Questions Asked

User Interview Analysis: Christine Lopes (Grants Coordinator, Uniondale School District)

1) Executive Summary

Christine Lopes is a highly experienced Grants Coordinator whose workflow represents a hybrid model: she and an external consultant both prospect for grants, but the consultant handles the primary writing for large, competitive bids. Christine’s core responsibilities are

internal coordination, prospecting and eligibility vetting, budget creation, and managing the entire post-award lifecycle. Her most significant challenges include the highly

manual data reformatting required for reporting , the "disappointing" high-effort/uncertain-reward nature of the application process , and a specific, painful compliance workflow for finding and managing Minority/Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE).

2) Core User Pain Points

• Manual Data Wrangling for Reporting is a Major Bottleneck

  • Christine identified this as her biggest challenge; every grant requires data in a different format, and her team must often reconfigure data "by hand."

  • A specific, major pain point is linking

    local student IDs to state student IDs, as they are not connected in any system and require manual searching for every report.

• Time-Consuming Grant Discovery

  • Searching for opportunities is "not straightforward." While she uses Grants.gov and state websites, she finds that prospecting for

    private foundations is particularly time-consuming because their websites must be read thoroughly to understand their specific priorities.

• Frustrating Pre-Award "Legwork" with Uncertain Payoff

  • She describes her role in the application phase as doing the "legwork"—making connections and creating budgets—as the most difficult part of the process. The effort is significant, and it is "disappointing" when the grant does not come through after the investment of time.

• Painful MWBE Compliance Workflow

  • A New York State requirement to allocate ~30% of grant funds to Minority/Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs) presents a significant hurdle.
  • The state-provided website for finding these vendors is "horrendous," and managing the associated paperwork is a tedious, manual process.

3) Key Insights & "Aha!" Moments

The Coordinator as "The Connector": Christine's role is less about writing and more about being the central hub. She connects the external consultant with the right internal people (data director, superintendent) and ensures the smooth flow of information and approvals.

Data Exists, but Formatting is the Bottleneck: Uniondale has strong data infrastructure with PowerSchool. The true pain isn't a lack of data; it's the "last mile" problem of extracting and manually reformatting that data to meet the unique specifications of each grant's reporting template.

State-Specific Compliance Creates Unique Pains: The MWBE requirement is a perfect example of a non-obvious but severe workflow challenge. Christine stated that a tool to automate the search and paperwork for this would be "amazing."