"I love the software, and I love how adaptable it's been. I'm happy to continue to sing Grant Frog's praises. The way I know it's working is how much I use it, and that it makes me happy."

Chris DeVore
Grants Manager
The Cabin

About

The Cabin serves as an anchor of literary arts as Idaho's only nonprofit devoted entirely to arts and educational activities that celebrate reading and writing. From its restored log headquarters on the banks of the Boise River, it reaches more than 10,000 people across the Treasure Valley each year, including over 1,500 children and youth. 

Its flagship Readings & Conversations series brings internationally acclaimed authors to town. Their workshops, lectures, readings, camps, publications, and other programs fulfill their vision of creating experiences that promote the power of literature.

Chris DeVore is The Cabin's Grants Manager, where grants are his main focus. His work in Idaho's literary and arts community reaches well beyond The Cabin: he is also Executive Director of the Mountain Home Arts Council, editor of The Whistle Pig literary journal, and a member of the Board of Directors for Arts Northwest. With a background in English literature and years of experience writing and managing grants, he knows both the strategy of building a funding base and the day-to-day of supporting arts organizations.

Project Overview

The Cabin's grants program helps support multiple programs each with its own funders, deadlines, and reporting. Chris keeps a steady flow of grant proposals and reports moving year-round and works to grow their grant program to ensure support of their literary mission.

For years he ran all of it across an outdated grants system with grants, reports, and tasks kept in separate places. There was no single view of a grant from research through reporting.

He moved to Grant Frog to bring the whole process into one platform built for grant work. Proposals, grant reports, funders, deadlines, and tasks now live together, with automated deadline reminders and a grants calendar, funder relationship management, and the Funder Intelligence database of 200,000+ foundations for funder research, plus a white-glove migration that carried his history over. 

What stands out to Chris is simple: Grant Frog is a tool that keeps The Cabin’s grant program running and one that he’s happy to work in each day.

What The Cabin needed most:

• One place for the whole grant process instead of grants, reports, and tasks in separate tools
• A way to keep grant timing straight - when they applied to a grant and when to expect to receive notice of a grant award
• Quick answers to grant and funder cultivation - who needs a thank you letter, whose logo as a supporter is displayed, when a grant decision is expected
• One organized home for his grant content and records
• The to report on their grants pipeline - what’s been awarded, what’s been submitted, what grants are up next

Challenge

Chris built The Cabin's grants process over the years with the tools he had - an outdated grants system. But as he continued to grow the program, he wanted a dedicated grants tool made for the entire grants process, so he could spend less time on admin and more on writing proposals and finding funders. A few specific things got in the way.

• Grants, reports, and tasks lived in separate places. His reporting, tasks, and grant records didn't talk to each other. He got some alerts, but there was nowhere to see a grant from research all the way through reporting.

• Grant timing was hard to keep straight. A grant at The Cabin might be applied for two years out or two months out. He often had to answer "what season is this for?" or "when did we apply versus when do we expect to hear back from the funder?" - and there as no easy way to search by when an answer was due.

• Full insight into the grant details. Who do we need to thank? Whose logo goes on this program? When will we hear back on that grant? Getting the answer meant digging through files or going off memory.

• Reports were pieced together by hand. Building a report for leadership or the board meant pulling data from multiple places, looking through several files, and assembling it manually.

Solution

Moving everything into Grant Frog changed the way Chris able to work and allows him to full confident in The Cabin’s grant program. Instead of rebuilding the same information across an outdated grants system and separate files, he works from one source. The grant, deadlines, grant report, and funders are all in the same place when he needs them.

The payoff shows up in multiple, mighty ways - no more wasting time digging through multiple files, the ability to quickly generate reports, being reminded or any grant deadline, and being able to answer questions about any grant with a quick glance. 

• Complete grant pipeline outlook and overview - Chris tracks every grant, grant, report, and task inside of Grant Frog. Decisions about what to apply for next are based on the whole program, not a partial view.

• Instant answers to any grant question from leadership or programs - Decision dates, who to thank, whose logo goes where: he searches Grant Frog and has it, instead of digging through files. His old setup couldn't search by when a decision was expected; Grant Frog can, and he uses it constantly.

• Reports for leadership in one step, not several - He pulls a report straight from Grant Frog instead of gathering data from one place and assembling the rest by hand. With his fiscal year set in the system, the totals are already correct when leadership asks.

• Tasks and reminders that keep it all on track — He assigns tasks to himself related to grants or reports, and can assign tasks to others. Automated reminders go out ahead of deadlines, so the process stays coordinated and moves to the next step. The whole program lives in one place instead of on one person's computer and mind.

A Team That Answers

For Chris, the features are only part of it. What stands out is having a team that answers, follows up, and keeps improving the tool. When he has a question or feature request, the answer is always the same: how can we make this work for Chris and others better?

Keeping Idaho’s Literary Arts Funded

For The Cabin, keeping grants in one place means Chris spends less time managing information and more time doing the work that funds the programs - the author series, the school residencies, the summer camps, and the Idaho writers it publishes each year.

Details

• Industry: Nonprofit / Arts / Literary Arts
• Function: Grants Management / Development
• Organization Type: Nonprofit — literary arts center
• Location: Boise, Idaho
• Annual Budget: $1M
• Use Case: Grant Proposal Tracking · Grant Report Compliance · Funder Relationship Management · Foundation Discovery · Deadline Management · Task Management
• Service Provided: White-Glove Data Migration · Onboarding & Training · Ongoing Customer Support · Funder Intelligence
• Migrated From: An outdated Grants system