Grants – the bane of many fundraising professionals. Talk to almost anyone in the nonprofit industry, and it becomes evident that grants and grant writing is the task that everyone loves to hate. For starters, finding and applying for grants is expensive. Finding a grant can take from one to three days, and writing a grant application can range from $600 for a small foundation grant to $18,000 for a complex federal grant. This is a huge expenditure for most nonprofits when you consider that only 40% of applications are awarded. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t do this type of return-on-investment calculation, or they are so strapped for cash that they are forced to incur the costs on the chance they might win the funding.
This was the constant battle that founder Ansley Fender witnessed in her work as a nonprofit professional. And so was birthed Atlas Solutions, a collaborative platform for finding, managing and reporting on grant funding.
Disheartened by the status quo
For Fender, nonprofit work never proved to be quite the right fit. In college, Ansley studied music until her career was sidelined by injury. She turned her focus to nonprofit management, which seemed to be a natural fit given her upbringing in nonprofit arts organizations.
The characteristics of nonprofit work that Ansley admired are ones that you can see mirrored in her startup:
- Scrappiness
- An agile mentality
- The ability to innovate with little-to-no resources
But it was these exact same characteristics that Fender began to find disheartening as she began her internships in nonprofit management: the constant struggle of manual processes, the dreaded spreadsheets, ancient software programs, and processes that no longer provided a clear return to the organization. Ansley entered the nonprofit world with a desire to work with teams solving the world’s problems but watched instead as the nonprofits she so admired were cut down by budget constraints, a lack of resources and government red tape.
A move to consulting and the advent of Atlas Solutions
After starting her family, Fender decided to pivot to nonprofit financial consulting where she did everything from basic bookkeeping to financial consulting and education for organizations that did not have the resources to hire internal financial professionals. Over time, Ansley began offering grant management and witnessed how time-consuming and manual traditional grant management processes are. She wondered how nonprofits providing critical services to the community could be financially cut off from missing a single grant reimbursement deadline and how nonprofits spending 50-60 hours each week on grant management could still need support from her business.
It made Ansley question every step of the grant cycle and begin thinking of ways to improve it. And thus, Atlas Solutions and the dream for capacity building came into being for Fender.
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