Beacon's grantmaking element allows you to receive applications for your open funding programmes, award and track grant payments, and receive evaluation reports from your grantees all in the one place.

The grantmaking element is made up of 4 core record types:

A grant programme is a round of funding that benefits a particular cause or segment of your beneficiaries. By grouping your grants under the programmes that drive them, you can track and report on the success of that specific programme.

You can store and see the top-level information about your programme here, including the key dates for applications and funding periods. There are a variety of record alerts that use this data to quickly see important information at the top of the record:

Feel free to customise and add fields to the Grant programmes record if there's more information you'd like to store!

Grant applications are the heart of grantmaking in Beacon. You can collect details from your applicants, assess it and move it through your approval pipeline, and define final awards and schedules. They are also the cornerstone for linking outgoing payments and evaluations to the recipient and programme that they're for.

Application forms

Assessments

Application pipelines

Don't manually enter application information - have applicant information flow into your Beacon database automatically and seamlessly by using a Beacon form! Ask any questions you need, require answers to mandatory questions, and easily link or embed the form for easy access.

The type of form to use for your application is a 'Signup' form. This will be able to create both a Person record for who is applying, and the Grant application record for their submission.

To ask questions from your applicants, you'll first need fields for that information in your Beacon account. Many fields will already exist (such as their name, email, phone number, amount requested and reason for application) but there will be others that are unique to you and will need to be created first.

Before creating a new field, first decide where it should be stored. In this case it will either be on their People record or the Grant application. But how to know which one?

Once you have fields to store all the information you need, you can then add them as questions to your form!

To add questions to your form, add a new 'General fields' section for the record type where your questions are stored (i.e. Person or Grant application (via Applicant)). You can add as many sections as you like to help split out your application and make it more user friendly.
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If you're asking questions that are stored in fields on the Person record, you can alternatively add them to the existing 'Your details' section.

If you'd like to have fields or sections of your form display conditionally based on an applicant's answers to other questions, you can use our form field and section visibility feature.

See our full guide on form field and section visibility for more details.

Often you many want to provide some extra information to your applicants, or give additional guidance about how to answer a particular question. To do this, you can add 'Label' text-only sections or items to your form.

Add a label section: Click the '+ Add section' button under your existing sections, then choose 'Label' as the type of section.

Add an label item: Click the '+ Add item' button on any existing section.

For some of your text-based questions, you may want to limit the length of response so that applicants don't add too much text!

On any short text or long text fields that you've added to your form, simply toggle on the 'Set character/word limit?' option and you'll be able to adjust the maximum length of responses.

If you'd like all of your applicants to agree to terms and conditions, or make mandatory confirmations, you can add required checkboxes to your form that they will need to tick in order to submit the form.
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​Read more about submission agreements.

Each time an application is submitted, you'll likely want to set some data behind the scenes that is the same for every submission. This is called fixed data and, naturally, can be set in the 'Fixed data' section of your form.

The most common fixed data that you'd want to set on your application form would be:

People

Grant applications

We've included a variety of standard criteria that you can use to score each application to quickly see which applications are best suited to receive funding.

Whilst these are common categories we've found useful for many organisations, we encourage you to change them to suit your processes and needs!

You could:

Beacon's pipeline views are perfect for quickly seeing an overview of your applications, and for moving them from stage-to-stage. We recommend using 'Stage' as your pipeline field.

Once you've approved an application, it's time to schedule and pay the grant to the recipient. Grant payments in Beacon should be created for each payment that will go out to the grantee, and can then be tracked so you know who and what needs to be paid when.

There are some handy rollup and smart fields on the Grant application that will show you how much still needs to be scheduled to be paid by creating Grant payment records. Each time you add or amend a payment these fields will immediately recalculate!

The easiest way to schedule payments is to add them from the 'Scheduled payments' related record card on the Grant application.

Click the + button on the card then add the amount to be paid in that instalment, and the date it should be paid out. Leave the 'Paid?' checkbox unticked so that you know it's still awaiting payment.

If you have a daily payment run, you should create an easy-access view to show you just the payments that are due to go out today.

If you'd like to export the payment list for your finance team to process, you can create an export template that makes it quick and easy to get just the relevant data out.

Step 1 - Create export template

Step 2 - Run the export

Step 3 - Update the payments to mark them as paid?

Once you've granted and paid money to a grantee, chances are that you'll want to get some insight into the impact and results of your award. Grant evaluations are where you can collect and track those reports.

To ask questions of your recipients, you'll first need fields for that information in your Beacon account. We've given you a few example field types to start you off, but you'll want to customise these, and add any new fields for data and questions you'd like your grantees to complete.

To collect evaluations from your grantees through Beacon's forms, you can either use the Portal if you have it, or otherwise our signup forms.

Collecting evaluations with the Portal

Collecting evaluations with signup forms

If you have the Portal element, you can schedule evaluations for your grantees and have them log into the Portal to complete them (or have them create and submit their own evaluations), keeping all your data clean and tidy.

To create a grantee portal, follow the main steps in our Portal guide.

To allow people to complete their evaluations, you'll want to include a 'Related records' section for the Grant evaluations record type.

You can either create and schedule the Grant evaluation records in advance for your grantees to then complete, or you can allow grantees to create their own evaluation records. If you'd like them to create their own, toggle on the 'creating records' toggle on that section:

If you'd like to schedule evaluations for your grantees, the easiest way is to add them from the 'Evaluations' related record card on the Grant application. You can schedule all evaluations that will be required at once, or you can periodically add them as needed.

Once they've been scheduled, they would show up in the grant evaluations section of your portal that you created above.

Just like your grant applications, you can use a signup form to allow grantees to submit their evaluations directly into your Beacon account!

Create a signup form, and add a new 'General fields' section, for the 'Grant evaluation' record type. Add any fields from your Grant evaluation records as questions on the form.

You'll likely want to include some information in the fixed data section of your form, to correctly categorise the data coming in to your account. For example: