E-019 Technology Trends for Grants with Liz Marenakos and Lucy Morgan
Episode Summary:
### Quick Episode Summary Grant Talks Podcast [#019]
*Intro ***.41***
* Fire Away Questions with Liz Marenakos and Lucy Morgan CPA***1:40***
* Trends for Technology and Automation in Fundraising and Grants***3:40***
* Trends in Grant and Technology-Powering the Social Good Community***4:49***
* Best Practices: The Role of Technology in Effective and Efficient Grant Management***7:37***
* Cloud Computing and Automation: The Evolution of Accounting in the Social Good Sector***8:16***
* Federal Grant and Technology Trends: The World of Open Data and the DATA Act***10:54***
* Technology and Grant Management: Tools Designed for the Best Outcomes***17:22***
* The Last Word with Liz Marenakos and Lucy Morgan CPA***19:00***
*Outro Audio GrantTalks Podcast with Lucy M. Morgan CPA ***21.15***
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Introducing Liz Marenakos from the Blackbaud
Intro: 00:04
Welcome to the Grant Talks podcast with Lucy Morgan. Lucy is the CEO and director of MyFedTrainer.com a leading provider of grant management training and templates for federal grant recipients. This show is for grant professionals looking to gain confidence managing their grants. In an age of increasing complexity, you'll hear from leading professionals on the best practices surrounding grants, what's involved in successfully managing the grants lifecycle and how to make sure your grants are managed correctly. Now here's your host Lucy Morgan.
Lucy Morgan: 00:42
Welcome, everyone, to this conversation with Liz Marenakos, director of product marketing for both Financial Edge NXT and Blackbaud Grantmaking. If you aren't familiar with Blackbaud, it's the world's leading nonprofit software company powering social good. Liz has served on the boards of several nonprofits in roles ranging from treasurer to vice president. She has also served as a financial manager of a nonprofit organization, managing several fundraising events and participating in capital campaigns. Before joining Blackbaud, she worked for a public accounting firm and ran her own business for four years. Additionally, she worked on a forensic accounting project with the federal court-appointed receiver. Liz holds a BS in international politics from Georgetown University, a master of accountancy degree from the University of Charleston, and I'm Lucy Morgan, the host for this session.
Welcome, Liz. I am thrilled to be able to interview you for this podcast.
Liz Marenakos: 01:38
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Fire Away Questions with Liz Marenakos and Lucy Morgan CPA
Lucy Morgan: 01:40
I've been working with Blackbaud on a variety of projects over the last years, and I've always been impressed by this organization and, more importantly, the people working here. So, today we are in Charleston, and we're gonna talk about what's new in the world of grant technology for both accounting and grant-making. And I have a few fire-away questions to introduce you to our audience. Are you ready?
Liz Marenakos: 02:01
I'm ready.
Lucy Morgan: 02:02
So, first of all, how did you survive Hurricane Dorian and what's been the impact with Blackbaud?
Liz Marenakos: 02:07
On the whole, we were really very lucky with Dorian. We did get a lot of wind and rain, but the flooding was way less than was expected. While the city and the county are still kind of busy cleaning up all of the debris, like fallen trees and limbs, most of the city was cleaned up and back to normal pretty quickly.
Lucy Morgan: 02:26
Oh, that's good news. And now, I saw that you worked in forensic accounting. And that's a specialty that not many people get into, and quite frankly, it's something I always thought would be really fascinating. So, what surprised you most about working on that project with forensic accounting?
Liz Marenakos: 02:41
The people really do store cash and lots of unlikely places, like old sneakers. What I loved about the project was that we had to recreate financial statements from boxes and boxes of papers, some of which were traditional receipts, but many of which had to be traced through other transactions. So, it was a real opportunity to play detective. It amused me that someone had rolled up tens of thousands of dollars and stashed them in several pairs of sneakers that were found in the original raid.
Lucy Morgan: 03:15
I took a class a while back in forensic accounting, and it was funny, when I first started, I thought, "I don't know how people commit these frauds." And one of the benefits of the class, by the time you're done, you know.
Liz Marenakos: 03:26
You know. Yes, absolutely.
Lucy Morgan: 03:28
You get some insights into how people's minds work now. They never talked about the cash in the sneakers, but I thought that was quite an experience.
