Grantee Webinar: Paul Coverdell and DNA Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction Programs

ANDREA BORCHARDT: Good afternoon and welcome grantees of the Coverdell and DNA Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction Production Programs. My name is Andrea Borchardt and I'm a Senior Forensics Policy Advisor within the Bureau of Justice Assistance or BJA. We're quite happy to have you here and appreciate the time you've taken from your schedule to attend this training webinar today. We chose to combine the webinar for these two grantee pools because there's a lot of overlap in the grant administrators with these two groups and we hope to make the best use of your time. I'm going to now turn it over to one your JustGrants trailer, Ms. Jennifer Jeffries, to discuss the webinar grant roles. Jennifer?
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. Thanks, Andrea. Welcome to today's session. And I'd like to begin by first orienting you all with the Webex platform. This Webex session allows participants to use the chat and Q&A functionality. Video has been disabled and all participants are currently muted to limit background noise. Next slide. If you need technical assistance, please select the chat box to alert the host. If you cannot hear, click the arrow to--next to the mute and unmute icon. If you are still unable to hear, please dial into the meeting using the meeting invitation details. Next slide, please. During this presentation, we do encourage that you submit your questions via the Webex Q&A functionality. On your screen, you may locate the Webex Q&A box in the bottom right-hand corner of your Webex viewer. Please address your questions to all panelists in the Q&A box. By selecting all panelists with your submission, our team will be notified of your question and this may be helpful for others to be able to see your question on the webinar. Lastly, we did receive a few questions for today's session that we will be addressing throughout the presentation. If we don't address your specific question, please feel free to add that to the Q&A box and we will address it during one of our pauses for questions and answers. Now, I would like to turn it back over to Andrea to present our next few slides. Andrea?
ANDREA BORCHARDT: Thank you, Jennifer. Before we get into the meat of our training today, I need to provide the DOJ disclaimer essentially saying that any opinion stated today are those of the presenters and not necessarily those of DOJ. Next slide, please. Our agenda today will be to quickly give you a welcome, explain what BJA is, give you an introduction of--to the staff working to administer your funds, provide an overview of the CEBR Logic Model, and then get into the bulk of the training today which is to go over JustGrants and how to accept awards, submit progress reports, and submit GAMs. Next slide, please. I want to give everyone a warm welcome. We're very excited to have the forensic capacity programs here at BJA. As you may know, they are recently transferred from NIJ starting last fiscal year approximately in March. We're quite excited we finally built up our forensic unit within BJA and we're very pleased to have you with our--with our team. Next slide, please. As you all likely know, again, these programs were transferred from the National Institute of Justice to the Bureau of Justice Assistance since I think it helps to orient oneself to the menagerie of government acronyms and agencies. This is an old chart of the Office of Justice Programs or OJP. OJP is one component of United States Department of Justice, and our mission within OJP is to increase public safety and then improve the fair administration of justice in America. Within OJP, there are six main offices, BJA, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, National institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention, Office for Victims of Crime, and the Office of Sex Offenders Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking or the SMART Office. Next slide, please. Within BJA, we strive to help make American communities safer by strengthening the nation's criminal justice system. With the transfer of the forensic capacity programs, we now have the forensic unit staff with subject matter expects to help with these programs. Next slide, please. When an award is made within BJA, the administration of funds and monitoring the performance as [INDISTINCT] main unit, the Programs Office, The Policy Office, and the Performance Metrics team. Next slide, please. This is the BJA Team that you will likely interact with or some of you interact with parts of this team on a daily basis when working on your award. First and foremost is the Programs Office who works to administer your funds and ensure compliance with applicable loss. These individuals are on the top of the slide from left to right. Julia Anderson is a Retired Naval Officer who has about five years of Grants Management experience. Alan Spanbauer is the Chief of the unit who has 14 years of Grants Management experience, who's also a Drug Chemist, and a Published Research Toxicologist. Next is Christine Torres who has 25 years of Federal Service. Monte Evans who has 15 years of Grants Management experience. And Kathy Manning who has over 10 years of Grants Management experience. One of these--one of the things that these folks want to make sure to stress to you is that while they are the ones you primarily interact with, there are also many layers of approvals needed for things like GAMs for the grant adjustments. So if you plan to submit any changes to your project, please ensure that you build and leave time for all the reviews and approvals needed to make in order to complete the GAM. I kind of liken it to my experience with admin and tech review in the lab. I may have finished my report, but a bunch of people are still going to have to look at it before I can send it to the [INDISTINCT] the next on the slide is Michael Adams on the bottom row to the left. He represents the Performance Team where they evaluate our performance metrics and help ensure that we have proper and measurable data with which to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs. And finally in the Policy Office with Forensic Subject Matter Experts and help advise the Programs Team when they have questions about the solicitation, forensics, or any Forensic Laboratory Medical Examiner issues. We're on the bottom row, next to Michael. And from left to right is me, Andrea Borchardt and I'm a Forensics Analyst. Next is Lindsay DePalma, and then Vanessa Castellanos, they're both associates of [INDISTINCT] Hamilton and they've supported these programs for many years. Next slide, please. This is our contact slide, so it has our email addresses and phone numbers. I'll pause on this slide for a few seconds to give you guys an opportunity to get out your phones, take pictures, copy things down. This event is being recorded so you can ask us this information later but if you want something right away, I advise you to pull out your smartphones and take a picture. Okay. Next slide, please. This is just to remind everyone of the purposes of each program. With Paul Coverdell, this is a congressionally legislated program, aimed at improving the quality and timeliness of services at forensic labs, medical examiners offices, and coroner's offices. This program has both a formula and a competitive component. And last year, we had more than a hundred applicants for the approximately four million available on the competitive component. So it's--not to say competitive too much, but it's highly competitive. As far
the DNA Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction Program, as aimed at improving the capacity of publically funded labs as well as on the processing of case working database samples for entry into CODIS. We do plan to offer both these programs again this year, in FY21 and are hopeful that they'll be released in the upcoming weeks. Please be sure to sign up for alerts from the BJA site to get notified when the new funding opportunities are released. Next slide, please. Something that is relatively new that we do want to make sure you are aware of is the DOJ Interim Policy for Forensic Genetic Genealogy and Searching or FGG, or FGGS. This is a DOJ policy that impacts anyone using federal funds to conduct FGG or FGGS. While it'll have limited impact on-limited to no impact on most of you, I strongly recommend you reach out to me prior to using funds for this purpose so we can assure you're eligible to use the funding for this purpose under your program. You can talk through the policy and how you'll be compliant with both it and with section nine in the associated metrics reporting. There's a link to this, but if you search basically DOJ Interim Policy on Forensic Genetic Genealogy, you should be able to find it on the DOJ website. Next slide, please. And for those of you who are--who are receiving CEBR funds, you may be interested to know that we've recently developed a logic model for this program. I was fairly confused when we started this process but with the help of the performance team. I was safely guided and successfully separated through this and I now am a very, very big fan of using these to help evaluate programs. So Michael Adams, I'll turn this over to him to tell you more about the process. Michael?
