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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WizeHive Zengine
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Wizehive offers Zengine, a cloud-based submission management platform for grants, awards, scholarships and other kinds of awards ands applications. Zengine can be used to track customers, job candidates, projects or more and replaces paper processes, outgrown spreadsheets, or generic software products.
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Pricing
Blackbaud Grantmaking
WizeHive Zengine
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Grantmaking
WizeHive Zengine
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
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Zengine by WizeHive is a flexible platform that can be set up to directly address the needs and requirements of your organization. As such, pricing is determined after a thorough discussion about your process and goals. Pricing does typically fall into three areas, each determined by the complexity of program, features required, and the number of programs being managed in the platform.
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.
I highly recommend this software, as it has allowed us to be much more transparent with the delivery of benefits and their applications, also the hours of work in this regard are less, allowing staff to devote to other tasks. A very useful and necessary software.
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).
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.
The platform is very basic. On the other and, our staff does not take advantage of its full capabilities because such features did not work well for us/fit our needs
We didn’t really use their support. I wish they would have told us more about the fact they were changing to get rid of the flash player as that was the main reason we left.
Their design team gave us the option to save some money by creating the forms ourselves for both the submission and review portals. This also allowed us to get to a point where we felt very comfortable in any future changes that would need to be made to forms since we were so immersed in creating them.
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.
SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo are great to use for other programs and events that require collecting fairly basic responses and feedback, however, these don't provide the level of information and data that is needed for our grants processes. WizeHive provides a number of tools and other benefits that are just beyond these products' capabilities
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.
