From Procurement to Purpose: Transforming Grantmaking in the Era of Opioid Settlement Funding

When new funding arrives with high expectations and little infrastructure to support it, the pressure to deliver is immediate. That was the reality for Colorado Region 10 Opioid Abatement Council (ROAC) when it was charged with stewarding $50M over 18 years in a rapidly evolving policy environment.

This session shares how Region 10 transformed its operations from fragmented, procurement-based workflows to a purpose-built grant management approach powered by Euna Solutions. We'll walk through what drove the change, how leadership secured executive and cross-department buy-in, and how the team restructured internal processes to support transparency, collaboration, and long-term grantee success.

The results speak for themselves: Region 10 has emerged as a leading council among Colorado's 19 ROACs, recognized for operational clarity, transparent processes, and effective grant stewardship.

Attendees will leave with practical strategies for navigating implementation under public scrutiny, improving review and decision-making workflows, strengthening post-award grantee relationships, and streamlining the applicant experience, all while building organizational confidence in a new way of working.

If your agency is managing new funding mandates and needs to evolve quickly without sacrificing accountability or adoption, this session is for you.

• How to Transition from Procurement-Based Processes to True Grantmaking Infrastructure: Practical steps for evaluating legacy workflows, identifying misalignment, and redesigning systems to support transparent, accountable grant programs—especially in new funding landscapes like opioid settlement dollars.
• Driving Executive Buy-In and Cross-Department Adoption During High-Visibility Change: Real-world strategies for aligning leadership, council members, and staff while implementing a new platform under public and policy scrutiny.
• Implementing a Grantmaker Framework Through Measurable Operational Transformation: How improved workflows, structured review processes, and streamlined applicant experiences positioned our council as a leading example among our peers.

Transforming Detroit from Bankruptcy: Best Practices in Data Management Supporting Transparency & Outcomes

Detroit's road to financial recovery is one of the most remarkable turnaround stories in modern municipal history. This session opens with the context that made transformation necessary: the city's 2013 bankruptcy, the fiscal conditions that led to it, and the establishment of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO), the centralized body that would shape Detroit's path forward.

From that foundation, the session explores how Detroit built its grants infrastructure from the ground up. That includes the creation of a centralized Office of Development and Grants, and the city's adoption of its first-ever grants management software in 2015 through eCivis. A core part of that story is how Detroit approached data quality early on, establishing naming conventions, document standards, and metrics tracking that became the backbone of its reporting and ultimately supported the city's navigation out of the State's Financial Review Commission oversight.

The session also covers how Detroit developed processes for tracking grant implementation progress and milestones, keeping funds on track and spent in alignment with their intended purpose.

The results speak for themselves: a significant reduction in audit findings, a growing portfolio of funders and total dollars raised, an improved credit rating, and a population increase for the first time since the 1950s.

• Good data management requires consistent standards and routine quality checks. Without them, transformation stalls.
• A single approval process for grant applications and awards gives organizations full visibility into their portfolio. Simple in theory, complex in practice for larger organizations.
• Milestones and spending steps need to live in one place everyone can access. Silos kill momentum. When teams can see progress clearly, reporting gets easier, funders get confident, and more funding follows.

Budget Book, Done Right: Lessons from Frederick County

When Frederick County Government set out to build their budget book in Euna Budget's transparency solution OpenBook, they learned that the real work happens before the first page is published. In this session, the Frederick County team walks you through their end-to-end implementation experience, from identifying the data fields and custom attributes you'll need to defining the structure and organization of the final book.

You'll hear honest lessons learned, practical tips and tricks, and the questions they wish they'd asked before starting. Whether you're pre-implementation or mid-build, this session will help you avoid common pitfalls and get the most out of Budget Book Studio.