MICHAEL ADAMS Thanks so much, Andrea, for that generous introduction. And thank you everyone for attending. I know I've probably spoken to some of you on the phone or email exchanges as I've supported the program for quite some time. So to give you background, first, I'm going to do a quick overview of the logic model for future reference. There will be a email communication to all grantees of the CEBR Program for this logic model and also a in-depth use--user guide on how you can utilize it. So first, how this came about. So based off the [INDISTINCT] report in 2019, there are a few principles and recommendations that BJA agreed to exercise. First communicating the programmatic goals consistently to the grantee population and to establishing clear linkages between the program activities performance measures, programmatic goals and their respective quantitative goals, or otherwise objectives, and, of course, the logic models [INDISTINCT] representation of the relative relationships that laboratories have to meet their programmatic goals, aligning their objectives, outcomes, outputs in respect to their resources and allowable activities during their grant cycle. And, of course, this is to visualize and analyze how the program is expected to work over the grant cycle. Next slide, please. So I'll keep it brief. Again, you'll have a in-depth user guide and your own personal copy sent to your agency likely during the spring, but I'll do a quick overview. Top left-hand corner, the needs statement, this essentially covers the matter at hand or the issue that the program is trying to solve. So in this particular case, untested DNA and laboratories. Top right-hand corner program goals, yeah, this is essentially establishing the pathway to addressing the needs statement with the problem at hand and increasing capacity and significantly improving the amount of increased casework samples that can be analyzed at a laboratory or database samples at a database laboratory. Furthermore, in the furthest left-hand left corner inputs, those
are the various resources the laboratory has added disposal. So, that's staff, software, private vendors. Moving over to activities, these are the allowable activities or the financial levers, if you will, that grantees can elect to utilize to reach their programmatic goals. Third column outputs, these are measurable aspects of inputs used during their activities. So, for example, CODIS uploads CODIS hits. Next to the outcomes, these are changes resulting from activities of the outputs for the program. And lastly, the furthest right-hand column, objectives, is the effort directed to achieve a strategic goal or, in this case, we already have outlined quantitative goals for the program that we worked on about a year and a half ago. So, that's my bit and you'll receive communications from us very soon. Thank you so much and I'll turn it over to Jennifer.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. Thank you so much. So, just before we get into our JustGrants portion in today's session, I do encourage and recommend that everyone use the Q&A box when you're submitting questions. We're getting a few private messages for questions, but we want to make sure that everyone in the call can see the questions because if you have a question, someone else may very well likely have the same question. So we are tracking the questions in the Q&A text box so that certainly will encourage you to submit your questions. Going to JustGrants here, the purpose of today's discussion is to learn more about JustGrants and address some of your questions that you may have. We want to ensure that you are off to a great start. I have the tools that you need to utilize JustGrants. Let's go ahead and look at the agenda and talk a little bit about what we're covering today. We're covering Award Acceptance, Grant Award Modifications, Performance Reporting, and then we'll provide you with some information about help. So, on the screen, here you see the entity User Roles Slide, which outlines the six foundational roles that are available in JustGrants. At this point, you should've identified your authorized users for JustGrants, if you--if you haven't identified your users, here are a few steps to keep in mind. Think about who will be working on your grants currently or in the future. As I mentioned, here are a list of all the users that can be assigned in JustGrants. Once you have determined your list of individuals that you want to assign roles, you want to have your list and invite those individuals in DIAMD and give each person an assigned role. Once you have added them to the system, let them know to be on the lookout for an invitation from the DIAMD system so that they can go ahead and activate, and begin setting up their account. We also created a user role matrix which breaks down each of the roles as well as information of what they can do in the system. So we'll go ahead and provide a link to that particular matrix in the chat. We'll go ahead to the next slide. All right. So for Award Acceptance. Let's review some important roles and processes and the award acceptance process. So the Authorized Representative is the only role that is able to accept or decline an award. It must be the person in your organization with the authority to enter into a legal agreement on behalf of the entity and bind the award--and bind it to an award terms and conditions. The Authorized Representative is assigned at the application submission process. However, the Entity Administrator should verify the correct Authorized Representative to the award package in order to accept or decline the award. If the Authorized Representative has changed since the application was submitted, the Entity Administrator will need to take steps to reassign the correct Authorized Representative to the award prior to accepting or declining. This image
shows steps that are taken that are important in the application and award acceptance process. Here, you see the Entity Administrator and Application Submitter roles are created when submitting through JustGrants--through Grants.gov for the first time. The Entity Administrator needs to create and confirm the Authorized Representative so the Authorized Representative can be included in the JustGrants application submission. If the application results in funding approval, the Entity Administrator needs to invite and register the Financial Manager and Grant Award Administrator that will be responsible for funding the award. The Authorized Rep will then accept the award and once the award has been accepted, you can invite other roles as necessary. So we're going to go ahead to our next demo to look at award acceptance, but--and I'll turn it over to Lisa to walk us through the Award acceptance process. Lisa.
