Dec 11, 2018 | News
By Carla Lutner
Chief Operations Officer
You’re not alone if you have sometimes found it difficult to use the Gwaii Trust’s online grant application process. Several years ago, we decided to reduce, as much as possible, the huge amounts of paper consumed through our application process and move it entirely online. As you can imagine, while this did accomplish our aim of decreasing paper use, we ended up with a bulky and complicated website, which has never quite worked as well as we would like.
In early October, our website crashed completely and while eventually it did come back up, our online applications did not completely recover. We have not been able to accept online applications ever since. To solve this challenge temporarily, we put Word versions of most of our applications on our website, and asked islanders to email completed applications to staff while we searched for a better solution.
The outcome of all this is that we will be transitioning to a new online grant management system, which will be much easier to use. We’re also working on a whole new website, but we realized we needed the grant application portion immediately. The first five online grant applications – Community Innovation, Vibrant Haida Gwaii Communities, Continuing Education, Travel Assistance and Major Contributions – will go live on December 15. The remaining grant applications will be rolled out over the first quarter of 2019.
Meanwhile, we received a great response to our call out for website redesign proposals and are pleased to announce PathWise Solutions have been selected to begin work on the new site in December. By April 2019, we expect to launch a completely new website that will function the way we’ve always wanted.
By Carla Lutner Chief Operations Officer
