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Our Community Matters • 40 •
SmartyGrants anniversary: we’ve come a long way in 10 years BY DENIS MORIARTY, GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR, OUR COMMUNITY.
At Our Community, we’ve been working with grantmakers and grantseekers since the 1990s, and just over a decade ago we started to detect a wave of “grants rage” surging across the nation. Grantmakers were growing increasingly frustrated by the poor IT systems they were using to manage their grants (or by the fact that they didn’t have any IT systems at all), and grantseekers were frustrated too. Grantmakers started to shift online but their tech managers didn’t know how to do grantmaking, and grantmakers didn’t know how to instruct and supervise an efficient IT build. The result was a proliferation of multiple systems of varying quality mushrooming up across the nation, each one coming at an enormous financial cost and ripping out money that would otherwise have been available for social programs. System updates were difficult and expensive. Grantmakers were becoming less efficient, rather than more. We were shocked and appalled by the waste.
Denis Moriarty So we built SmartyGrants. And a decade on we’re proud that more than 360 government, business and corporate organisations use it to distribute their grants funding.
