountant.

“Everyone involved with the grant process participates on the foundation website at the most convenient time for them,” says Hamilton. “The applicant can submit proposals instantly, the committee can discuss and vote on proposals prior to their meetings, and the grant manager can administer the whole process from anywhere.”

Each RFP costs $980 to activate with smaller foundations (under $10 million in assets) paying $490. Grant seekers do not pay anything to apply, and save significantly on their own copying and shipping expenses.

For foundations that already have a grant software package in place, ZoomGrants™ will export data into a spreadsheet that can be imported into existing software. This allows foundations to get online faster and eliminates the need for additional software modules or custom website programming. And since ZoomGrants™ stores proposal data in a central location, it also means that applicants can enter their data once and use it with multiple foundations.

“We want foundations to get their grant process online today,” says Hamilton, “so we made this as easy as possible to integrate and administer as well as being the best value for the money. We hope we’ve seen the last days of paper grant proposals.”

Using ZoomGrants™ on a foundation’s website makes it easy to receive grant proposals electronically and reduce administrative tasks. It also increases the collaboration and discussion within the foundation, helping them operate more efficiently and more effectively. Foundations now have a way to say goodbye to towering stacks of grant proposals stacking as well as marathon committee meetings.

Additional information can be found at http://www.zoomgrants.com.