LISA HARTMAN Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much. Sorry about that. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. So I'd like to sort of start by orienting everyone to the JustGrants homepage, which is where you will all find JustGrants as soon as you login. So before we get into award acceptance, I'd like you to notice on the left-hand side, there is a menu option--list of menu options starting with home and going to Entity Profile, Entity Users, Entity Documents, Applications, Awards, Monitoring, and Federal Forms. So those are the general sort of areas in JustGrants that you'll be able to access. The homepage, again, is where you'll start and you'll notice at the top of the main portion of the screen that there is a section for alert. Please do pay attention to these alerts because we do--we do provide information about JustGrants, about changes to JustGrants, and about important deadlines there. So it's definitely worth your while to take a look at alerts. Right below Work Alerts, you'll see My Work List and this is a very important section as well because everything that you find on My Work List is assigned to you and only to you. So, these are all the tasks that you will need to take action on. The types of tasks that are assigned to you are determined, again, by the role that you have and also by the specific awards or applications to which you are specifically assigned. So, I'm going to go ahead and start off here because I know we have some time elements to manage. So, this particular demo, again, sort of walks you through the different sections of this menu and I do encourage you to explore this menu as you can. Notice at the header, there's a little triangle there, that is a sort--or filter a triangle. So it allows you to filter out the particular case type or case ID, case status, that sort of thing. We're looking for the accept/decline award agreement. That status is the one that will locate any new awards that have yet to be accepted or declined. Again, as Jennifer mentioned, only the Authorized Representatives assigned to this particular award is going to be able to do this function. JustGrants very much targets a particular person to manage a particular task on a particular award. So, you have to be both assigned a role Authorized Representative as well as the assigned specifically to this award. So once you open up this award package to take a look at it in order to accept it, you're going to see a number of different sections in here. And each section is going to have to be reviewed and accepted separately. So, here is the acceptance, the introduction letter. The content of that will be displayed. And directly below that, you see a little checkbox with the remarks "I have read and understood--understand the information presented." You have to select that in order to accept that section. The next section is Award Information. You'll see Recipient Information, the Award Type,
the Award Number, et cetera. Again, that section is accepted separately. Then you have the Project Information where you have the Solicitation and title and Application Number, again accepted separately and then Financial Information. If there is an OCFO letter, the content of that will be displayed as well. So, none of these are editable here. You go ahead and just accept this section. Following that is the section for award conditions and they will be--typically there are going to be more than 40. And each one should be reviewed, but you will accept the entire package of award conditions as one. So, we're going to take some time here to scroll down through these award conditions. And, again, I should note that this is--that this is not a real information. This is taken from our testing database. So, this is all sort of, you know, artificial information, but the award conditions, the way it's displayed, is correct. So, again, we'll continue on. And like I said, there are typically more than 40 and we're looking at the 30s right now. I'm going to move through. And at the very bottom of this, we're coming there shortly. There will be a single checkmark to accept all of these award conditions. Notice right below the list, there's a little Load More. So there really actually are more award conditions on this that are not displayed but we're going to go ahead and check this box because we've taken care of all of that. So then finally we have the Acceptance and Electronic Signature section. Once you check out, the system understands who you are and they will--the system will automatically enter your title, your name, and the date and timestamp that this was certified. So really this is the process to accept an award. Again, the Authorized Representative is the person to do this. Just move on the last little bit here. And at the very bottom, you're going to have three buttons that we'll roll down to here in a moment. One of those buttons is the Cancel button which will remove any edits that you've made to this document and return you back to the homepage. You also have the opportunity to either accept or decline this award. And we're rolling down here shortly. The demo is taking longer, there we go. So notice that here we have the Decline button or the Accept button. If you do decide to decline this award, then we'd ask you to provide a justification for declining the award and attach any documentation that you feel might be necessary for that, but we're not going to decline. We're going to go ahead and accept the award. And there we are, we are going to accept. And now once we've accepted this award, you'll see that it's called--it's a Pending Account Creation. So in this particular instance, it is ready to go with the funded award, although there still are a couple of steps that were not completed for the account creation. Typically, if you see something like that, it may mean that you might need to assign additional people to the award. At this point, you would assign a Financial Manager, a Grant Award Administrator. And also if, for instance you are a--you are new to JustGrants, you may need to set up an ASAP, ASAP account for drawing down funds. But essentially, this award is open and ready for work. So, I'll send it back over to Jennifer and we'll see if there any questions.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. Thanks, Lisa. Yes. We do have one specific question around printing capabilities. "Are you able to print out the award or any of the award conditions for approval purposes if you need to?"
LISA HARTMAN At this time, no, and the printing capability for JustGrants is being built in several areas. It is available in a couple of areas, but it is not yet available in others.
So the ability to print--the ability to print is not yet available for the award acceptance piece or the award conditions. Now if you need to have someone else approve it, I think the--one of the best options may be to provide that person access to JustGrants, assign them the role award--or sorry, Authorized Administrator and they can go in and review the award conditions as needed.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay, great. Thank you. Let's--looks like that's the only question we have around award acceptance so I think we can get into our next topic. CYNTHIA GUILLEN: Hey, Jen. I actually--if we could just address this last question that just came in. It says, "Did this part change? Because I was able to print the award and conditions in December." So Lisa, you--I'll let you answer that.
LISA HARTMAN Yeah, that I--that one I would--I'm not aware of the fact that you're able to print the award and award condition, so I can do some research on that and see if that has changed or if that is a capability that I haven't been made aware of yet. So I'll take that question back and I'll provide it to the--to Andrea and her team and she--we can make sure that we get that information to you.
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: Yeah. And Lisa, for further clarification, I'm wondering, you know, depending on your browser, you can click on the browser, will have an option to print and so I believe you may be able to do it that way, but there is not a print feature within the app for award acceptance of this time, correct?
LISA HARTMAN Yeah. That's correct.
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: Awesome, thank you.
LISA HARTMAN Uh-hmm. But I'll follow up on that and get a definitive answer from our--yes, our technical team.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. I'm not seeing any additional questions for award packages. I'm going to go ahead and move into Grant Award Modifications and please continue to provide those questions in our Q&A textbox. It looks like you all are doing a great job of entering those there. So we encourage you to continue to add those questions that you may have. So, again, it's created to update the award details, but it is used only to modify key facts or details about the award. There are three types of GAMs. You have the Project Period Extension GAM, Programmatic GAMs, and Financial GAMs. On the screen, you also can see the individuals that can initiate GAMs and that consists of your Grant Manager as well as you all's grantees. A Project Period Extension GAM is used to extend a project period. A Programmatic GAM is used to update changes in the project scope or to gain prior approval for changes with programmatic costs and activities as determined by the DOJ Financial Guide. Financial guide--GAMs are used to modify budget details or approve a budget that received a conditional clearance when awarded. As you see here under the financial GAMs, there
are three types of financial GAMs, the Budget Reduction GAM, Budget Modification GAM, and Sole Source. You'll notice the very last GAM, Budget Clearance GAM, is initiated by a Financial Staff and that's typically internal DOJ Staff, but with OCFO, so that would not be the grantees to initiate. Users can enter information to GAM. They can save it and you can return at any point to complete and submit. Once a GAM is submitted, DOJ reviews it and they--they'll send a notification whether it's been approved or denied. We'll go to the next slide. Just talk about a few updates and highlights here. So, again, the purpose is just to update award details. GAMs are used to only modify those key details about the award. They're limited to updates or changes to award details, not to confirm or compliance requirements. And a user, you can delete them before submitting. So those are just a few things to keep in mind. On the next screen, here are a few things that are longer processed with GAMs. Before, an entity would use a GAM to change the Grant Award Administrator or the Authorized Representative. Now entities will manage their own users and entity information in DIAMD. Also, entities used to have to process a GAM to release a hold on funds and now this happens in a different area of JustGrants without needing a GAM. So I'll leave this up for just a few moments and then I'll turn it back over to Lisa for demonstration of how to initiate a general process step for GAMs and then I--we'll go and look at a budget modification GAM.
