Case Study: UNIFEM — Fund for Gender Equality
Customized online grants application system and backend interface for reviews
Challenge:
The Fund for Gender Equality of UNIFEM is the women's fund at the United Nations. Since 1976, it has worked at advancing gender equality on the national level in countries spanning all regions of the world. The grants process had been traditionally served via paper submissions, a long and tedious process. A generous commitment from the Government of Spain enabled the Fund for Gender Equality to implement an online grant processing application. Under a tight schedule and with limited IT resources, the agency needed a solution that would be quick, dependable and robust.
Solution:
Ops Divina developed an online grants application system accommodating lengthy and technical grant application submissions on a compressed timeline. The user interface provided application processing in five languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Russian. The applications included various types of question/answer formats including dropdown selections, check box options, essay text fields and required document upload capabilities. The advanced database configuration enabled the processing and archiving of the multiple data formats and in multiple languages. Additionally a highly customized backend admin interface was built to enable online application submission reviews and a multi-phase rating system with several levels of user access. The user-friendly online grants processing increased grant application submissions by 175%, facilitating the international grants application process in an expedited fashion.
