The subsidies distribution system for the Center for the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Children

Project

Within the framework of the national project "Education" (approved by the Presidium of the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and National Projects, Protocol No. 16 dated 12/24/2018), the Center's activities consist in advising parents and legal representatives of children, as well as helping citizens who want to become guardians and foster parents.

To achieve these goals, modernization and development tasks were set:

1. Information and consulting portal "Растимдетей.РФ", where citizens can find the necessary information and request individual advice and assistance.
2. Subsystems for the distribution of subsidies for profile accountable NGOs that provide targeted assistance to parents, guardians and children (according to Order No. 178 of 04/16/2021 within the framework of the federal project "Modern School").

Our tasks included the creation of a subsystem for the distribution of subsidies.

Previously, when applying for a subsidy, each NGO had to provide at least 14 paper documents. The examination of applications was carried out in two stages. At the first stage, applications were checked for completeness and correctness of registration and could be rejected in the absence of any of the necessary documents, and this was found out only at the time of opening the envelopes. At the second stage, experts conducted a qualitative assessment of applications according to nine criteria. The application was accepted if it scored more than 25 points out of the maximum possible 48. In controversial cases, the application was sent to the third stage of selection — the presentation of projects.

After the conclusion of the agreement, the grant recipient must send several paper documents in the form and within the established time frame: reports on expenses and achievement of indicators, an analytical report. It was also necessary to report monthly and quarterly expenses by e-mail. Hundreds of such letters accumulated in the mail of the responsible employees of the Center for a month.

There are now more than 150 such grantee organizations, and the procedure for granting subsidies and receiving reports significantly burdens the Center's employees. The project was designed to minimize the cost of working time and reduce the volume of paper document flow when issuing subsidies and receiving reports.

Tasks

The essence of the project was reduced to the key tasks of automating the processes of conducting All-Russian grant competitions. Our two modules allowed us to implement all the requirements — TOT Select for collecting applications and reports and TOT Expertise for evaluating them.

In general, the system had to perform four large tasks:

• automatic verification of applications at the first stage of selection;
• examination of applications at the second stage of selection;
• collecting reports from grantees and generating printed documents;
• formation of a structured database of NGOs and their applications for subsidies.

Implementation

The whole project took about 4 months and included 4 main stages:

1. Pre-project survey.
2. Implementation of the module TOT Select to collect applications and reports from accountable NGOs.
3. Implementation of the module TOT Expertise for the examination of grant applications.
4. Personnel training, pilot operation and acceptance tests.

We have solved all the tasks in full. Now the procedure for collecting applications and reports has become faster and more transparent:

Without paper
An NGO employee submits an application for a grant through the system, attaching all the necessary digital documents certified with an electronic signature. Similarly, reports on the expenditure of subsidies are submitted. You don't need to print anything.

Automatic screening
The system automatically checks the application for completeness and correctness of filling in and availability of the required documents. The application is not accepted until it meets all the requirements. This saves time for specialists — they work only with full-fledged applications.

Expertise directly in the system
There is no need to submit applications for examination to some external specialists. You can check the documents and evaluate the relevance of the application within the system and issue a conclusion — whether it is worthy of a grant or not.

Current statistics
All applications and reports remain in a single database. You can trace the history of each application and grantee. Naturally, the database can be filtered, sorted, uploaded to Excel, otherwise why is it needed.

Hand on the pulse
All participants in the process are always up to date. Users receive automatic notifications about the change of the application status and the onset of deadlines.

Total

The customer was afraid that in accountable NPOs, the employees responsible for reporting would not be able to understand the new system for them. However, the fears were not justified: all reports were submitted on time and in the right form. The curator of the project from the Center himself understood the system perfectly and began to zealously adjust it to the tasks of the organization.

This project is a vivid and rather classic example of how digital transformation works. The already well-established and understandable business processes of the customer are significantly accelerated due to automation; all objects are systematized, complete information on them is found in a minute; the working time of employees is used more efficiently.

It is especially pleasant that the customer is not a technology corporation, but an organization dealing with acute social issues. This is the first such customer in our practice. It is very motivating to realize that our solutions will help to help those who need it faster.