The Duke of Edinburgh Awards – Grant Management

The Duke of Edinburgh Awards transformed their Grant Management processes by leveraging Microsoft Dataverse, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 for seamless data centralisation, process standardisation and enhanced operational efficiency.
The Duke of Edinburgh Awards (DofE) had identified the need for the standardisation and centralisation of their Grant Management processes. They had already committed to the Microsoft Technology Stack and wanted to move as many core processes into it as possible. Additionally, they needed the Microsoft Dataverse to serve as their central data repository, consolidating data that was previously scattered across multiple third-party systems. Integrating Grant Management into Dataverse was a crucial part of this process.

An automated process captures grant requests submitted via DocuSign and creates a new record in Dynamics. Grants are tracked against client data, greatly streamlining the approval process.

A business Process Flow leads operations officers through a pre-defined grant approval process, thereby ensuring legal requirements are met and all grants are treated the same.

Raw data is stored in Dynamics 365 whilst the signed DocuSign document is saved to SharePoint, giving DofE control over data integrity and retention policies.

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Company Information

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is a NonProfit awards programme for young people aged 14 to 24 focusing on volunteering, physical activity, developing skills, and planning and carrying out expeditions. The DofE is run in schools, youth clubs, hospitals, fostering agencies, prisons and sports clubs in more than 100 countries. Nearly 30% of 14-year-olds in the UK started the Bronze award in 2022-3 They operate a franchising model, providing support and funding to licenced organisations to operate the Awards. They also monitor and accredit a national network of approved activity providers twice a year. Through their Access Without Limits funding programme, they provide free access to the DofE for young people living in difficult circumstances and to train a network of adult volunteers providing an estimated £17 million worth of volunteering hours each year.
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What Was Delivered

A new table and model driven app, both called Grant Management, were created with the table adhering to a data structure based on the Grant Management application form already built in DocuSign. Automation was achieved via a Power Automate Cloud Flow in conjunction with the out-the-box DocuSign connectors and custom connectors built using DocuSign’s Rest API. On top of using the raw data from the DocuSign envelope to create a record in

Dataverse, the flow saves the completed DocuSign document in a SharePoint folder linked to the record it has just created.

It links the record to the correct Account and flags potential duplicate applications.

Further automation is used to notify the necessary parties when a grant application has been received and at various stages of the approval process.

Operations officers were further assisted by a Business Process Flow that guides them through the required checks to approve the grant.

This ensures all grants receive the same treatment and building it helped standardise the process across all regions where there was previously variation.

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What The Client Said

“As our charity is 100% cloud-based, predominately built around the Dynamics and Office 365 family; we had to ensure seamless integration between Dynamics CRM and our bespoke eDofE platform. FormusPro have really helped us achieve our aims and objectives at every step of the project.”

What We Do

Helping businesses, SMEs and charities of all sizes digitally transform the way they work with customisable, user friendly, all-in-one software solutions.

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To find out about how we create systems around the Microsoft D365 platform or to ask us about the specific industry focused digital management systems we create, get in touch.

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