Blackbaud Grantmaking (formally GIFTS Online) is part of Blackbaud’s extensive portfolio of software, services, data intelligence and expertise that powers social good. Blackbaud Grantmaking delivers grantmaking capabilities configured to meet the user's needs, and to improve efficiency with personalized online grant applications and report forms, personalized user dashboards, and simplified financial processing tools. By providing access to giving data, including standard, advanced, and ad hoc…
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Fluxx Grantmaker
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Fluxx in San Francisco offers Grantmaker, this being their grant management platform for funders, providing clear data exploration tools and customizable dashboard, dynamic workflow with audit trail, and many collaboration and sharing tools.
As I mentioned, cost is prohibitive for us. Because it is highly customizable, it is very powerful, but if you are looking for an intuitive, easy to use solution right "out of the box" solution because you have few staff and no IT dept. this may not be the best fit (unless they develop some lower cost / less customizable options?). That being said, we have managed to implement successfully with no IT. I completed the implementation, code the application and online reporting forms (using HTML) and use Blueprint to customize what we need, but it has been a big learning curve and an investment of time to manage the back end of the program. I will say that training new general users is pretty straight forward so their ability to search for information they need and quickly is greatly enhanced. The automatic customized reports and reminders are pretty great, and the overall integrity of our processes and data are greatly improved. Sometimes we wonder if it is overly complex and if there is a way e could "hide" more of the aspects that are not relevant to us, or that we are not using, so we can have a cleaner interface.
Grantmaker is well suited for managing grant-making processes and records. It's not a very good tool for CRM. We are currently working with an outside vendor to design a module that will integrate with Grantmaker to help with CRM.
Custom reporting: in addition to providing many standard reports, Blackbaud Grantmaking makes it very easy to create and save custom reports. Writing effective queries is simple and requires no knowledge of SQL (though you have an option to write SQL queries if you prefer).
Robust template system: Blackbaud Grantmaking's Document Template Manager greatly facilitates our written communications with applicants. Approval/decline letters, check letters, and proposal summaries are just a few of the documents we generate on a daily basis, and unlike some other systems we've used, you don't have to export the data from Blackbaud Grantmaking before using it in a mail merge document. The Document Template Manager integrates with Microsoft Word.
Managing multiple funding sources: We have over a dozen foundation clients who have supported hundreds of organizations over the years. Blackbaud Grantmaking makes it very simple to keep the client data separated, even when multiple clients are contributing to the same organizations.
Blackbaud Grantmaking is a budget-friendly document management system. We have documents associated with organizations (e.g., IRS letters), individual grant requests (applications, budgets, approval letters, etc.), requirements (grant evaluations and reports), and payments (check letters) and it is very easy to save and search for these documents when they are needed. Blackbaud Grantmaking makes is easy to keep everything where it belongs (and move documents when you misfile them).
Highly configurable for different use cases and easy to customize.
Instant insight into different job functions can be provided through the unique, customized filtered cards and dashboards for each user.
Frequent updates of new features that add more value to the product over time and create more efficiencies for staff and grantees.
Collaborative user base that is eager and willing to share best practices with lots of support from the vendor.
Friendly staff that is genuinely interested in the funding and nonprofit sectors and how they can make it easier for us to have the community impact we are all trying to achieve.
System enhancement ideas must be submitted to a community portal and other users must take the initiative to vote on their favorite ideas instead of vendor programmers collecting received ideas and doing the work themselves.
Lack of conditional logic in online application
Communication with other Blackbaud products notably Employee Volunteering and Engagement (fka AngelPoints)
I would love to see either email or text notifications added to the platforms to remind of upcoming deadlines and tasks.
Sometimes the data that is pulled into the visuals is not accurate and is a bit glitchy.
Adding a real time commenting capability, like Slack, would help the team to stay in contact. This is especially important for remote grantwriters, like me.
As long as there is continued development in the product allowing us to create efficiencies, streamline operations, deliver on our reporting requirements and the usability for internal and external partners remains strong we would have no reason to look elsewhere from a systems perspective. If costs changed substantially we'd have to look at different options to meet our cost savings objectives.
There is room for improvement and the development of the software seem slow. As customers, we hear a lot about what's in development and promises of new features rolling out. However, it feels like those developments take a really long time to show up in they system for my day-to-day use.
I have an assigned rep who is very responsive and is able to answer any questions. Other than that, the technical support has been terrible. I often don't waste time documenting bugs because I know they likely won't get fixed or even followed-up on. Instead, I search for workarounds.
As I have said it is extremely versatile. However it can also be confusing. There is always room for improvement. Blackbaud provides extensive online training, good response time from the help desk, a method of recommending enhancements as well as interaction with other users and enhancements are scored by users to determine the importance of enhancements to users.
Fluxx is not only more intuitive than CyberGrants, its interface is also smoother and easier. Fluxx allows proposers to enter and attach proposal information in a more appealing platform than in CyberGrants. Fluxx also retains more historic data than CyberGrants
It has given us the ability to make grants faster. Example: one donor wanted applications to 50 grantees in a short period of time. Even with other items of work on my agenda, having to research where at least 30% of these grantees were since this was their first time getting a grant and going back and finding other ways to contact these grantees- old and new- when the people were not longer at the organization, it got done by me alone in less than two days.
Blackbaud Grantmaking allows us to keep track of everything from how many times a grant has been given to an organization as well as the amount donors have given.
Because of Blackbaud Grantmaking I can create a grant and process letters for payments faster than I can get a check for the grantee, thus making it harder on the finance office to keep up with what I am doing.
