The Challenge
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety needed a way to create and manage an unlimited number of online federal and state grants, including allocation, known-recipient, and competitive grant programs. DPS staff wanted to effectively eliminate duplicate data entry that was previously required by many of its grantees, reduce the colossal amount of paper being consumed during the application and review process, and easily create numerous different application forms and reports. Finally, the state wanted to be able to manage its ever-changing needs without having to return to the software vendor on a routine basis.

The Solution
The solution combines the IntelliGrants™ core functionality with a new, dynamic Grant Designer™ module. Grant Designer™ enables state staff to design their own unique application forms that incorporate a variety of data formats. Grant Designer™ also allows state staff to consider every detail of a grant program – its type, how it is funded, what types and/or subtypes of programs the grant will encompass, allocations to known recipients, and specific budget categories. Staff can also design post-award progress report forms that the grantees use to report their ongoing grant activity. Finally, Grant Designer™ contains a reporting tool that gives state staff the ability to generate reports based on the applicant-entered content of the forms they designed. For the first time, the flexibility of a dynamically-generated form is combined with the power of a query engine to produce user-defined search results and reports.

The Benefits
WEGO is anticipated to manage up to 1600 grant applications in its first year of implementation. Managing the sheer volume of paper such a response generates is a daunting task. IntelliGrants™ gives state staff the ability to eliminate the paperwork and manage the application and review process with a degree of precision not imagined in the paper-based world. State staff can query application data to generate an unlimited variety of geographic, demographic, programmatic and financial based reports for state and/or federal purposes. State staff can also create before and after reports to effectively judge the planned vs. actual progress of one or more grantee projects.