Toni DeMaglio
Toni DeMaglio has performed post-award grant management duties and served as a compliance officer at two higher education institutions for over twenty-five years. In this capacity, she provided interpretation of policies and rules to ensure the conformance of federal and state laws, rules, regulations, and agency/program policies. Her primary responsibility was keeping grants in the state of audit-readiness by providing technical assistance to college personnel in fiscal integrity related to programmatic activities. She worked closely with project directors and financial services to prevent and identify activities and charges that would be unallowable under grant regulations and, if required, recommended corrective action plans. Toni designed grants management training for grant project directors, administrators, and support staff. She also assured that statutory/administrative requirements and grant conditions had been met during the closeout of each grant project.
In addition to State and private foundation grants management, she has extensive experience providing oversight for grants from the US Department of Education; the National Science Foundation; the US Department of Labor; Health and Human Services; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous grants management experience included serving as a project director for federal, state, and private grants; under her leadership, grants consistently exceeded their objectives.
As a grant management consultant, she has been retained as a compliance expert, where she assesses post-award management gaps, recommends processes and procedure improvements, evaluates post-award management needs, and designs grants management professional development training. Additionally, Toni provides programmatic evaluation of grant projects. Her comprehensive grant knowledge and abilities offer a strong and reasoned approach to evaluation that employs fidelity assessment designed to create quantitative and qualitative data to measure the project’s effectiveness for formative and summative evaluation reports. Her client base includes entities representing state and local governments, non-profits, and institutions of higher education.
As a grants management trainer, she developed an online course for subrecipient grant management; designed and delivered one and two-day grants management training programs, as well as developed and delivered national training webinars on topics including grants policy requirements, development and implementation; site visits; reporting; travel; effort reporting; procurement; allowable cost; personnel payroll documentation; policy requirements; and subrecipient monitoring.
Toni is often requested to present at national and statewide conferences on compliance and grant management issues and has served as a peer panel reviewer for seven federal grant award competitions. She has chaired the Education Committee, served on the Board of Directors for the National Grants Management Association, and was one of the six subject matter experts who developed the content of the Body of Knowledge for the Specialist Certification in Grants Management. Currently, she serves on the Thompson Grants Editorial Advisory Board.
My Sessions
Session 5: Choose Wisely-Developing Grant Partnerships and Monitoring Subawards Without Losing Your Mind >>
There are two grant worlds. The ideal world is where we get to choose our grant partners who are competent, capable, reasonable, experienced, and contribute to project outcomes. Then there is the real world, where most grant managers live. This session will focus on navigating the political waters where we are expected to “make it happen” by examining monitoring procedures contributing to compliant and successful grant partnerships.
Session 6: Developing, Revising, and Operationalizing Institutional Policies to Comply with the Uniform Grant Guidance >>
Like all nonfederal entities, Institutions of Higher Education must have specific written policies and procedures to manage their federal award. Grant management training often focuses on the policy mandates of the Uniform Grant Guidance but falls short on the how-to operationalizing these requirements. This training is intended to demystify the required and necessary written policies every institution should have to implement compliant and successful grant projects. Discussions will also include the challenges of internal politics and overcoming procedural pitfalls when implementing effective policies and procedures.
Session 1: Be Careful What You Promise: Submitting a Grant Proposal With a Budget That You Can Live With, and Objectives That You Can Deliver >>
Whether a grant proposal is written by a faculty member, a departmental content area expert, or an external consultant, there are common elements that should exist in every proposal to ensure that the potential project will be compliant and successful. This session will focus on best practices for pre-award procedures that contribute to the reasonable assurance of the project’s success and help avoid common mistakes made during proposal development that often set up grant projects to fail.
Session 2: Time and Effort Reporting: The Reason Why it is the Number One Audit Finding for IHE >>
Effort reporting/payroll certification….how hard can it be? Yet, year after year, IHEs reimburse the federal government millions of dollars for disallowed personnel costs that derive from incorrect, incomplete, or missing effort reports. Effort reporting should not be complicated, cumbersome, or mysterious. Effort reporting should just be compliant. This session will examine best practices that promote an effort reporting system that will contribute to a state of audit readiness.