Liz Marenakos: 03:36
It was really pretty funny when you saw the receipts written up.
Trends for Technology and Automation in Fundraising and Grants
Lucy Morgan: 03:40
Well, you've been involved with grants from both the accounting and the fundraising side. What are some of the ways that technology and automation are changing both fundraising and grant management?
Liz Marenakos: 03:50
So, one of the biggest changes is simply the move to the cloud. The most exciting thing about this move is that features and functions that were simply not possible with on-premise software are now easily configured and accessible given a secure cloud as well as fully documented APIs. So, there are two areas where I think this is particularly true. One is the automation of routine tasks, and the second is collaboration and building communities online.
Lucy Morgan: 04:20
What are some of the benefits to both grantmakers and grant recipients of these advances in technology?
Liz Marenakos: 04:26
I think that one of the biggest benefits is that it makes collaboration very easy, right? Especially when I'm thinking about our foundation and nonprofit clients, we've put tools into the market that allow them to have a conversation without being face-to-face.
Lucy Morgan: 04:44
And I imagine there are some cost savings in that as well.
Liz Marenakos: 04:47
Yes, there are, quite a bit.
Trends in Grants and Technology-Powering the Social Good Community
Lucy Morgan: 04:49
So, walk us through some of the trends in grants that are having the biggest impact on how Blackbaud's mission to power the social good community is being delivered.
Liz Marenakos: 04:59
Well, one of the biggest benefits in moving to the cloud is that staff can focus on more mission-critical activities because they no longer have to manage servers, worry about system availability and reliability, and it's more secure.
Lucy Morgan: 05:15
I talked with an organization not too long ago where I had done a case study on an executive director of a program that was funded by federal grants and there had been a fraud going on for about three years. And one of the things I found really interesting is this person was the executive director of that program, and she had deleted all the records when she found out that she was being investigated by the federal government and the Office of Inspector General. But what she didn't realize is that backups were being done at a remote location. And so, she wasn't necessarily an IT person, but speak again to just some of the security benefits of being on the cloud from the standpoint of not only ease of use, but also from a security perspective.
Liz Marenakos: 06:03
Well, if you think about it, right, every day we read in the paper of some cybersecurity attack. Somebody is phishing your employees, and they're tunneling their way into your network that way. By moving to the cloud, you've put the burden of stopping all of those attacks on the vendor as opposed to having to do it yourself.
Lucy Morgan: 06:25
You know, I think of the case study I did recently on Atlanta and the ransomware attacks that essentially shut down Atlanta not only from the standpoint just inconvenience, but they couldn't access evidence for trials, they couldn't access their court system for any of the information needed to prosecute crimes or anything like that.
Liz Marenakos: 06:49
It's really kind of scary, and I think we're hearing more about attacks on smaller cities and county government, so beware.
Lucy Morgan: 06:58
Yeah. Just about two weeks ago, there was a newspaper article, I believe it was a series of nonprofit hospitals in Texas that had also had a ransomware attack. And you think about, you know, things being in the cloud and just how many ways we need to have access to them, everything from, you know, HIPAA reporting or the documentation for our grants and everything. If we're relying on the IT department to stay ahead of the curve and on the servers of every ransomware attack that could happen, it's probably not gonna be that effective.
Liz Marenakos: 07:31
It's not efficient, right? I mean, it's not the best use of resources, really, for a nonprofit.
Best Practices: The Role of Technology in Effective and Efficient Grant Management
Lucy Morgan: 07:37
So, what are some of the primary problems that your clients are looking to solve through the use of technology?
Liz Marenakos: 07:43
Well, I would say reporting always tops the list. As you receive more money from different funders, with that money often comes different reporting requirements. So, you really need to think about how to build your system or design your system to be flexible enough to allow you to track the data needed by all of those funders and also be able to have the assurance that you can track the balances associated with each funder very easily.
Cloud Computing and Automation: The Evolution of Accounting in the Social Good Sector
Lucy Morgan: 08:16
And I know a lot of our audience probably can relate to some of those challenges. Maybe they're still using Excel spreadsheets to track all that. It makes me kind of sad because it still seems to be part of a lot of groups' lives, especially smaller nonprofits and things. How are the advances in technology...not only the cloud but really maybe even how we think about data and reporting, how are those advances changing Blackbaud's product and support offerings in the social good sector?