LISA HARTMAN All right, Jennifer. Thank you. We'll go ahead and take a look at GAMs. I know we had a lot of questions on GAMs. So the first thing I'd like to do is show you all where to go and how to initiate any one of the types of GAMs. Then the second demo that I have is walking you through a Budget Modification GAM specifically. We only really have time for one, you know. We could probably take a couple of hours and do them all. But we'll walk through one just sort of as an example. But we do have training materials, videos, and step-by-step instructions on our training website for every type of GAM. So one of the things that I want to talk about first is one of the biggest questions we get is I want to make a GAM but the GAM selection field is grayed out. So this is--this is going to be due to one of a couple of issues. First of all, if you look above in the header, you see that we have a lot of information about the award in the header. Solicitation title, project title, start and end date, managing office, and grant manager. And right below that, you have a field that displays the Grant Award Administrator. And that is the person--and if there is an alternate Grant Award Administrator assigned to this award specifically, those two people can initiate a GAM. Nobody else. So if anyone else is logging in, trying to initiate a GAM, they are never going to be able to get an active field there. That's one of the things that has been happening. So, it's got to be that Grant Award Administrator initiating the GAM or the alternate. The second thing that happens is that it has sort of two different views. Almost every time you log into an award, if you log in, for instance, to the awards from the menu option on the left award,
that will, by default, open the award in read-only mode. That awards list on the left-hand side is intended for anyone who has access to JustGrants awards to be able to open and view an award. But the only other person who's listed as the Grant Award Administrator on the award is ever going to be able to edit anything within the award. One of the best ways to access you award is to log in from the homepage and your My Work List and when you log in that way, it will automatically open in edit mode. If you are working with an award and you do log in from the awards menu, the first thing that you're going to be presented is a list of tasks of different sorts. Everything from programmatic task, to a performance report, to a financial report, and if you are the Grant Award Administrator on that award, you will be--you will see a begin link with the programmatic task. You must click that begin link on the programmatic task in order to be able to edit anything within the award. So, we find that that is--that we know that that's now very intuitive. And we've had a lot of questions about that. But if you ever can't edit an award, look for the begin link on the programmatic line and that will allow you to open and access the award. Once you are in edit mode, you'll see that--you'll notice that award package that we had previously, this was the question that came in initially, the award package that we had previously had a list of different sections that needed to be accepted. The application itself that was submitted earlier had a number of different sections. Once you have an award, you have the different sections of the award that you're going to manage that are very different from what you had in the application. So in the award itself, you have in the left the Award Package. And if you click that header, you'll see everything that was accepted by the Authorized Representative when they accepted the award. Secondly, once the award's accepted, all of the award conditions appear in a list under the Award Conditions tab. And if that-during--when you look at that list, you'll be able to see all of the various award conditions that were agreed to and you'll be able to see if they're all in compliance. Each one is listed as being in compliance or not in compliance. The Award Details tab on the next header over displays information that was in the--in the package that was accepted as award details. In the Performance Management tab, all of your performance reports are going to be listed, those that are--that have already been completed and those that are still needing to be completed. The Funding Balance and Availability will show how much--how much of your funding has been drawn down and it will show is there any withholding or suspension amounts in--on the award. The Federal Financial Report tab will display all of the federal financial reports. Again, the ones that have been completed as well as the ones that are due. The Grant Award Modification tab that we have here, this is where you'll be able to both create and see all of the grant award modifications that are either in progress or have been completed. If there's any--been any monitoring issues or requests, you'll see those on the Monitoring tab. And then Closeout if you want to initiate closeout early, you can do that there. But that having been said, that was the question that came in early, so I wanted to make
sure everybody understood those different tabs. So, I'm going to go ahead and set in motion this demo and we're going to initiate a GAM. So the different types of GAMs, as Jennifer mentioned, we have three different, sort of categories, of GAMS. And that's what you're going to select first in this GAM selection drop down menu. And the demo will move forward here. So there we are, the Financial Programmatic and Project Period Extension. If you select the Financial, you get a subtype drop down that allows you to select one of the three subtypes. The Budget Modification, Budget Reduction, et cetera. If it is a programmatic GAM type, you'll be able to select the Programmatic Costs or Scope Change. And finally, if you go to the Project Period Extension GAM, there are no subtypes, you'll just, by creating a GAM, be able to go ahead and open up a Project Period Extension GAM. Now one of the things that you need to know about this particular type of GAM is that if you're trying to extend your project period within 30 days of the project period end date, you'll need to contact your DOJ Grant Manager because they will have to do that for you. Prior to the 30 days before your project period end date, you will be able to initiate this GAM. All right. So that is GAM initiation. And now I'm going to go through and we're going to walk through the process of initiating and completing a--or submitting a Budget Modification GAM. And this is one of the types that we have. We do have instructions on all types [INDISTINCT] so the Budget Modification GAM is a Financial GAM. We'll select that. And then on the subtype, we'll go ahead and select Budget Modification. And once you have a type and subtype, you'll notice the Create New GAM button becomes blue. We'll click that. And it opens up--it's going to open up the Budget Modification GAM field. So here we are. In the Budget Modification GAM, you see on the left the approved budget which is not editable. That is what is currently listed in your award as being approved. But on the right, the Revised Budget, is where you will enter the total amount that you would like that budget category to come. And in the center, Requested Changes, notice that JustGrants actually makes that calculation for you. So here, we're just going to move $5,000 from other costs into procurement contracts, and that's the only change we're going to make here. But notice the other changes you can make. In the center of the page, you see a little link next to the listing for guidance to the DOJ Financial Guide, and that link will open up that particular section of the DOJ Financial Guide that applies to the Budget Modification GAM. You'll enter a justification for this GAM. You can also upload an Indirect Cost Rate Agreement if that applies to this process for you. And then below, you see we have the option to upload other financial GAM documentation as we did, and then you just upload the document from your workstation share drive. You can open upload Grants Management contract--comments. And these are comments that you might want to provide for your Grant Manager in order to sort of communicate with that--with them about that. So this will refresh here in a moment. I'll try and move this forward, too. There we go. All right. So that will refresh here in a moment. And we will roll down here a bit. All right. We'll keep going. So once you have actually entered
