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Green revolving funds (GRFs), a sustainability financing tool that has been in use for decades, are a proven model for securing a continuous source of funding for energy efficiency and other sustainability projects. However, even with GRFs’ record of success, without the proper tracking and management mechanisms in place, the implementation of such a model can remain challenging for colleges, universities, and other nonprofit institutions.

The Green Revolving Investment Tracking System (GRITS) was designed to manage every aspect of an institution’s green revolving fund including aggregate and project-specific financial, energy and carbon data.

This secure, account-based web tool lets institution administrators selectively grant access to campus stakeholders involved in revolving fund management, including student leaders and interns, sustainability staff, and facilities personnel. In addition, GRITS’ central platform gives institutions the ability to share project information and learn from best practice strategies and sustainability projects with institutions from across North America.

The Benefits of GRITS:

Identification of potential projects, selection of projects worth funding, managing your fund’s account, tracking carbon, energy, and financial savings, and reporting fund results.

Identification
Finding creative project ideas to fund can be difficult; however, GRITS displays project examples from all participating institutions. GRITS users can view these projects and the related data.
GRITS makes it possible to:
Search the Project Library for data from peer institutions. Search criteria includes:
– Institution Name
– Institution Type (e.g., population size, public/private)
– Type of Project (e.g., renewable energy, building retrofit)
– Building type
– Payback Period, and
– Initial capital investment

Selection
When deciding which projects to fund, knowing how the future of the fund will be affected by the investment is important.
GRITS makes it possible to:
– Create informative pages for each proposed project in order to assess its future performance as well as simplify project selection.
– Sort through proposed projects by key criteria, such as estimated payback time and project types.
– Estimate future project costs, resources saved, and abated carbon emissions.
– Compare predicted financial indicators, such as return on investment, net present value, and internal rate of return among projects.
– Collaborate with committee members to review project proposals. In the future, GRITS will enable comments to attach to proposed projects, promoting further discussion and idea sharing between different stakeholders.

Management
Managing multiple projects with varying payback times can be challenging, but with GRITS all account deposits and withdrawals can be viewed in one place.
GRITS makes it possible to:
– Manage data-sharing privacy through administrator preferences.
– Create customized levels of access for each faculty, staff, and student stakeholder involved in the fund.
– View projects at every phase (e.g., proposed, under construction, completed)
– View deposits and withdrawals to GRF account by tracking itemized transactions.
– Calculate monetary payments to GRF over time through the use of institution-specific interest rates and other unique financial criteria.
– Choose the frequency of payments back to the GRF based on fiscal year calendars.

Tracking
As annual energy prices and utility savings fluctuate, updating GRITS dynamically changes data so that the payback amounts to the fund will adapt to the current year.
GRITS makes it possible to:
– Input real cost and savings data to track realized financial gains and resource-use reduction over time.
– Measure cumulative carbon emissions abated from a variety of energy-saving projects.
– Report on project and fund success through project-specific and aggregate fund data.
– Predict future fund balance to make more informed funding decisions.

Reporting
There are many creative ways to measure and show fund performance, and with GRITS administrators can transform the institution’s data into informative and useful visuals. While not available in the beta version of GRITS (to be launched in June), GRITS will offer administrators and stakeholders the ability to:
– Generate customized reports and graphs that provide aggregate financial and/or efficiency performance for a given period.
– Export detailed reports for publication or posting on the web.
– Visually compare projects from various institutions.

Questions? Contact Shoshana Blank, Senior Research Fellow at shoshana@endowmentinstitute.org