Liz Marenakos: 08:47
Well, the first is automation. For instance, in our Financial Edge NXT product, we allow you to connect to your bank to facilitate reconciliation. So, you can download all the transactions directly from your bank. The system itself will run through and reconcile items that it can, leaving you to only deal with the exceptions. So, this frees you up from ticking and tying every single transaction and relying on the system to do it.
Lucy Morgan: 09:21
So, no more yellow highlighters between a paper copy of the bank statement.
Liz Marenakos: 09:25
No more yellow highlighters, it's sad.
Lucy Morgan: 09:29
Because I guess that kind of now is in the graveyard of accounting with the 10 columnar pad and a green bar paper. You also spoke about task automation. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what types of tasks you can automate through some of these technology solutions?
Liz Marenakos: 09:44
Well, another good example is credit cards, right? Our system will allow you to connect to your credit card transactions and allow employees to put their expenses in. The system itself can check and see whether that was an allowable expense and prevent them before they actually hit the general ledger.
Lucy Morgan: 10:10
Wow. I had no idea that this software was doing that too. Is that similar to, like, a Concur type of travel management system?
Liz Marenakos: 10:17
Exactly.
Lucy Morgan: 10:17
Okay. And it's already built-in, so you're not having to also find a third-party solution for that.
Liz Marenakos: 10:23
That's right. And we actually took it one step further and arranged with the bank to have a purchase card associated with it so the nonprofit could get the purchase card. And the benefits of that is that it's all automatically handled through the system. But secondly, there's an ability to earn a rebate back on whatever the nonprofit spends so they get a little check back.
Lucy Morgan: 10:44
Oh, wow. It sounds like office Christmas party time.
Liz Marenakos: 10:47
That's right.
Lucy Morgan: 10:48
Of course, only...not spending any federal dollars on anything that we're not supposed to.
Liz Marenakos: 10:51
No, no, no.
Federal Grant and Technology Trends: The World of Open Data and the DATA Act
Lucy Morgan: 10:54
Well, since this conversation, we talked about disaster recovery and resilience around Hurricane Dorian, do you have any insights for communities who may be realizing that how we've done things in the past may not be good enough anymore with the advent of greater accountability, particularly to federal agencies? And then I'm gonna say there's even increased expectations around things like the DATA Act, like open data on that. Our reporting, our methods of reporting have to change. So, are there some mistakes or speed bumps that you commonly see when communities are looking to increase their grant-funded response?
Liz Marenakos: 11:31
Well, one of the things that they don't really think about in great enough depth, I think, is taking the time upfront to really understand the data they need to collect and then how are they gonna use that data both for managerial reporting as well as the reporting required by those federal granting agencies or other funders? So, you mentioned the DATA Act and the OPEN Act, there are specific data elements that need to be collected, and you have to think through how you're gonna efficiently and accurately collect that data. You have to think about what level that data should sit in your accounting system. Should it sit all the way down at the transaction level? Can it sit at the invoice level? Can it sit at the grant level? So, you have to think about all of that as you go out and solicit funds, right, because you have to be prepared to actually use your system to do the reporting required.
Lucy Morgan: 12:31
So, one of the pieces of data with federal grants is a really critical little, teeny tiny piece of information, but it's not what you would traditionally think of as part of the financial system is just the CFDA number. And for our listeners who aren't familiar with those, that's Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, and that's just a unique identifier used for federal awards to track which award it is. Now, you talked about you can use the system to track different funding sources. How would one little element like that, that's not really a piece of financial data, what level would that sit at, and how would something like that be tracked?
Liz Marenakos: 13:09
Well, I would recommend that that sat at the project or grant level. Our system allows you to track identifying features like that about the particular grant at the project level, and all of those data elements are then available for reporting.
Lucy Morgan: 13:28
And I'm guessing with your technology, there are also ways to have different types of cost collectors, or cost centers, or whatever you wanna think of within the software so that people have an easy way to track the different sources of money as they come in and then the expenditures as they go out. Is that a fair way of describing it?
Liz Marenakos: 13:47
That's fair. But we do it with a little bit of a twist. Many accounting systems will have you put that at the account segment level. And what that does over time as you have many grant grants throughout the life cycle of your organization, that creates a pretty large chart of accounts. So, within Blackbaud, we have a record called "The Grant" that gets attached to the transaction, but you're not having to expand your segments and, therefore, your chart of accounts over time.