comments for your Grant Manager, they appear below. So let me just scroll down a bit. One of the things you'll find is that whenever you save something, you're always returned to the top of the screen and you have to roll back down to get to where you were, so that's just something that we work with in JustGrants for now. And now here-there's the Grant Management comments again. You just add your comments in there for the Grant Manager and then click the add button and that will then become part of the--there we go. Sorry, that moved a little too fast. So I'm going to stop this for a moment. At the bottom, you have a Cancel button so if you decided to--you don't want to complete the GAM right now and you want to just exit out without making any changes, you can do that. It will maintain the GAM structure, however. You will essentially have already initiated the GAM, which has been empty. If you choose right now to delete the GAM, then you can delete that GAM and it will still remain within your record but it will remain as deleted and resolved. You can save the GAM and come back at a later time or you can use the button to submit and that I believe is what we did here in our demo is submit the GAM. So we'll go ahead and do that and I'll--want to just point out one more thing. Once you submitted a GAM, there's a little purple box up here at the top. It says pending approval. That's the status of this GAM. It has gone off to your grant manager for approval at this time. And that is the process of submitting a GAM. So Jennifer, I'll turn this back over to you so you can talk a little bit about the review and approval process now that we've submitted our GAM.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Thanks, Lisa. So once again once the GAM has been submitted its sent off to your grant manager for approval. If the grant manager approves the GAM and has been sent forward through an internal review process the internal review varies based on the type of GAM and the managing office, so keep that in mind. If the GAM status changes during the internal review process both you and your grant manager will receive notifications. Once the GAM has been approved, it is sent to the financial system and/or ASAP to update the award information. At this point, it can take up to 24 hours to update your funded award with the financial information. So there's a lot of information. So let's see if we have any questions in the Q&A text box. And I know that I saw some coming in. So I'll start with the first question here. How long does it take to actually get your GAM approved or have a GAM approved for grantees? Could we answer that question?
LISA HARTMAN I want to see if someone from the program office may answer that question. That's really outside of the JustGrants system question.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES And you may be on mute, you'll have to take yourself off from mute.
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: This is Cindy. I can answer it because it was answered in the chat. So it should--it can vary depending on the type of GAM, whether corrections are needed, et cetera. I would plan for it to take three to four weeks. If a GAM is rejected, I believe the system will let you resubmit another GAM once this one is fully rejected.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great. Thank you. And can you talk a little bit about the difference between a Programmatic Cost GAM and Budget Modification GAM?
LISA HARTMAN Again, this is--this is not so much a JustGrants question. The one thing that I can add to this is that a Budget Modification GAM allows you to modify the actual figures on your budget. The Programmatic Cost GAM too is something that's a little bit more program-specific. But the Budget Modification GAM will allow you to update your actual budget figures.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Yeah. Thanks, Lisa.
KATHRYN MANNING This is Kathryn Manning. I'd like to chime in…
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay.
KATHRYN MANNING …on that if I may? Just to add that JustGrants treats GAMS a little differently than GMS did. So for formula awards, we are largely not doing the Financial Budget Modification GAMS anymore because formula awards don't receive a final budget clearance from OCFO. So I know some of you have tried to complete a Budget GAM and gotten an error message. So if you're not sure of what type of GAM you're supposed to be doing, I recommend that you reach out to your grant manager first. Just send an email to make sure the GAM is needed and what type it should be. But the advice or recommendation for type of GAM that you're doing may be different than what you were told to do in GMS because JustGrants does take a different approach.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. Thanks, Kathy. Are we able to print GAMS from JustGrants?
LISA HARTMAN At this time, I don't believe that you are. Again, if, you know, I don't believe that JustGrants has that print capability. However, you might try to use your browser print as Cindy mentioned earlier. And if that fails, you can always do a screenshot and print that. But I believe right now there is no print capability in GAMS.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great. And can you speak a little bit more about the roles that can actually submit GAMS? We have an individual where they're the Authorized Representative and they can submit a GAM--excuse me, their Application Submitter and Grant Award Administrator cannot. So could you talk a little bit about who can submit GAMS and--as a JustGrants user versus someone that who cannot? LISA HARTMAN Yes, I can talk a little bit about this. There has been so much confusion around this particular question. So a couple of things about the roles. The way the JustGrants is designed and developed only the Grant Award Administrator is able to submit a grant--a GAM. The alternate Grant Award Administrator can initiate a GAM and can make entries in a GAM but cannot submit. So this is the way that JustGrants is designed. Now, I know that we have had recently some glitches in how our roles have been able to perform within JustGrants. This has actually not helped the confusion but added to it. So I can give you the--what JustGrants is intended to be doing. If you're seeing anything other than that, it is a glitch and will most likely be corrected at some point. So while there might be an Application Submitter, an Authorized Representative, a Financial Manager, there--they might be assigned to that award but they should not be able to initiate or submit GAMS. Only that Grant Award Administrator and alternate can initiate and only the Grant Award Administrator should be able to submit. So again, if you're seeing something else, that is a technical issue that should be reported to our technical support team.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great. Let's see. Will the ability to print GAMs be coming out soon? The popular…
LISA HARTMAN Yes.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES …one, about printing.
LISA HARTMAN I know this print question is--this print question is, you know, is a hot topic. And I know that our development team is really--is really working on print capability [INDISTINCT] of JustGrants. So while we may not have the print capability now, I know that they are looking into solutions for printing not only in GAMS, but also in other aspects of JustGrants. So, again, JustGrants when it was launched, it was launched sort of as a--as sort of a platform on which they're going to continue to build and add features and functionality over time. So, expect that if you don't have it now, it will--you know, it is--it is being considered and the timeline for development for all of these things just varies based on our resources.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great.
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: Thanks, Lisa. This is Cindy. And if I could just add to that. So that question--that answer kind of answers to questions that we're seeing one about print functionality but also about roles. So there's a question about will an alternate Financial Manager be added? This could be eventually added. What we encourage users to do is just make sure that you're signed up for like the news and updates. And so, when these new features are available, you'll receive those notifications and you'll know what features are coming out as they are released.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Right. And it looks like we have one more question about supporting documentation. What type of supporting documentation should it be attached within the GAM? Can we have maybe someone from the program office speak to that question?
KATHRYN MANNING Hi, this is Kathy. I can take that. I think I heard that the question is about what type of supporting documentation to attach to a GAM?
