Great Lakes Fishery Trust

Objective: Run every grant cycle in one place

The Great Lakes Fishery Trust funds projects that enhance, protect, and rehabilitate Great Lakes fishery resources: research, habitat restoration, public access, and stewardship education. Each year it opens funding opportunities, reviews proposals, awards grants, and follows every funded project through its progress reports to close.

That cycle was spread across a public website, paper and emailed forms, and staff spreadsheets. The Trust asked Web Ascender to design a new website and build one system where applicants apply, staff and reviewers evaluate, and grantees report.

What Web Ascender Did

• Discovery and design - feature planning, wireframes for the application and reporting screens, and a responsive website design
• A website with its own content manager - pages, menus, and side columns the staff manage themselves, with page history, a public resource library, and funded-grant listings
• Funding opportunities - opportunities organized by category, with documents, deadlines, and phases
• A questionnaire builder - staff build each application form themselves, with sections, custom fields, reordering, cloning, and previews, including two-phase opportunities that move from a pre-proposal to an invited full proposal
• Applicant accounts and organizations - applicants register, manage their organization’s details, and add collaborators to a project
• Projects and funded grants - each proposal becomes a project carrying its application, documents, amendments, and grant dates through to closure
• Reviews - reviewer access, scoring, and a review export for the staff’s decision process
• Progress reports - scheduled reports for every funded grant, with reminders, approval and status emails, overdue tracking, and a grace period
• Roles and permissions - staff, reviewers, and applicants each see only what they should, down to individual documents and fields
• Email and outreach - an email template designer and queue, and interest-based notifications for new opportunities
• Reporting - CSV exports of responses, proposals, and projects, plus financial and contract-overdue reports
• Keeping it current - a major Ruby and Rails upgrade with a refreshed interface, reworked attachments and messages, new templates, server and security updates, and a support plan that has kept the system running for more than a decade

The Outcome

Every grant cycle the Trust runs, from the first pre-proposal to the final progress report, happens in one system its staff control. The platform has carried the Trust’s grantmaking since 2013, and Web Ascender continues to support and improve it.

The illustration uses sample data.