The answer library

Every funder asks for your mission statement, your EIN, your board list, your standard evaluation approach. The answer library stores those once so you stop hunting through last year's proposal for wording you already have.

Find it under Grant Center → Settings → Answer library.

Adding an answer

Go to Grant Center → Settings → Answer library.
Click Add answer.
Record the question as a funder would ask it, then the answer text.
Choose a category, add tags, and set a review date.
Save.

Categories cover the sections most applications ask for in some wording or other: organization background, mission and vision, statement of need, program description, methodology, evaluation, staffing, governance, budget narrative, partnerships, equity and inclusion, sustainability, and other. They affect filtering and nothing else.

Status — the part that matters

Text from this library goes to a funder over your organization's name. So "somebody wrote this once" and "this has been checked and is current" have to be visibly different things — otherwise the library's convenience is exactly what makes a stale paragraph easy to send.

Two rules protect the approved badge:

Editing the text of an approved answer sends it back for review unless you are an administrator. Silently keeping the badge is how an approved paragraph quietly becomes something nobody has read.
Only an administrator can move an answer into Approved. Anyone who may edit can retire, un-retire, or leave an answer as a draft.

When an answer stops being approved, its approval stamp is cleared rather than left standing.

Review dates

Set a review date on anything that goes out of date — staff counts, financial figures, "we have served X people since". Answers past their review date are flagged as stale and counted at the top of the library, so a review is a short list rather than a re-read of everything.

Using an answer

Find the answer, copy the text, and paste it into the application. Record the usage against the grant so the library shows where each answer has been used — useful when a funder asks a follow-up question about something you wrote, and useful for spotting the answers that carry the most weight.

Answers that have been used cannot be deleted, so the record of what you sent stays intact. Retire them instead.