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Yes.
KATHRYN MANNING The answer would vary a little bit depending on the specific circumstances. And so, some of you will say I've been typing in the Q&A, you know, consult with your Grant Manager about your specifics. I want--I want to offer that as my disclaimer. Your specific situation might be more detailed than I'm able to address right here. But in general I would recommend number one, a document that summarizes the changes you're proposing in the GAM. This can, you know, be a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs that says why you're doing the GAM. Second, if there is any change to your approved goals and objectives on the award, you would need to update those goals and objectives. So, the first is sort of just a quick overview summary document of what's changing with the GAM and why. The second is the more formal, "Hey, we're changing our official approved goals and objectives." And third, if there are any budgetary changes and updated revised Budget Detail Worksheet that the revised budget worksheet should still total the entire award amount. You wouldn't want to submit a budget worksheet that only addresses what's changing. Your budget worksheet always needs to total your exact final award amount. So, I hope that's helpful. But again, please reach out to your Grant Manager with specific questions about what's needed for your specific GAM situation.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great. Thanks, Kathy. I think those cover all of our GAM questions for now. So, if we can go and look in our next topic on Performance Reporting. So let's look at the…
KATHRYN MANNING Sorry for interrupt…
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay.
KATHRYN MANNING I just have one more that I'd like to see if Lisa can clarify for us so that…
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Sure.
KATHRYN MANNING …people have this information. So there was a question, why is every function for example a progress report award at the mission, et cetera, given a different ID number that doesn't correspond to other functions of the actual award number? You have to click each one every single time to find the info for--do you have to click each one every single time to find info for a particular grant? Can you speak to maybe like the search features, Lisa, in JustGrants and how--and what connects each of these different functions to all one award and then the awards, the one entity, and how they could possibly use the search feature to help?
LISA HARTMAN Sure. So, the award--the award itself--the award record itself is very complex because while the award record contains information that comes from, you know, your entity organization, it contains the people who are assigned to that award, it also contains within it. You know, it's really sort of a large wrapper that contains within it other individual record. So each performance report is its own record within a larger award. So while that award has a number, each performance report has its own number so that it is differentiated from all of the other reports within that award. So that's what you're seeing. When you see the performance report on your work list, you see that it has its own number and that number is automatically associated behind the scene with the larger award. Now, I can go back and I'm going to--I'm going to go back and just show the homepage here for a moment because it will help you to see how you can associate that. So, one of the things that you're looking at here F is the financial report. You can see the due date and all of that. If you click this little caret, which I can't do because this is actually just a video, it will open up and show you which award it's assigned to. So, again, the--you know, all of the little individual case IDs that are visible here on your work list are actually part of a larger award. But in order to track them separately and have them go through the approval process separately, and have them be resolved separately, they all each have their own individual numbers. So that's really sort of in a nutshell why you have so many different sort of numbers. Is that each task has its own ID number. Did that answer the question?
KATHRYN MANNING I hope so. I think so, Lisa, that gives a lot of clarity and you walked through--back through the steps that I was hoping they'd be able to see so that they could have that.
LISA HARTMAN Okay. Great.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Let's go ahead and move forward to Performance Reporting and the process that you'll go through for Performance Reporting. Okay. Perfect. So on the screen, you'll see this table highlights, general, quarterly, semiannual, and annual calendar dates for Performance Reporting throughout the grant award life cycle. This provides you with a general schedule for performance report frequency and due dates, we'll leave this up for just a few moments so that you can orient yourself with those dates. If you'd like to take a picture as Andrea mentioned, you can take a quick snapshot, but please note that a recording of this webinar will be available after today's session and a later date to download. So don't worry if you are not able to get a screenshot or a picture during the presentation. And next up. I'll turn it over to Lisa for a demo of how to complete and upload performance reports in JustGrants. Lisa.
LISA HARTMAN All right. Thank you Jennifer. So there are two different ways that performance reports can be submitted. And I understand within the group that we have online today, some of you are entering your performance report data into PMT. And if you are within that group, you're going to want to pay attention to the first half of this demo because in JustGrants you'll need to upload the PDF report that you create in PMT into JustGrants and submit it from there. So I'm going to show the first half of the demo is going to be for those of you who use PMT. The second half of the demo is going to be for those of you who are using questions that's within JustGrants. So this is actually--well, this is one demo. It's actually for two completely different processes. So we'll go ahead and start here. And again, this is for those folks who are going to be uploading a PMT generated PDF file. So again, from the My Work List, you'll open the performance report which begins with a PR. You can see the due date. You can see the urgency how many--how many days is it due. Is it past due? And you can see that one day past due this becomes a delinquent report. And you don't want that. Currently, it should be noted that currently due to, you know, sort of early issues with JustGrants and early issues of the performance reports. There is no financial impact to having a delinquent report and until these issues are fixed I don't know the date at which that will be a factor again. But right now, even though your case status is delinquent. You're not having funds withheld for late reports. So we're going to go ahead and wait for the demo to go ahead and select the performance report. When you open the performance report, and again, this is for uploading a PMT report. You'll see the header for the--for the report and the associated--the associated award information at the very top. You'll see that it defaults to a regular report. It will default to a final report only if it's the--if it is actually the final report for your award based on the award project start and end date. So again, you can see the start date, the end date, and the due date for this particular performance report. If you do, if you are closing your award early and you need to change this from a regular to a final report, you can click that final button and you'd have
a pretty serious message here that tells you if you do this, you can't go back. So you do need to confirm that you are changing this to a final performance report. We're not going to do that today. We'll cancel that. You'll see, if you're uploading a PMT report there's a question set section there and it should be empty. The question sets will not appear for you there. But the next--the next demonstration will show you how to deal with the question sets. There's a comments field and you'll be able to enter comments regarding this performance report that are visible to your Grant Manager and anyone Alpha T and J was able to see this performance report. So we'll go ahead and type this. The save button for the comments is actually the save button for the performance report record itself, which is at the bottom of the screen. And once we finish typing in here we'll scroll down and find that save button at the bottom. So, we'll need to do that in order to save that comment. And again, every time you hit save at least for now JustGrants will roll you all the way to start at the top of the record again, so you have to scroll back down. Now you can see that that comment appears here and you can also-this is where you upload your PMT file. Again, you want to upload the PDF form of this, not the Excel version, PDF forms is what JustGrants reads best. Once you upload it, you are able to change the name of the file if you like. You can only have one file with a particular name. So you'll need to--if you have multiple files that you're going to upload, you can upload multiple files, but you're going to need to name them something different. So whether it's adding an ABC at the end, whatever you need to do you cannot have two files with the exact same name. So that's how you would go ahead and upload that report, it's very straightforward. Again, upload as many files as necessary just make sure they have a