Rural County Halves Grant Research Time and Grows Pipeline

Organization Profile

• Industry: County
• Location: Rio Grande County, Colorado
• Number of Employees: 125
• Population: Approx 11,000
• Tyler Client Since: 2018
• Tyler Products Used: ERP Pro, Content Manager, Time & Attendance, Assessment & Tax Plus, Records Management, Payments

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Challenges

Rio Grande County sits in south-central Colorado, a rural county of just over 11,000 residents. For most of the last five years, its entire finance department was one person: Amanda Klapperich, the county’s chief finance officer, who was hired in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among her responsibilities were researching, applying for, and managing awarded grants. From the start, the volume of grant work was unsustainable for the staff available to handle it.

“When I started with the county almost five years ago, we had maybe 10 to 15 grants that needed to be managed,” Klapperich said. “And that very quickly increased to, now, more than 40 grants.” For a rural county, grant funding is not optional. It pays for the projects the county takes on where other funding sources fall short. But finding those grants meant going from site to site, checking eligibility, and tracking deliverable requirements, all by hand.

The workload had outgrown the staff. “I can’t manage 40 grants by myself without a tool,” Klapperich said. “I can’t research for new grants. I don’t have the time or capacity.” She went to her board and told them she could not take on more. The county’s grant portfolio stalled at 40, the most one person could manage.

Determined to find a way to manage more grants with the resources available, Klapperich began exploring new approaches to grant management.

Solution

Klapperich’s involvement in developing a grant management tool started at the Tyler Connect conference in San Antonio. Tyler’s team introduced an early concept of the solution at the event, and Klapperich did not wait to be asked. “I immediately raised my hand and said, ‘I want to help. I love this idea. I want to help,’” she said. That was the start of a working partnership that shaped the product itself.

What she pushed for most was a way to follow a grant through its entire life cycle. “They have taken my suggestions, my ideas straight out of my brain and put them, essentially, directly into this application,” Klapperich said.

The result tracks each grant from searching and researching opportunities to applying for and ultimately receiving funding. The tool also lets her clear any grants she has ruled out with a single click, so it no longer clutters her view.

Rio Grande County had moved their ERP Pro software to the cloud after struggling to work remotely during the pandemic, and with the web-based software, she could keep working from anywhere. The grants tool brought her grant research into the same interface. “We now have it all in one place as much as possible,” she said.

She was deliberate about building something that could improve grant management for any government. “It’s not just tailored to Rio Grande County’s process,” Klapperich said. “It’s tailored to what I have seen to be any grant process,” from a one-person department to a large finance team.

Results

The time savings were immediate and measurable. “We’ve gone from probably three days of reading through 894 grants to paring that down to maybe a day and a half, cutting research time in half for us,” Klapperich said.

The time savings helped in two ways. It freed Klapperich to research and apply for more funding rather than stay capped at 40 grants, and it gave her room to catch up on day-to-day finance work that had been pushed aside. For a department that had been stuck at 40 grants, that recovered time has made it possible to take on more.

Klapperich is clear that the impact of this grant management tool can reach beyond her own county. “I know my story is not unique,” she said. Plenty of government finance teams are looking for ways to streamline grant work. “It’s not getting any easier,” she said of grant management. “If anything, it’s just getting more competitive.”

For Klapperich, the lesson behind Rio Grande County’s partnership with Tyler is straightforward. “We all have a voice, and it’s important to share that voice,” she said. “All you have to do is raise your hand in a conference and say, ‘I’ll help.’”