• Identify the right data fields before you build your budget book
• Structure your budget book for public-facing clarity
• Avoid common implementation pitfalls
• Know the questions to ask before you start

Grants as a Strategic Growth Tool: Moving from Funding to Transformation

Grants are more than funding opportunities; they are strategic tools that can drive organizational growth, innovation, and long-term transformation. This session explores how organizations can shift from reactive grant-seeking to intentional funding strategies that align with mission, operational priorities, and measurable outcomes. Attendees will learn practical approaches for building sustainable grant pipelines, strengthening partnerships, and leveraging ERP and grant management systems like AmpliFund to improve visibility, compliance, and operational efficiency. Through real-world insights and actionable strategies, participants will gain a framework for using grants to create lasting organizational impact.

• How to Align Grants with Strategic Goals: Attendees will learn how to evaluate funding opportunities through a strategic lens, avoid mission drift, and build a grant alignment framework that supports long-term organizational priorities and growth objectives.
• How to Build a Sustainable and Scalable Grant Pipeline: Participants will gain practical strategies for forecasting opportunities, improving internal collaboration, defining roles and responsibilities, and creating repeatable systems that increase funding readiness and long-term success.
• How Technology and Systems Strengthen Grant Management: Attendees will understand how ERP and grant management systems, such as AmpliFund, can improve transparency, compliance, reporting, financial tracking, and cross-department coordination — allowing organizations to move from reactive grant management to strategic operational excellence.

From Initiatives to Impact: How High Point Aligned Its Budget Process with Strategic Goals

Discover how the City of High Point transformed their approach to budgeting by intentionally linking departmental investments to the city's strategic plan. As Budget and Performance Director, Stephen Hawryluk sits at the intersection of two disciplines that too often operate in silos. This session walks through High Point's evolution from informal initiatives to a formalized strategic planning process, including how they gained council buy-in and modernized a budget office to meet the demands of a growing city.

• Aligning your budget process to a multi-year strategic plan
• Connecting financial decisions to measurable community outcomes
• Driving organizational change incrementally and getting leadership on board
• Building transparency and accountability into your process

Grant Management Reimagined: Centralization, Collaboration, Results

This session will share the transformation of our grant management process from a fragmented system reliant on Excel spreadsheets and Outlook communication to a centralized, collaborative platform using AmpliFund. Prior to implementation, grant information was often stored across multiple files and email threads, and accountability for timelines and deliverables was difficult to track across teams, project directors, and principal investigators.

Through intentional change management, leadership engagement, and cross-department collaboration, we implemented a centralized system that integrates task management, automated alerts, digital approvals, and real-time visibility into grant activity. This transformation not only improved efficiency and accountability but also strengthened compliance and ensured that critical grant information was accessible across the organization.

Participants will gain insight into the practical steps required to move from siloed processes to a transparent and collaborative grant management framework while fostering adoption and cultural change across teams.

• A clear understanding of the risks associated with decentralized grant tracking systems, including reliance on spreadsheets and individual knowledge.
• Practical strategies for implementing centralized grant management systems that improve transparency, accountability, and efficiency.
• Approaches for securing executive leadership buy-in while driving adoption across departments, project directors, and grant teams.
• Lessons learned from managing organizational change, including training, communication, and building a culture of shared responsibility.
• Examples of measurable outcomes, including improved deadline management, reduced project delays, stronger compliance, and better protection of grant funding.

Personnel Module for Budgeting Salary and Union Contracts

Salary budgeting is challenging enough. Add union contracts, step increases, and benefit allocations, and it becomes one of the most demanding parts of the budget process.

In this session, Champaign Park District shares how Euna Budget's Personnel Module supports personnel cost forecasting, salary budgeting, and the management of contractual compensation rules, along with practical lessons learned from implementing these processes in local government organizations. Whether you're just getting started or looking to get more out of the module, you'll walk away with practical ideas you can apply to your own budget process.