Lucy Morgan: 14:18
Yeah. That raises a really good point because I know in the past, I've worked at organizations where they took very much a chart-of-accounts approach to every time they needed to track a department, a cost collector of some way, they would add a new account to the general ledger. And some of the work that I've done in the past is implementing that type of cost, I will call it cost accounting, which is actually another form of fund accounting. Not "fun" for our listeners, F-U-N, but "fund," F-U-N-D. And so, if you have an expense like, say, travel expense, you don't need a general ledger account for each department's travel expense, you can use that second layer to go, "Okay, total travel expense is this, but that's comprised of 15 different departments or 15 different cost collectors that are grants," or whatever that is, so.
Liz Marenakos: 15:05
Exactly. And if you think about how an accounting system closes and calculates a balance, if you've got all those myriad of accounts, it's really difficult to tell which accounts should close into what equity account. So, one of the things our system does do is allow you to track both the balance sheet and the income statement for every grant, which keeps the money segregated to the best of your ability, right? So, you don't run into the possibility of pulling money for the wrong thing.
Lucy Morgan: 15:40
It's so much fun to talk to a fellow accountant about accounting things and general ledgers.
Liz Marenakos: 15:45
I said "income statement" and "balance sheet" in the same sentence.
Lucy Morgan: 15:49
And that first time that I think we're able to reconcile an account and it releases those endorphins in our brains, and you get hooked in the profession of accounting. You know, we've talked about kind of a wide range of accounting things and then some reporting issues as well. What lessons learned would you offer another grant recipient who's struggling with kind of some of the same issues that we've just raised?
Liz Marenakos: 16:10
So, it's really important that the grant recipient understand both the data required under the terms of the grant and the data structure and relationships within their accounting system. It can really help to seek input from the technology vendor who knows the system inside and out when you first receive a new grant so you can explore all the options that are available that will make reporting under the grant easier down the road. You know your requirements inside and out. The vendor knows their system. So, I really recommend that you have a conversation to figure out how you're gonna do it.
Lucy Morgan: 16:50
And that's a great piece of advice. In the past, when I worked on system implementations, one of the things we spend a lot of time at, which I think was time well spent, is before we even got into what would be the best software solution. We really sat down and made sure we had conversations with all the different stakeholders from the program, from the accounting side, what are the requirements so that we had a really good list before we even started shopping around of what our requirements were.
Liz Marenakos: 17:19
I think that's critical. I really do.
Technology and Grant Management: Tools Designed for the Best Outcomes
Lucy Morgan: 17:22
Well, I think we're all feeling it kind of a crushing feeling of, "Geez, there's a lot of things to think about here," and realizing how fast technology is changing.
Are there some eternal, let's call them truths, about technology that you can offer to someone who's, maybe they're struggling with some antiquated systems or maybe their software is not really designed for grant management? You know, they might be on QuickBooks, or they might be on even just Excel spreadsheets that they're doing managing tens of millions of dollars in grants on Excel spreadsheets.
Liz Marenakos: 17:55
Yes. Well, the eternal truth I always ask people to think about is that systems are all organized slightly differently. There generally was an underlying conceptional approach to building the system. So, it's important to understand what the system was originally built for.
So, for example, many for-profit accounting systems were or are built for a manufacturing organization, or for job costing. In both those cases, the money and resources within those organizations is fungible. So, a for-profit company can take money for one project and put it on another because that allows them to maximize their profit.
It's very different for a nonprofit who gets grants or dollars that have been restricted for a certain purpose or by a donor. And in the case of a nonprofit, tracking the balances for each of those grants or endowed funds, for instance, is critical so they can prove that they've used the money appropriately.
The Last Word with Liz Marenakos and Lucy Morgan CPA
Lucy Morgan: 19:00
That is some great advice. And I'd like to give you the last word in this session. Is there something I should have asked about the technology but didn't?
Liz Marenakos: 19:10
Well, I think the exciting bit about all of these technology advances is that they can really change the day-to-day activities of the CFO. By automating repetitive tasks and taking advantage of the connectivity that the cloud enables, the CFO and finance staff are freed up to focus on the bigger picture. Like, instead of distributing reports only after period close, what if they could enable reporting on demand for all of their departmental peers? What if they could focus on reporting options that combine financial and nonfinancial data? What if they could partner with other departments to find other ways to drive efficiency in the organization? It's really changing the role of the CFO, I think.