different name. And do please make sure that the category is performance report for all of those. The category should be performance report. At the bottom, you can cancel, you can save, and come back to submit or you can go ahead and submit this performance report, and that's what we're going to do. And now, we'll--we see that we've submitted this and it has gone off for approval. So that is for those of you who use PMT to generate your report. The next portion of this demo is going to walk through how you would submit a performance report if you actually have a question set embedded in the performance report, and so we'll launch that here in a moment. And while we're looking at this--yeah, there we go. We'll go ahead and launch this. So now this one is a little bit different because if you notice there's a question set link here in the question set section. So that's going to be our first place to go is to click that link to open the question set. And here we go. Sometimes this moves a little slower than I talk. Sometimes it moves a little faster than I talk but we should be able to open that here shortly. And I want to make sure that once we open this that we stop and take a quick look because there's something very important that you're going to need to see here. And that is once you open this question set you see this little begin button here. And again, this is another aspect of JustGrants. That is--the question set will be view only if you were to be able to see it. The question set would be view only until you click this begin button. So the demo is going to go ahead and click the begin button. Actually, before it does it's going to display all of the questions. These are the empty questions here for the question set. Now again, you can--if you want to print these out you're welcome to do that using the browser print or you can use screenshots to capture this information but I don't believe the performance report actually has a print capability just yet. So we're going to go ahead and click this
begin button. And once we do we see all of the--we see all of the performance report questions here in an editable mode. Now the performance report questions are going to change from award to award based on the solicitation requirements. So what I'm showing you here is really sort of just an example of different types of questions and, you know, how to use them. So at the top, the first two are radio buttons. That means you can only make one selection. Right below that we have check boxes. Which means you can select multiple in that section. So the check boxes just allow you to have a multi-select. You can use the bottom right corner the continue button to move to the next page or you can use the header at the top. You see we're onto BJA_stop and notice that in this case as we enter information in one field, it displays additional fields for us to populate. So this capability you might find that in your performance reports as well. And we'll go to the third page here and we're going to, I think in this case we put the little header at the top for the three. And again, here we have drop down menus and all sorts of, you know, other different types of questions here that we're answering. And so I'm going to kind of move forward because I think we've pretty much seen the kind of standard questions that we have moving forward and I believe--this one goes off the rails here for a moment. All right. So here we are on the second to last page for this particular performance report and we'll continue on and finally move to the last one. Notice the little continue button on the very last page no longer says "continue" it says "finish." And it's important to understand that finish does not mean submit. We're going to submit this report elsewhere. Finish just indicates that you're finished with answering these questions. Notice at the end those--most of these questions, the little red asterisk, that's the indicator for a required field. So everything with an asterisk is a required field. And these larger text boxes you can either type or copy and paste your information in here. So if you prepared your performance report elsewhere, you can use the copy and paste function to put your answers in there. So again, now that we finished entering all our questions we are going to click finish. And then I'll show you how to submit which is a separate step. Okay, so then we click finish. And once we do that, it's going to display that same list of questions again but with the answers included. So again, if you want to print this out again the print capability--you see the little print option here, but I think a lot of people have discovered that that will only print the page you're looking at. So you might want to use your browser to print or again if that doesn't work you can just take screenshots of the questions and print those. And again, the print capability is still being worked on. So now here I want you to notice that we have come back to the original performance report screen. One of the things that you want to--want to do at this point is go up to the actions menu and use the refresh option and that's what we did there. Now that we've refreshed we actually have the performance report is here. The status is here and you see this reopen button if you need to reopen it at this point prior to submission. It's very easy to do, you can reopen and you can adjust any questions and answers that you might have. You can reopen a progress report after you've submitted it but of course it's always easier to reopen it, you know, from--prior to submission. Again, you have the option to add comments. You have the option to upload additional performance report documentation and then now we're going to submit when you click submit at the bottom of this screen. Now submitted, and as you can see at the top the status has changed to pending review meaning that is at the
Department of Justice for review. So Jennifer, would you like to talk a little bit about the approval process?
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Thanks, Lisa. Yes. So once your performance report has been submitted, it'll be routed to your Grant Manager. The Grant Manager or Reviewer only has the option to approve the performance report. Currently, there's no way to change request a performance report in JustGrants, so your Grant Manager will communicate with you via email, if additional information is requested. The Grant Manager will then upload any additional information provided by the Grant Award Administrator. Once all additional information has been provided by the Grant Manager or Reviewer--excuse me. Once all information has been provided, the Grant Manager or Reviewer will approve the performance report and that will show in your system, that it's been approved. And it will continue to the DOJ internal review and approval process. So let's go to the next slide and look at deliverables. So deliverables are found in the performance report tab in the funded award. They are sorted by category type to be sure that the attachments are associated with the correct functions in JustGrants. There are deliverable categories consisting of monitoring issues, GAMs, and performance reports. So just think when you're selecting what attachments to include make sure you're selecting the right deliverable categories. Okay. To upload a document to JustGrants you're going to navigate to the performance management tab in the funded award and use the add attach button in the deliverable section to begin. Enter and drag the file into the system or either you can locate it from your device. Once the attachment has been located, select the open button, select the deliverable category, and enter a comment indicating the nature of the deliverable. If it applies to the performance report or, again, a response to a monitoring issue, be sure to provide information indicating to which issue or performance report your deliverable is associated with. Award compliance deliverables have a separate category, and that comment should reflect the condition to which it is associated. Once the deliverable has been uploaded, it appears in the deliverable section with a link to open the document. All users with access to the funded award are able to view the deliverable. This applies to the users within your organization as well as your grant manager and other DOJ personnel that are part of the review and approval process. So I know that there are a lot of questions about performance report and I wanted to kind of post those to the group here. So we do--we did have a few folks ask about the pending status, they submitted their progress report. Can you speak a little bit about pending status and they're not able to move forward in JustGrants, Lisa?
LISA HARTMAN Sure, I can. The word pending is applied to virtually every step-status, and you can almost always ignore the word pending. You might have pending actives, you might have pending review, you might have pending initiate closeout, these are all different statuses in JustGrants and for some reason the system places the word pending at the beginning, so in other words, the word pending can be ignored. Whatever--what's important is what comes after that. So not knowing what the--that next word is, it's--can we just both address that question but pay attention to the word that comes after pending.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay, great. Okay. Let's see. We spoke a little bit about the change requested process. Can you just reiterate that, Lisa, that currently, if you have to make any changes to your performance report, how would you go about doing that with your Grant Manager?
