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Frequently Asked Questions

New Features to Help You Flourish!

New Features!

The Community Foundation’s new Grant Portal will provide helpful and exciting new features for applicants, while streamlining efficiencies for our staff on the backend.

Click to read about these new improvements:

Once you register in the new Grant Portal, you don’t have to wait for approval to begin applying for grants as you would in our old Grant Portal. Our team will regularly check new profiles to ensure there are no duplicate users or organizations being created. old

The new Grant Portal will auto–save your work every 100 characters you type and when you click out of a question. You can also click Save at any time, typically located at the bottom right of the page:

Through the new Grant Portal’s collaborator feature, more than one person can work on an application together. You may find this helpful if you’re a nonprofit leader collaborating with a contracted grant writer, or to ask a fellow staff member or volunteer to review the grant before you submit it. Collaborators do not have to complete user registration and you decide whether they can view, edit, or submit on your behalf.

Review this helpful article to learn more about using this option. (Please note, in our old Grant Portal our staff had the ability to add multiple organizations to a single user’s profile, allowing them to toggle between organizations. This is no longer possible in the new Grant Portal, however, the collaborate feature can be used instead for people who need to work on grant applications for more than one organization.)  

Grant Agreements, Progress Reports, and Final Reports will all reside within the Grant Portal. You will no longer need to work with DocuSign or external word documents to complete these – they are all built into the workflow of the system, along with prompts and email reminders prior to deadlines when applicable.

Please note that in the new Grant Portal, grant agreements, progress reports, and final reports are all considered “Follow up forms”. 

In some instances, you may be able to copy answers from other grant applications you’ve already submitted into the new Grant Portal.  Review this helpful article to learn more about using this option. 

Most questions on applications in the new Grant Portal have been set to the maximum character count. This does not mean we want you to write long answers – it just means that we value your time and don’t want you to lose time wordsmithing to fit limiting character counts.

Please do your best to be concise and remember that sometimes staff and grants committee members may be reviewing twenty or more grant applications.  

Frequently Asked Questions:

 

Yes, in almost all cases, you will need to re-register for the new Grant Portal. For recipients with outstanding progress or final report(s) on grants awarded in the old Grant Portal, an account has been created for you for the purposes of migrating the outstanding report(s). You should have received an email from [email protected] on February 28 notifying you if an account has been started for you prompting you to set your own unique password and login to view the outstanding report forms, which are called “Follow Up Forms.” If you did not receive this email, please check your spam or junk mail.

No, our old grant portal is no longer available.

There is no limit to the number of people representing an organization (whether staff or volunteers) that can register for the Grant Portal. However, it’s likely you’ll only need one or a few representatives to create their own accounts, thanks to our Collaborator feature, and the ability for primary contacts to see all applications submitted on behalf of their organization. We do not recommend account or password sharing for security reasons.   

Every grant opportunity has its own deadlines which you can find posted under the Grant Opportunities section of our website. With the implementation of our new Grant Portal, deadlines are now 11:59 p.m. on the date of the deadline and we will no longer move deadlines that fall on weekends to the following Monday.  

Our staff has the ability to designate a primary contact and set visibility behind the scenes. If you are a primary contact (i.e., Executive Director, CEO, or Board Chair), please reach out to us at [email protected] to request this access at any time.  

It is highly recommended that rather than having them create a user profile of their own, to utilize the system’s Collaborator feature on applications. Review this helpful article to read more about using this option. 

 

Have you checked your Spam/Junk folder? To ensure that emails sent from the Grant Portal do not go to your Spam, you may want to add Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region [email protected] to your safe sender list. 

We do not recommend using the Grant Portal as a research tool. The best and most accurate and up-to-date information about grant opportunities is available on our website. It is very important to read the grant guidelines for each opportunity prior to completing the application in the Grant Portal.  

First, please check our Grant Portal Guide. If you are not able to resolve the issues with the help of the provided tutorials, please send an email to [email protected] with questions or concerns and we will ensure the appropriate person from our staff or software support team assists you.

Reach out to [email protected] and our team can disable the individual’s account. You can let us know as well if you wish for others in the organization to view submitted applications or need to complete a started application from that staff member and we can reassign to a different user.   

 

If you don’t see a specific grant application listed, it’s probably because it is not accepting applications at that time. Application open and close dates vary depending on the grant opportunity. Please refer to the grant guidelines on our website for more information on timing and availability.