Meridian Foundation Grants

The challenge

Before

Meridian Foundation deploys roughly $24M a year across forty grant cycles supporting youth and education programs across the United States. Applications came in by email PDF, were logged in Excel, scored on a shared Google Sheet, voted on at committee, and then disbursed through a finance system that had no link to any of the above. Reporting back to the board on portfolio outcomes required a six-week scramble at year-end, and the program officers admitted they often could not remember which conditions they had attached to which grant.

• Grant applications received as email PDFs, logged into Excel by hand
• Scoring done on a shared Google Sheet with manual rubric application
• Committee voting recorded in meeting minutes, not in any system
• Disbursement happening in finance with no link back to application
• Grant conditions tracked in a Word document per grant, often forgotten
• Grantee reports emailed as attachments, filed in inconsistent folders
• Year-end portfolio report taking six weeks of analyst scramble
• No way to surface which programs were producing measurable outcomes

The solution

What we built

We built a grants management platform that owns the full lifecycle from applicant intake to portfolio reporting. Applicants apply through a branded portal with field-level rubric mapping, document upload, and budget structuring. Internal review routes the application to assigned program officers with structured scoring against the cycle's criteria. Committee deliberation is supported by a meeting-mode interface that captures votes, conditions, and notes in real time. Approved grants flow into a conditions tracker — every condition has an owner, a due date, and an evidence requirement. Disbursement is initiated from the platform and reconciled back to finance through an integration with the foundation's general ledger. Grantee reports come in through the same portal, mapped to the original logic model, and roll up to portfolio dashboards that show outcome metrics by program area. The board now sees a live portfolio dashboard instead of waiting for a year-end PDF.

How the system flows

1. Application Submitted→Eligibility Check→Program Officer Assignment
2. Rubric Scoring→Committee Bundle→Meeting Mode→Vote Captured
3. Approval→Conditions Tracker→Owner + Due Date + Evidence Required
4. Disbursement Trigger→Finance Integration→Payment Confirmed→Audit Log
5. Grantee Report→Logic Model Mapping→Outcome Metric Aggregation
6. Portfolio Dashboard→Program Area Roll-up→Board Briefing
7. Renewal Application→Prior Cycle Context→Prefilled Workflow

• Conflict-of-Interest declarations captured per scorer per cycle
• Document retention scheduled per IRS and state attorney general rules
• Branded applicant portal with field-level rubric mapping