"Grant Frog is user-friendly; it's easy to navigate, and it's customizable. This can be tailored to many different organizations.
— Erin Comeaux, Grants Coordinator, Pasadena ISD
About
Pasadena Independent School District is a large public school district in the Houston, Texas metro area, serving roughly 42,000 students across 63 schools on a budget of more than $600 million. Its grants team brings in federal, state, and private foundation funding for programs across the district, from literacy to gifted and talented to campus-level needs.
The team has kept that funding steady through a period of major change in the grants landscape, securing roughly $4 million in awards each year and managing another $4 million still pending.
"Most of the systems we looked at were not K-through-12 friendly. Being a school district looking for a real tracking system, not a spreadsheet, finding something that would work for K-12 has been our biggest challenge. Grant Frog is the one that works for K-12"
- Olivia Smith-Daugherty, Executive Director of Grants, Pasadena ISD
Pasadena ISD's grants department is led by grant professionals with decades of experience. Erin Comeaux, the district's Grants Coordinator, just marked ten years at Pasadena ISD and runs the pre-award side of the program.
She does the prospecting, turns 50-page federal guidelines into one- or two-page summaries administrators can act on, helps build budgets, coordinates with program staff, and handles grant submissions. Before Pasadena ISD, she spent her career in a community college system and before that at a nonprofit running basic-needs services. Olivia Smith-Daugherty, the Grants Director, oversees the program, and a post-award compliance team handles reporting once awards come in.
Olivia calls Erin a superstar, the person she goes to: "She's so good at pulling the pieces together and getting what we need, and she uses Grant Frog to make it happen." Erin and Olivia work from a philosophy they call 'grant customer service'. They handle the grant work and the details for the program directors, so those directors can focus on running their programs. Because of their important work, they needed a grants software company that shares that same belief in supporting others.
Project Overview
The team had scaled their grants program through a series of tools, but none of them were built for a school district. An early system they used was oriented toward research institutions and NSF-style grants. It was powerful, but required constant workarounds for a K-12 school district. Another grants tool fit better, but it was retired, and the replacement offered far more than a district needed at a cost to match.
So the team went looking again. They evaluated a few options and chose Grant Frog as the one that actually suited K-12 school district grant work. Grant Frog brought their grant proposals, deadlines, grant reports, and team into one place, and handled the data migration from their previous system.
"We've used a few systems in the past, and I feel Grant Frog has really been able to meet our needs."
— Erin Comeaux, Grants Coordinator, Pasadena ISD
Challenge
Pasadena ISD's team had done excellent work with tools that were never designed for a school district, making enterprise-oriented systems work through years of workarounds. Every hour spent fighting the software was an hour not spent managing grants and making sure the district's projects and kids are taken care of. What the team wanted was a system that truly fit how a K-12 grants program runs.
- A grants tool built for K-12 School Districts - The systems on the market were aimed at research grants or weren't tailored for the full grants lifecycle management a school district needs, as Grant Frog provides. The team wanted something that fit school-district grant work natively, without workarounds.
- Reporting they could tailor to what leadership needs - The team produces a monthly report for administration and pulls historical and trend data on request. They wanted to choose exactly what appears on a report, so they can share a grants overview anytime.
- One clear view of a high-volume grants calendar - Throughout the year, the team researches, submits, wins, and closes dozens of grants. They wanted a single place to see every grant's status, from a potential grant, all the way through to the post-award process.
- A shared workspace across pre-award and post-award - Pre-award and post-award compliance are a vital part of their grants process. They needed to be able to see what everyone was working on and share access to all grants and grant reports.
- Data migration and team onboarding - The team needed years of grant history migrated into a new platform without losing any of it, and the whole department onboarded quickly, with little downtime for a program that runs year-round.
Solution - Grant Frog Grants Management Software
Grant Frog gave the grants team at Pasadena ISD a platform built for how a school district runs its grants, and set up to fit what this district needed. Instead of shaping their work around a tool made for someone else, the team could put their attention back on funding programs for 48,000 students.
- A monthly report for district leadership, without the manual assembly - The team pulls the exact grants and fields they need into a clean monthly summary for upper administration, covering grants by status, proposals submitted, awards with amounts, and the post-award grants under department compliance. Getting the right data to administration is now a quick task instead of a manual build.
- One view of the whole grant pipeline - Every grant lives in Grant Frog with a status, from research through award to close, so that the team can see the full pipeline and deadline calendar in one place. It holds the full range of their work, from a major Javits gifted-and-talented federal application to smaller literacy and foundation requests, with reminders backing the calendar as due dates approach.
- Team collaboration across pre-award and post-award - Proposals, grant reports, and leadership reporting all draw from the same records, and everyone can see what the others have entered. The whole department works from one shared picture instead of several separate ones, which keeps a program this size coordinated.
- Time back for the grants themselves - Fewer workarounds means fewer hours spent making a tool behave and more spent on prospecting, writing, and supporting the program staff who carry the funded work out. The results reflect it: roughly $4 million awarded this school year, with another $4 million pending.
- A data migration and onboarding - The Grant Frog team moved the team's grant records off their previous system and set the account up to fit the district, so their grant history carried forward, and nothing had to be rebuilt. The department was working in the new platform quickly, with no downtime.
A Grants System That Fits a K-12 School District
"You all have been very responsive and very easy to work with, willing to make changes and listen. We've hit some walls in the past with other organizations. This has been more direct. Fewer workarounds, and just easier."
— Erin Comeaux, Grants Coordinator, Pasadena ISD
A grants program deserves tools that work as hard as the people running it. For years, Erin, Olivia, and their team did great work in spite of software that was never built for them. Grant Frog changed that, giving a K-12 district a system that finally fits, and giving a talented team back the time and clarity to do what they do best: find and manage funding for the programs their students depend on.
