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Northern Border Regional Commission (NBRC) 

NBRC is a Federal-State partnership for economic and community development in northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. NBRC's service region is rural and heavily forested, and its economy has historically depended on natural-resource-based industries such as pulp and paper production. In the past 30 years, however, these industries have changed as efficiency grew, demand for traditional products declined, and production shifted to lower-cost regions. NBRC was established to address the challenges created by these economic shifts and serve as a catalyst to help alleviate economic distress and position the region for new economic opportunities, stabilization, and growth.  

NBRC sought a modern, secure Software as a Service (SaaS) GMS to not only facilitate compliance with government regulations and statutes but also to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability and allow automated processing and oversight of the grants workflow for each of their programs. The new system must serve as a portal for multiple grant application cycles/year and facilitate management and oversight of grant-funded projects, up to and including close-out activities.  

NBRC's grants management processes needed more transparency and a streamlined view to receive and issue funding to subrecipients as a passthrough entity. NBRC will use the new system to receive approximately 200-400 project proposals per year across three different grant programs, awarding up to 75-85 new awards per year, totaling approximately $50 million per year. Approximately 12-15 NBRC staff, 20-25 external reviewers, and up to 300 applicants and current grantees are expected to use the new system annually. NBRC chose REI and our GovGrants product to implement its GMS.  

REI leveraged our cloud-based, low-code, highly configurable, FIBF-ready, accessible, role-based, and highly secure GovGrants grants management platform. REI led the business process and standardization effort to optimize NBRC's grants management business processes. REI configured GovGrants to be ready for pre-award grants processes in March 2024 for three grant programs within six months of project kickoff, allowing NBRC to immediately reap its benefits by publishing a Notice of Funding Opportunity and having Grantees come through the system to submit applications. REI delivered the award and post-award processes, including payments with financial integration, to NBRC in May 2024.    

The NBRC’s GovGrants system has already demonstrated a better overall user experience for efficiently managing grants and specifically saving time on the application process for NBRC staff and its grantees. 

Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) 

The State of Washington sought to replace its legacy Department of Education grants management system (iGrants) with a modern SaaS COTS solution that could be integrated with its Financial and Student Information Systems (SIS). OSPI supports 2,393 schools across 295 school districts, has 100+ internal agency users and 6,000+ external district and school users, and annually awards $3.0B+ in grant funding. OSPI’s legacy grants management system only partially automated the grant lifecycle's announcement and application intake phase. OSPI struggled with a legacy grants system that required continual intervention by expert-level system programmers, resulted in frequent application submission errors, and relied on numerous manual tasks and duplicate data entry to manage grants across multiple systems. 

OSPI’s GovGrants implementation (EGMS) supports the entire portfolio of education funding across the State of Washington. Capabilities supported include all phases of the grant life cycle, including opportunity notification, application receipt and review, award issuance, real-time budgets, payment activity, and post-award monitoring. All payments and award allocation management are automated by integrating with the State’s Financial management system (SAFS and AFRS). 

REI developed and introduced the Consolidated Grants concept for OSPI, wherein a district can apply to multiple grant opportunities with one application, reducing staff hours spent on completing applications and improving service to underserved districts that previously didn’t apply for grant funding because of staff capacity and grant size. In addition, REI developed complex data integrity checks in forms to ensure that the districts completed the forms available in the application and progress reports holistically, in the correct sequence, and completely. 

REI provided the entire project team, including project management, business analysis, configuration and customization, testing, and deployment. The REI team worked across OSPI stakeholders and groups to finalize requirements and coordinate deployments. REI has also provided post-go-live support now that the system is live. 

REI’s modernized and improved OSPI’s grants processes, improved compliance, reduced fraud and abuse, and reduced staff hours spent administering grants. Further, REI’s solution drove OSPI’s mission by increasing grant funding to previously underserved districts. 

Since deploying GovGrants, OSPI has seen numerous benefits, including: 

• Improved compliance 
• Reduced fraud and abuse 
• Reduced staff hours spent on administering grants (including manual data entry and reporting burden for both internal and external users); 
• Increasing grant funding to previously underserved districts and 
• Reduced bulk payment processing time. 

Gwinnett County

Gwinnett County, part of Atlanta's metropolitan area, is the second-most populous County in Georgia. Each year the County's Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant program administers funds to support the County's initiatives to 1) help create and preserve affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households, 2) provide shelter and supportive services to homeless persons, or provide homelessness prevention activities for low- and moderate-income persons who are in danger of becoming homeless, and 3) develop viable communities by providing decent housing and a suitable living environment, and by expanding economic opportunities, principally for persons of low- and moderate-income.  

HUD receives approximately 600 grant applications disbursing $5.5 million annually. Most business processes supporting these programs are performed manually using Microsoft Excel sheets, Microsoft Word documents, and multiple systems.  

The GovGrants project provides the County with “As a Grantee” and “As a Grantor” functionality to support the HUD grant program. The system tools assist the County with establishing measurable goals, priorities, objectives, and strategies to address their identified needs. It contains the County's proposed investments of HUD Grant funds to address these needs. In addition, GovGrants provides a central location for the County to manage funding opportunities when the County is acting as a grantee that can be utilized to carry out the activities needed to meet the annual goals and objectives. The County's subrecipients are also provided with an external portal to review, apply, and manage the funds they receive from the County all in one central location. 

Interoperability and existing standard integrations were of great importance to the County. REI successfully integrated GovGrants with HUD’s SAP Financial Accounting System and DocuSign. 

REI implemented GovGrants for the County in 2 phases. Phase 1 was deployed in January 2023 and included support for four HUD grants, and 80 internal users. Phase 2 was deployed in June 2023, and supports 145 internal and 250 external users.

City of San Diego 

The City of San Diego is home to over 1.5 million residents. Each year the city receives more than $10M in funding that it uses to invest in: 1) homeless shelters, 2) specialized economic development projects, 3) affordable housing, 4) workforce development, and 5) rental assistance through five Development Grant Programs. In total, the programs have 800+ users and 100+ external applicants.  

The City historically tracked financial grant incentives through manual processes, PDFs, and spreadsheets, which created errors, delays, and inefficiencies. To fix these issues, the City decided to procure a new flexible, enterprise-grade, automated, and turnkey grants management solution. With the new GMS, the City hoped to 1) reduce error-prone manual processes, 2) increase Collaboration between the City’s grantor agencies and grantees, 3) have access to real-time dynamic reporting and visibility throughout the grant’s lifecycle, and 4) reduce the duration of the award process.  

The City chose REI and GovGrants to implement their new GMS. REI worked with the City stakeholders to deliver the first phase of GovGrants capabilities within four months of the project start (the start date was in September 2016, and the first phase was released in December 2016.) The second phase added the remaining GovGrants capabilities and was released in May 2017.  

“With GovGrants in place, the City has experienced a 30% increase in applications received,” said Rahul Sundrani, San Diego EDGrants Program Manager at REI. “Applications are of much higher quality as only 3 applications have been rejected this year because of completeness and correctness errors.” 

REI and GovGrants provided agency benefits including decreased workload of City staff, applicants, and reviewers, 33% increase in applications submitted, 25%+ reduction in the number of incorrect / incomplete applications, an 90% reduction in the duration of the award process (four months to 2 weeks), and a 30% increase in grants process automation.