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, or open it from a grant with Saved Answers on the grant's Schedule.

Adding an answer

Go to Grant Center → Settings → Answer Library.
Click Add an 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.

Finding an answer

Search questions, tags and answer text, and narrow the list by category or by status. The status filter is how an administrator pulls up exactly what is waiting on review. Past review date only shows the answers that are due a check.

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.

Three rules protect the Approved badge:

Editing the text of an approved answer sends it to Needs Review, for everyone, administrators included. A self-review is not a review, and Approved is what the next person reaching for the paragraph reads as evidence that somebody else checked it. An administrator can approve it again in one more step.
Only an administrator can move an answer into Approved. When anyone else marks an answer Approved, it is saved as Needs Review instead, so it goes to the reviewers.
Anyone who may edit can retire, un-retire, or leave an answer as a draft. Choosing Retired while you edit the text is respected; it is not redirected to review.

When an answer stops being approved, its approval stamp is cleared rather than left standing. When it is approved again, the stamp records who approved the current text, and when.

Review notifications

When an answer becomes Needs Review, the reviewers are told: each gets an in-app notification and an email naming the question, so it does not sit unnoticed in the list.

The top of the Answer Library says who that is: Review notifications go to followed by the addresses. Grant administrators can click Change to name the reviewers, as a list of email addresses separated by commas. If nobody is named, your grant administrators are notified.

Review dates

Set a review date on anything that goes out of date, such as staff counts, financial figures, or "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.

Viewing and copying an answer

Every saved answer has a View button, available to everyone who can see the library. It opens the full text, read-only, with its word count and a Copy button. Copying from here does not record a use, so it is the way to read or borrow a paragraph without claiming it went into an application.

Using an answer on a grant

Open the grant and click Saved Answers on its Schedule. Retired answers are not offered.
Find the answer and click Copy & Record. The text is copied to your clipboard the moment you click, and the use is recorded against the grant.
Paste it into the application.

If your browser blocks the copy, the use is still recorded and the text is shown so you can select and copy it by hand.

Recording the use means the library shows where each answer has been used. That is 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.