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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Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
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.
If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
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).
Lots of connection points. I can associate a contact with an organization, an event and a donation, easily bouncing between them and pulling reports accordingly. Love this!
This system has many more features than we will ever actually use but I love that because when we have a new idea or want to try something out we don't have to switch systems, we just have to dig a little deeper into salesforce and they probably have a solution waiting for us already.
Salesforce is great at training! I love their trailhead and have used it a lot, especially when I was just getting to know the system. It is easy, fun, informative, and always there to teach me something new. I can also go at my own pace instead of many people's models of training through webinars that are almost always at inconvenient times.
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)
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 think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
I would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.
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.
As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
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.
Salesforce for nonprofits is our source of truth for donor and member data.
It's made a world of difference to know we only have to look in one place for an address or donation history.
We have yet to connect Salesforce with our financial software (QBO) given the cost of the third-party connectors though I am investing a fewer lower cost options I have just found.