• Build accurate salary budgeting at the position level
• Manage labor agreements and forecast long-term budget impacts
• Reduce manual calculations and create more time for strategic financial planning

From Implementation to Impact: How Vibrant Emotional Health Uses Euna to Strengthen Grant & Budget Management for National Mental Health Crisis Support

Vibrant Emotional Health implemented Euna Solutions to support federal grant and budget management operations, managing workflows across $1 billion over five years. Framed through the lens of a national, mission-driven organization, this session explores the challenges Vibrant set out to solve, from fragmented processes and limited visibility to complex compliance requirements, and how a unified technology solution drove measurable change.

Attendees will get an inside look at how Vibrant automated more than 20 critical grants management processes with full audit traceability, established role-based access controls to safeguard sensitive financial data, and streamlined subaward management by enabling end-to-end e-signatures, contract approvals, and invoicing within a single system.

Beyond technology, the session covers the operational shift that followed: stronger cross-functional alignment, increased efficiency, and a more scalable infrastructure to support high-impact, nationwide work. Candid lessons learned, from implementation hurdles to change management strategies, offer a practical roadmap for organizations looking to modernize their own systems.

Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how the right technology can improve day-to-day operations and build a stronger, more responsive foundation for mission delivery.

• How to successfully implement enterprise technology solutions in complex, mission-driven environments.
• Proven strategies to streamline and automate grant and budget management at scale for nationwide federal grants.
• Real-world lessons in change management, adoption, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Practical approaches to strengthen compliance, visibility, and operational efficiency.
• How to align technology investments with mission impact and organizational growth.

Procurement and IT Collaboration in Action: How TxDOT Closed the Gap Between Procurement and Mandatory Advertising Requirements

Most procurement teams using a sourcing platform still have at least one mandatory step that lives outside of it — a required posting site, a comptroller system, or a public notice board. The result: solicitations built carefully in one system are manually re-entered in another; the accuracy depending on whoever did the copy-paste that day.

In this session, leaders from Texas' Department of Transportation share how they automated the connection between Euna Procurement and Texas SmartBuy — and what procurement and IT had to figure out together to make it work.

The Integration is the outcome. The more transferable story is how they got there: how procurement framed the problem so IT could act on it, what options Euna provided to enable the work to be done, and how several teams across two agencies built something neither could have designed alone.

If your agency has a compliance step that lives outside your sourcing platform, this session offers a practical model for what that collaboration can look like.

• How to frame a procurement problem so IT can scope and prioritize it
• Which decisions inside Euna, such as data standards and solicitation structure directly shape what was possible on the integration side
• Why upstream data quality in your sourcing platform determines accuracy and compliance everywhere downstream
• What TxDOT's experience tells you about the timeline, resourcing, and cross-functional alignment required to automate a manual compliance step

DFW Airport's Path to More Strategic Procurement: Marketplace, Data, and Freed-Up Time

Public sector procurement teams are being asked to do more with the same headcount they had five years ago. For DFW Airport, the answer wasn't a bigger team, but a smarter way to work.

In this session, LuAnn Fisher, Procurement Systems Manager at DFW Airport, shares how a shift to Euna Marketplace freed her team from the administrative overhead of under-threshold purchasing and created the visibility needed to move from reactive to proactive procurement planning.

And that's just phase one. LuAnn will also share what DFW is building next and what it could mean for procurement teams ready to think bigger.

If you've ever wondered what your team could accomplish with less administrative burden, this session is for you.

• How to introduce a new purchasing process without disrupting your team or your suppliers
• What it looks like to redefine the day-to-day operations of procurement staff
• The spend patterns that helped identify when informal purchasing should become a formal contract
• How DFW is thinking about centralizing their procurement data and what it will unlock for their team and stakeholders

Grants Dashboard in Action: Real-Time Insights for Smarter Decisions

This session would show users how to use Euna Grants for data visualization to show patterns, identify gaps in funding areas, and make informed decisions using real-time data in the system. The session would walk participants through how to use the dashboard functions already within Euna and to leverage this capability to visualize their entire funding ecosystem during the entirety of the grant lifecycle. This would allow users to transform grant management decisions from reactive to proactive and would help better inform elected officials and citizens on these projects.

