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Fluxx Grantmaker

Score7.5 out of 10

7 Reviews and Ratings

What is Fluxx Grantmaker?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Grantmaker Review

Pros

  • It's easy to find grant records and related information.
  • Excellent tool for managing and displaying processes.

Cons

  • Technical support is weak. Bugs that are submitted are often not fixed and not even followed-up on.
  • The technical documentation is extremely sparse.

Return on Investment

  • It's a reasonable price compared to similar products.

Alternatives Considered

CyberGrants

Other Software Used

Expensify

Fluxx Grantmaker Intuitive Grant-Making Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Fluxx represents a grant-making portal utilized by the majority of the organization's external grant funders. Fluxx allows institutions like mine to easily apply for grant funding from a variety of non-profit organizations. My institution consistently applies to funders who use Fluxx as their primary proposal submission, application, and report submission vehicle.

Pros

  • Consistent format across non-profit platforms
  • Easy to use, intuitive
  • Historical record-keeping
  • Profiles across institutions/organizations

Cons

  • Downloading legacy grants database information into Fluxx not always accurate
  • Generated emails from Fluxx
  • Text formatting ability limited

Most Important Features

  • Profile record-keeping
  • Ability to accept attachments for budgets, narratives, supplements
  • Organizing proposals

Return on Investment

  • Fluxx has saved time versus reentering multiple pieces of data across organizations/proposals
  • Fluxx is easy to learn and intuitive for novice users
  • Fluxx is visually appealing making customers more likely to utilize its platform versus other products

Alternatives Considered

CyberGrants

Other Software Used

Blackbaud NetCommunity, Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, WealthEngine

Grantmaking meets Knowledge Management

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Support can be slow to respond to some submitted issues and Tier 1 support staff could be better at getting concrete answers about bugs or issues in the software.
  • With monthly releases, most of which have new features, the Q&A is sometimes not as good as it should be. Seems to be too much reliance on clients finding the issues and reporting them instead of Fluxx staff working to find those issues before release.
  • Some functions require Windows to configure, like the plugins to build documents and excel reports.
  • Coding knowledge is required for some advanced configuration.

Return on Investment

  • We have significantly cut down staff time wasted on repetitive mundane tasks that can be automated. Now staff has more time to focus on the intellectual work that has impact on the communities we serve as a funding partner.
  • Dramatic decrease in paper. We have eliminated our file room and all grant documentation, including historical records, are at the staffs fingertips.
  • Better communication with our grantees and a clearer process for them to follow when requesting funding.
  • Standardized reporting and applications for all grant types with the ability to customize these on the fly during the grants process.
  • The cornerstone of our knowledge management strategy, everything else emanates from this software solution.

Alternatives Considered

SmartSimple CMS360, Blackbaud Grantmaking (formerly GIFTS Online) and CyberGrants

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Qlik Sense, GitHub

How to Write Grants More Efficiently and Never Miss a Deadline- Grantmaker

Pros

  • Grantmaker uses timelines and visuals effectively for tracking critical events in the grant life cycle.
  • I am able to assign important tasks to myself and my team and track progress.
  • I love the motivating visuals that clearly indicate whether grant goals are being met.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • The time it takes me to pull a grant proposal together is less now because many of my talking points are organized within Grantmaker.
  • I feel more connected to my team even though I am a remote freelancer.

Other Software Used

Slack, Shopify, Evernote

Grantmaker Greatness!

Pros

  • Uploading completed elements of the grant
  • Easily and effortlessly edit before submission
  • Quickly submit and complete grant

Cons

  • Autofill of past information
  • Recommendations of other grants
  • Better word count amounts

Return on Investment

  • Better funding for our youth programs
  • Successful garnering of unrestricted funds
  • Business expansion via better staff funding

Alternatives Considered

ACTIVE Network

Other Software Used

Emma, WordPress, Kindful