Case Study

Summary

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) oversees Grants.gov, the federal government’s one-stop shop for grantmaking that disburses more than $300 billion in grants each year. With the goal of making Grants.gov the simplest, most accessible, and easiest way to find and apply for financial assistance, HHS tapped Nava to help scale modernization efforts of Grants.gov. This includes work on Simpler.Grants.gov, which is the beta site where HHS is building out modern architecture for Grants.gov. 

Approach

HHS wants the Grants.gov modernization process to be highly transparent. As such, all of the software on Simpler.grants.gov is open source, meaning anyone can access the code or leave suggestions on how to improve the site. We’re helping HHS build stakeholder trust by sharing out analytics data from Simpler.Grants.gov and by actively engaging the public in planning, design, and implementation.

Outcomes

In service of HHS’ goals to make Grants.gov more usable, accessible, and transparent for grant seekers and grantors, Nava is helping the agency with:

• A revamped search experience and redesigned opportunity listing to make it easier for people to search for grants they qualify for. 

• A simplified grant application workflow. 

• Building and nurturing an open source community.

• A comprehensive communications program to engage the public.

• A Co-Design group to collaborate on work with community members. 

Process

Building transparency with open source software

To ensure Simpler.Grants.gov is as transparent as possible, HHS is maintaining an open source approach to the project. This means giving the public access to things like the project’s roadmap, code, and decision record. It also means building resources that foster engagement with an open source community. This empowers developers, designers, and others to contribute to various aspects of the modernization effort. 

We’re helping HHS build a developer portal, which will act as a centralized hub for resources, documentation, and tools on how to contribute to the Simpler.Grants.gov ecosystem. We’re also working with HHS on outreach and engagement efforts to onboard new contributors and foster a vibrant open source community. Lastly, we’re partnering with HHS to host code and design challenges where members of the open source community can compete to propose technology improvements. 

Fostering an open source community has far-reaching advantages. To start, gathering feedback from community members helps HHS improve Simpler.Grants.gov. For example, HHS decided to prioritize a simplified authentication process after one community member highlighted how difficult it is to log into Grants.gov. Open source software can also help community members; developers who previously built custom software to comb through grants data can now access that data via HHS’s application programming interface (API). And perhaps most importantly, building open source software can enable other government agencies to leverage code that has already been successful. 

Improving usability with human-centered practices

Our team is helping HHS improve the user experience of Grants.gov through a revamped search, opportunity listing, and application workflow. 

The search and opportunity listing updates offer a simpler user experience, improved search relevancy, and opportunity information in plain language. After HHS published the initial versions of the search and opportunity listing, we received useful feedback from the Grants.gov community and helped HHS make adjustments accordingly. This included usability fixes like making it easier to share a search and solutions to common grant seeker needs such as saving a search or a funding opportunity.

We also helped HHS build out functionality for funding opportunity email notifications that applicants can opt in to. With this feature, applicants will receive a notification with new opportunities that match their saved searches. They’ll also be notified if one of their bookmarked opportunities gets updated, and importantly, applicants can opt out of email notifications for a particular saved search or bookmarked opportunity in a single click. 

To support HHS in building a simpler application workflow, we plan to conduct interviews with HHS staff, Grants.gov’s contracting teams, and partner agencies. This will enable us to craft a service blueprint showing the current application flow through Grants.gov and what a simpler flow could look like. We’ll then help HHS prototype the new flow so we can begin to gather feedback and iterate.

We’re also helping HHS improve the usability of Simpler.Grants.gov with a Co-Design effort that gathers cohorts of community members to advise on Simpler.Grants.gov over six to eight months. Our Co-Designers are grantwriters, non profit directors, community organizers, technical professionals, and small business owners. Engaging with them enables real grantseekers to provide ongoing feedback about our planning and design processes.

In the first Co-Design session, we built a rapport with the Co-Designers, established guidelines as a group, and asked community members about the challenges they face in finding and applying for grants on Grants.gov. In the next session, we presented our product roadmap and tied it to the medium-term and long-term outcomes our Co-Designers would like to see. Understanding the Co-Designers target outcomes helped us write a vision statement focused on increasing capacity for grantseeking organizations — something the Co-Designers identified as an important outcome. 

We then shared the vision statement with the Co-Design group and asked for their feedback. We also began to brainstorm what a simpler application flow would look like by identifying what’s currently working and what isn’t. Going forward, we plan to explore other workstreams with our Co-Designers. 

Leveraging open communications to enhance accessibility 

To be transparent and ensure that the wider Grants.gov community stays up-to-date on the modernization process, HHS has built out a robust communications program that includes a new brand identity, voice and tone guidelines, public demonstrations, email newsletters, and a public wiki site. 

The Simpler.Grants.gov wiki site is a public-facing knowledge base that contains information about how HHS is building Simpler.Grants.gov. It offers everything from decision records to the product roadmap. Nava is working with HHS and other vendors to hone aspects of the wiki like information hierarchy, plain-language writing, and governance.

Nava also partnered with HHS to roll out a new brand identity on Simpler.Grants.gov. To ensure the new brand meets the grant community’s needs, we relied on existing user research from a prior vendor, interviewed stakeholders, and conducted competitive analyses of other brands. The new brand identity is approachable, trustworthy, accessible, innovative, and conveys a unified message to the public. In the same vein, we helped craft a Voice and Tone Guide for all the content on Simpler.Grants.gov, ensuring consistency across the site. In the spirit of transparency, HHS published these guidelines on the Simpler.Grants.gov wiki. 

To keep the Grants.gov community abreast of the project’s progress, we helped HHS create a branded newsletter that shares updates on features development, the open source community, and more. As of early January 2025, 2,552 people were subscribed to the newsletter.

Finally, our team has partnered with HHS to host public demonstrations of our work. The first demo took place on Jan. 15, 2025, and covered the project’s roadmap and milestones. Nearly 1,000 people attended the demo, signaling strong public interest in HHS’s modernization efforts. 

Conclusion

Grants.gov is an essential resource to connect the public to federal funding. To ensure that the service is as usable, accessible, and transparent as possible, HHS partnered with Nava among other vendors. Together, we’re fostering an open source community, building human-centered features, and sharing our progress through strategic communications. Our shared work will help over 10 million people who visit Grants.gov every year. 

Special thanks to Michelle Min, Brandon Tabaska, and Andy Cochran, who contributed to this article.