Mastering Donor Funding: Best Practices for Effective Management Workshop (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: There are some donors who have well-established regulations that define their requirements for how you manage their funding. The U.S. government is a good example of that type of donor. They have thousands of pages of regulations that detail their requirements. But there are many donors who don't have extensive written requirements. All that you receive from those donors might be a four or five page grant document that provides little explanation of the donor's expectations for how you're going to manage the funding that they give you. And that might make you nervous to think about managing significant amounts of money without having detailed donor regulations to guide you. But I'm here to tell you that you don't have to worry too much about that because there are established standards that can serve as your organization's foundation for managing this funding. Momentum's new Best Practices for Managing Donor Funding workshop guides you through the key considerations for building and strengthening your systems for procurement, financial management, human resources, subaward management, reporting, and donor relationship management. In the workshop, we also identify key decision points and action items at the proposal, negotiation, start up, implementation, and close out stages of your awards. Momentum designed this workshop to be appropriate for all staff who work on awards at your organization. One of the keys to successfully implementing a donor funded project is to ensure that staff in all functions, such as finance, procurement, grants and contracts, human resources, and programs have a common understanding of how their organization is going to fulfill its responsibilities to the donor while also managing the project in a transparent and efficient manner. Momentum promotes a team-based approach to managing awards. So we present topics and decisions from different perspectives. So for example, in this workshop, when we discuss preparing budgets at the proposal stage and then later when we discuss managing budgets at the implementation stage, we present the perspective of finance staff and program staff on those two topics. We also incorporate the perspective of senior leaders who make decisions that affect how the organization identifies risks of working with new donors and also how the organization addresses small problems before they become large problems. We also emphasize the role that senior leaders have in protecting the organization through proactive negotiations with donors and also through investment in the organization's systems and staff to strengthen the organization's ability to manage donor funding. Momentum knows that this is a timely workshop because many organizations have made the decision to diversify their sources of funding. We hope you'll join us for this workshop to learn the best practices that your organization should follow as you work with your donors.