LISA HARTMAN So because currently there's no change request process in the performance man--or performance report section, then all of that sort of has to be handled outside of JustGrants. Typically, the best way to handle that would be to--for the--for you to exchange emails with, you know, with the updated information that might be necessary, and then the, you know, and then you as the grantee would then send that information by email back to your Grant Manager. They can then upload whatever information is needed into the system from their end. JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay, great. Next question. What attachments are expected for formula award progress reports? Maybe someone from the program office can speak to that question?
ALAN SPANBAEUR Hi, this is Alan. If this is a Coverdell Award, there's--there should be a question set, it may have not been uploaded yet for you, with the answer to the question set, in the performance management tab. For CEBR grantees, they are required to submit supporting documentation along with the PMT report.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay, great. Thanks, Alan. Okay. Looks like folks are interested to know, can you reopen a previously submitted PM--excuse me, performance report, and if so, can that also be applied to FFRs? Are you able to open and resubmit FFRs?
LISA HARTMAN Yes to both. You can--I'm sorry. No, there's no change request possible to a performance report. For the FFR, there is a reopen option, you can reopen and adjust the information on an FFR and resubmit. The caveat to that is you can do that until you submit the next FFR. So, you know, if your FFR was submitted for instance on March 30th and your next FFR is not due till June 30th. You can reopen and resubmit that FFR all the way up until June 30th but when you submit the one-submit the next one, then the first one can no longer be updated.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Great. All right. Cindy, are you seeing…
ALAN SPANBAEUR Lisa, just as--oh, Jennifer, just one clarification.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Oh, go ahead, Alan. Yeah.
ALAN SPANBAEUR The--just to clarify, the grantee will be able to open up the FFR and do the changes. The grant managers and OCFO cannot change request or make those changes for the grantee.
LISA HARTMAN That is correct. Yeah.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Cindy…
KATHRYN MANNING And this is Kathy, I just wanted to chime in with one more point of clarification on editing a submitted performance report, everything that's been said is accurate in terms of we cannot change request a performance report once it's been submitted in JustGrants but if the person was asking whether or not it's possible to edit a PMT report, you would be able to go back into the PMT system and make the changes that you need in PMT, generate a new report, and then email it to your Grant Manager for update in JustGrants.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES Okay. Great. Thanks, Kathy and thanks Alan. Any additional questions, Cindy, that you're seeing in the Q&A box before I move on to resources?
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: Sure. There's a question about the amount of files that can be uploaded, so the question is did they expand the amount of files that can be uploaded? I was only able to add five during my past performance report.
LISA HARTMAN So my understanding is that there should be no limit to the number of files that you can upload. However each individual file is limited to 25 megabytes.
CYNTHIA GUILLEN: And that was all. I had--I just want to address something, I think, that's come up a couple of times. For users that need support and are going to reach out to user support, is it also helpful from what I'm gathering that they also contact their Grant Manager just to let them know that they're having the issue, so that they have the support that they need?
KATHRYN MANNING This is Kathy. I'll chime in and say, sure, it's helpful to copy us-to copy your Grant Manager so that we're aware and if there's anything that we can see to offer advice on or potential solutions for, we're happy to do that. Unfortunately, there will often be times where there's not an action we can take on your behalf or not something we can do to resolve the problem for you, in which case, we would say, you know, please do reach out to the helpdesk if you haven't yet.
ALAN SPANBAEUR Thanks, Kathy. This is Alan. Also, one note on when uploading documents into the system, there is a character limit on the name of the document, so the shorter the name of the file, the better that the system will allow the upload of the document.
JENNIFER JEFFRIES All right. So I'd like to go ahead and just share a few resources that will be helpful, these are really great questions, we appreciate you sharing those in the Q&A text box, and we hope that you found that those answers were helpful. What's the next screen here? Well, we've mentioned here a few times on the call, there is a user self-support website that you can refer to for tutorial videos, step-by-step guides, FAQ, help documents, as well as contact information for our helpdesk, so you can certainly reach out, and I would bookmark this page because this is a really great page to have as a resource, as you're navigating through JustGrants. And I'm going to go
ahead and put the link in the chat for you all to have. We did mention here that we do have user support, and on the screen you'll see the user support email address as well as phone number. We'll go to the next slide. You can contact our technical support team at [email protected] or by phone at 833-872-5175. They do have hours Monday through Friday, 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, as well as weekend and federal holiday hours from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM. So we certainly would recommend if you are having those technical difficulties with your account or you're not able to navigate through the system, as we've mentioned here, having some issues, please reach out to our technical support team. All right. Go to the next slide. If you are reaching out to the technical support team, there are a few things that may be helpful to have handy to speed up your request. This is a list of items that you may want to have, but please provide as much detail as possible about the task that you're trying to accomplish. The more specific information that you provide, the better it is for us to kind of expedite and address your issue that you're encountering in the system. And then last step, in order to stay up-to-date on the latest information related to JustGrants, we suggest that you sign up for any news and updates. You can do this from the support page on the link that we have listed at the bottom of the screen. We also have a life management--grant life management life cycle that's available to help you get through to the JustGrants system. And as I mentioned, that provides you with tutorials, e-learning videos, and step-by-step guides of how to navigate the system. You can certainly reach out to our JustGrants support team, our training support team if you have training-related questions, at [email protected]. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Andrea to close us out for today's session.
ANDREA BORCHARDT Thank you, Jennifer, and thank you to your team for this really great presentation on JustGrants, I know we covered a lot of material and I know some of the materials went very quickly. But as a reminder, we are recording this or we did record this for your future reference and we'll send the link via the original email chain that provided the link to this training today. I want to thank you again so much for your time. And Jennifer, if you don't mind switching back to the slide that has all of the contact information just so we can end on that, it's pretty early on in the webinar. Is Lisa managing the webinar?
LISA HARTMAN Yup. I'm moving it backwards, so I'll have it here in a moment.
ANDREA BORCHARDT All right, thank you. And we'll finish up with the contact information so you can copy down our email addresses and our phone numbers, so you can reach out to us if you run into any hurdles with your grants. Again, reach out to your grant managers if you have any issues with your projects or with any of your-submitting of the changes in JustGrants, we're here to help you, and the--again the phone numbers and email addresses will be there. Thank you again so much for your time and this concludes the webinar.