From Tidy to Terrific: Optimizing SmartyGrants for the New Year

By Kate Caldecott

The end of the year, and the beginning of another is a great time to make a new start. Doing a few housekeeping tasks can set your grantmaking on the right track for the year to come.

Tidying Up

Close Out Grants
Start by having Program Managers check for outstanding grants. Follow up on any missing acquittal reports and make sure all completed grants were advanced to the “completed successfully” stage.

Archive What’s Not Needed
Next, have your SmartyGrants account administrator(s) do a little house cleaning. If you have more than one account administrator, pull everyone together to see which items should be archived. Remember that archived items can still be referenced for reporting. 


• Are all of your Standard Fields still relevant?
• What about your custom contact types?
• Archive all expired grant rounds
• You can now archive programs that are no longer in use
• If forms were created, but never used, they can be deleted
• Forms that were, but are no longer in use can be archived

Clean Up Duplicate Contacts
It’s easy to accumulate duplicates in your contact directory. Assign someone to resolve all duplicates to you can start the year with a tidy directory.

Eliminate Expired User Accounts
Go to Manage Users on the admin tab and make sure that only current users have access tot he system. Close any accounts that are no longer active.

Check Your Applicant Website
Is all the information still current? Did your branding change? If someone who wasn’t familiar with the site saw it for the first time, would they be able to find what they need?

Optimizing SmartyGrants

Now that your SmartyGrants account is nice and clean, it’s time to consider whether you can get more out of it. A lot of new functionality was added to SmartyGrants over the past year which you can deploy to make your system more efficient (see this webinar for a full explanation of the new features). A few of my favorites include:

New Permission Access Levels

While you’re checking to make sure that no one who has left your organisation still has access to the system, you can also review the access levels that your existing staff have. You may want to expand access for some users. For instance, you can empower Program Managers to add/manage their own assessors.


Put Things on Autopilot

Check your task lists and see which items can be set to “recurring”. Revisit your filters and set up useful snapshot reports. Take a look at your calendar and set up scheduled reports to ensure that all relevant information is provided for standing meetings.

Take SmartyGrants to the Next Level
If all of this seems old hat, you may be ready to take SmartyGrants to the next level by integrating it with some of your other systems. This can be useful for syncing contacts with other systems or integrating SmartyGrants payments with your finance system. Visit the Integrations page of the Help Hub to learn more.

SmartyGrants is always changing. Be sure you are signed up for SmartyNews, the monthly newsletter, to keep up on new features and training opportunities. If you would like a SmartyGrants tune-up or an evaluation of your SmartyGrants account, please contact me at Kate@katecaldecott.com.au or 0447 227 598.