CommunityForce Grants United vs. Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager

This product is great and well-suited for smaller organizations who are interested in doing an online grantmaking system for the first time or upgrading from a simple survey-type application. You would love this product for basic applications and reports; [...] [its also great] if you want to do some light reporting. This is not a product that is robust enough to handle complex budgets, contact or email management, or complex outcomes metrics. It also will not work if you are trying to track your conversations with potential grantees before they apply.

Incentivized

• Customer Service: Foundant is always super helpful and speedy in their responses to my questions, whether it's an email or call.
• Connections to other users: There's a great online community that's willing to share what works for their organizations.
• Company Response/Development: Foundant is continually updating (where it needs to) to make their product the best it can be, and is willing (and does) take comments and suggestions from clients for how the software could be improved.
• Training: A variety of training options- ranging from in person conferences to web-based tutorials. Very helpful, and updated as the product is.

Incentivized

• I don't think about what's lacking. This is much better than our previous grants management software.
• The landing page could have a snappier design.
• I wish our grantees could see more than one follow-up for a process at a time. Sometimes there needs to be a project mod submitted while that is an active renewal going on.

Incentivized

I used GIFTS more than 10 years ago. Their development was glacial, and it was clumsy software. They took much longer to develop the on-line application process.
I also reviewed Philan Tech. They did not offer the same flexibility that Foundant's GLM did. Nor did the company have the depth of software engineering experience that Philan Tech had at the time.
Finally, I used a back-office support company for a short time that has an on-line grant management component. This option proved to be too cumbersome and too expensive. And I did not personally get along with the staff there. Definitely not a good fit for the Replogle Foundation and me.

Incentivized

• This software has made it much easier to work with reviewers (panels of community volunteers who provide scores and comments for the grant applications). While we only use the Evaluator function for two of our many grant programs, the merge templates have saved a lot of time in assembling the materials to send digitally (one PDF per application) for the other grant programs. In our old database, I had to download each document from the application, convert to PDF, then combine. That was very labor intensive! In this software, I create a merge template and all the documents that I want included are automatically converted to PDF, in the order I want them. This was a big reason we moved to this software and it continues to be a fantastic feature.
• The automatic email reminders that have been built into the software (this is one example of an excellent improvement that has been added since we got the software - showing their constant efforts to get even better) have saved a lot of time and effort. I used to set reminders on my calendar every year to write a long involved email to all the grantees for a particular grant program, to remind them to submit their grant reports. And then, if they still forgot, I had to chase them down. Now, I just set up the reports in the software and there is an automatic reminder that goes out two weeks before; if they still forget, there is an automatic reminder that goes out one day after the deadline to let them know that it's late. I still have to chase a few of them down but the majority are taken care of.

Incentivized