Lucy Morgan: 19:55
Thank you for that insight. I love the part about collaborating with others outside the accounting department, and I think it's a lot more meaningful in our day-to-day jobs to not be the person with the yellow highlighter on the bank reconciliations, and instead, actually be part of the helpful partnership that makes us successful in helping our communities with whatever types of grants we have, whether we're talking federal grants, foundation money, whatever that is as well. So, again, thank you for that. If someone would like to find out more about Blackbaud or you, how should they get in touch?
Liz Marenakos: 20:30
I think the best place to start is to go to our website, which is www.blackbaud.com.
Lucy Morgan: 20:40
Thank you so much, Liz, for participating in the "Grant Talks" podcast. And listeners, you can find all the episodes out on granttalks.com. Thank you for tuning in.
Outro Audio GrantTalks Podcast with Lucy M. Morgan CPA
Outro: 21:15
To learn more about how MyFedTrainer.com makes grant management more manageable, visit MyFedTrainer.com. That's MyFedTrainere.com. You'll find all the Grant Talks episodes at GrantTalks.com. That's GrantTalks.com.
More About Liz Marenakos:
Liz has 20 plus years of experience in product management and product marketing for financial accounting software. Most of her career has been at Blackbaud, headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina. Liz has worked with hundreds of nonprofit clients to configure BLKB’s financial management software to support and understand their business requirements. Liz has a BSFS from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a Masters in Accountancy from the University of Charleston. She passed the CPA exam in 1998.
More About Lucy Morgan CPA:
Lucy M. Morgan is a CPA, MBA, GPA approved trainer, speaker, and author of 3 books including “Decoding Grant Management-The Ultimate Success Guide to the Federal Grant Regulations in 2 CFR Part 200.” As a leading authority on federal grant management for nonprofits, institutions of higher education and state, local and tribal governments she has written over 250 articles on grant management topics featured in LinkedIn, various publications and on the MyFedTrainer.com blog.
She is a sought-after presenter at national conferences sponsored by organizations such as the Grant Professional Association (GPA), National Grant Management Association (NGMA) and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
Lucy is also a highly regarded trainer whose techniques and teaching style come from real-world experience. Having faced many of the same challenges her audiences have endured, Lucy understands that what looks good on paper may not always work in the real world. Because she has been there, she provides people of all professional backgrounds with practical tools to advance their careers and make a bigger difference in the world. She can be reached at [email protected].
>>Hear more about Lucy's story in Episode #004
More Resources for Grant Professionals
Thanks for checking out the Grant Talks podcast!
In this episode of Grant Talks, we talked about a subject that you may want to know more about:
So...as promised I want to share some resources that may help you on YOUR grant journey.
It’s a whole new ball game for grant recipients when it comes to data security.
What if your organization was the latest target of leaks of sensitive information?
The Uniform Guidance puts grant recipients on the hook for even accidental disclosures of sensitive information.
This is a NEW requirement compared with the old regulations that were developed in the days “big hair” and even bigger “brick” cell phones.
If you need to get up to speed quickly on the data security requirements for grant recipients, check out my latest mini-guide “Grant Recipient’s Guide to Data Security - 3 Steps to Safeguard Protected Personally Identifiable Information (PII)”
Download and share this handy mini-guide with your favorite IT person and program folks.
I hope this mini-guide will keep you on the journey to more federal grants and fewer issues in your grant management.
This Mini-Guide walks you through our three-step process to ensure you are protecting personally identifiable information (PII) in your grant.
Here's what’s included:
- What is protected personally identifiable information (PII)?
- What are our responsibilities to keep it safe as part of internal controls and grant management?
- How is the federal government driving accountability for accidental (and deliberate) disclosure of sensitive information back to grant recipients and more!
These resources are designed for grant managers, just like you, and I hope that you will find them valuable on your grant journey.
Click here to download and share
P.S. If you’d like to feel even more confident about what’s changed with the Uniform Guidance, check out my article at https://blog.myfedtrainer.com/five-big-changes-to-grant-management/