• How to use and customize the dashboard tool for their needs; move away from a list, Word document summary of data to a visual representation of it all in one central place
• How to identify funding gaps and patterns
• How to use the data visualization to make informed decisions at a granular level

From Compliance to Cost Savings: Getting the Most from Your Marketplace

Most organizations know where their big contracts live. It's the everyday purchasing -- the tail spend, the off-contract buying, the purchases that slip through without visibility -- that quietly erodes your budget and compliance posture.

DeKalb County School District set out to fix that. By implementing Euna's Marketplace solution, they didn't just streamline purchasing -- they unlocked savings in their first year that exceeded anything seen in recent history, while giving procurement and finance teams the visibility they'd been missing.

In this session, Fred Christopher, Procurement Manager III at DeKalb County School District, will walk through what it actually took to get there: how they selected the right suppliers to set the implementation up for success, how they drove buy-in from end users across a large, distributed organization, and how the results made a compelling case to finance leadership.

Whether you're evaluating Marketplace, mid-implementation, or looking to expand adoption, you'll leave with a practical roadmap and lessons learned directly from the field.

• Strategies for driving end-user adoption across a large organization
• How Marketplace creates shared value for both procurement and finance teams
• What real-world savings and spend visibility look like in year one

From Spreadsheets to Statewide System: Rhode Island's Euna Grants Implementation Journey

In 2021, the State of Rhode Island set out to replace a fragmented, Excel-based grants management process across 30 state agencies with a unified Euna Grants GMS. Four years later, that system is live, integrated with their Financial Management System, and fundamentally changing how they manage federal awards and subrecipient programs. This session tells the full story, from the challenge of aligning 30 agencies around a single system, the change management strategies that drove adoption, the technical work of integrating GMS with financial systems, and what sustained success looks like years post-go-live. Whether you're managing a small grants program or planning for growth, attendees will walk away with honest, practical insight from an organization that has been through a full implementation, including what had to be adjusted along the way and what they would do differently.

• Understand the decisions and change management strategies that drove statewide adoption of Euna Grants across 30 agencies — and what to anticipate when scaling a GMS implementation across a complex, multi-agency environments
• Learn how Rhode Island built an integration (twice) between its GMS and Financial Management System, enabling automated payment requests, transaction data transfer, and unified subrecipient oversight
• Gain honest, longitudinal perspective on what implementation success actually requires — and how Rhode Island has continued to evolve its use of the system as agency needs and federal requirements have changed

After Go-Live: The Work of Making New Software Adoption Stick

Getting a system live is the milestone everyone plans for. Sustaining the behavioral change that makes it valuable is often a longer, ongoing journey.

Mark Topping, Director, Procurement and Contract Management Services at MacEwan University, has encountered the adoption challenge from every angle: driving implementations of Euna at two organizations, and joining a third where the system was already live but needed support to regain momentum. That rare 360° view shapes everything he shares in this session.

Drawing on all three experiences, Mark delivers a candid, practical account of what adoption actually looks like in the months and years after launch: where stakeholder resistance surfaces even after training is complete, why users revert to workarounds, and what it actually takes to move people from reluctant usage to genuine confidence in a new platform.

This session is for anyone who has launched new software and watched the energy fade, whether you work in procurement, finance, operations, or any function where change management is par for the course.

• Why go-live is only the beginning of change management, not the end, and what that means for how leaders should measure success in year one and beyond
• Where adoption most commonly breaks down post-implementation: the patterns to watch for and the early signals most teams miss
• How to engage and re-engage stakeholders who completed training but quietly reverted to old habits and workarounds
• What actually moved the needle across Mark's three experiences, including what he inherited, what he built, and what he would do differently