As a grantmaking foundation, your primary goal is to place funding in the hands of the organizations that need it most. However, administrative tasks, legal requirements, and unorganized data collection can make finding the best organizations to distribute those funds difficult.
Streamlined grants management begins with comprehensive, flexible software. Let’s explore how Nonprofit Cloud can guarantee a seamless, transparent experience for your foundation, applicants, and grantees.
Overview of Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking
The right tools are integral to an organized grantmaking process. Fíonta’s guide to grantmaking suggests choosing technology that includes communication tools, application creating and management features, and reporting capabilities. Nonprofit Cloud offers an integrated solution that manages the grantmaking process from start to end.
This solution aims to streamline the process for grantmaking organizations and grantees by minimizing the time spent processing applications and confirming compliance. Instead, foundations can drive efficiency and stronger results by using Nonprofit Cloud to easily:
- Keep track of grantees and applicants
- Create and share new funding opportunities with application details
- Review and approve applications
- Pair its capabilities with Experience Cloud to enable grantseekers to explore opportunities, submit applications and budgets, and upload documents in one place
Nonprofit Cloud’s comprehensive offerings mean your organization can manage all grantmaking activities from one platform. This will eliminate data silos, enhance collaboration among your staff, and enhance data quality.
Why Choose Nonprofit Cloud over NPSP?
Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) is a set of packages designed to help nonprofits manage their operations. Nonprofit Cloud is a more comprehensive solution built on Salesforce core, offering dedicated modules for fundraising, program management, grantmaking, and more.
Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking offers more functionality than NPSP’s Grants Management tool. This system may be better for your grantmaking organization if:
- You have complex needs. Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking is a robust, scalable solution, making it ideal for foundations with complicated processes. Rather than implementing a new solution or adding other tools to scale up in the future, you’ll save money and time by choosing Nonprofit Cloud.
- You want flexibility. Because Nonprofit Cloud is so customizable, you can tailor the system to your foundation’s needs. For example, the system can adapt to changing or untraditional processes.
- Relationships are important to your organization. With Nonprofit Cloud, you’ll gain access to components developed for other industries, such as the Actionable Relationship Center (ARC). This component allows you to easily visualize relationships between applicants and the grants they’ve received, providing a holistic view of each applicant to drive more informed decision-making.
- You’re looking for time-saving solutions. It can be time-consuming to manage grants, determine which organizations most deserve your funding, and track your impact. Tools like the Business Rules Engine can guide applicants through a process to evaluate qualifications and flag ineligible organizations. This saves your staff time without sacrificing compliance or due diligence.
In addition to supporting mission-critical activities and fundraisers, your organization wants its grants to drive the biggest impact possible. By choosing Nonprofit Cloud, you can leverage its Outcome Management module to define and track grant outcomes and get a comprehensive overview of your organization’s impact.
3 Grantmaking Tips for Nonprofit Cloud Users
Familiarize yourself with Nonprofit Cloud.
Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking combines relationship management tools with features designed to manage funding opportunities, review applications, award grants, and more grantmaking activities.
Specifically, your team can leverage the following objects to streamline and organize its processes:
- Program: Create your funding programs using this object.
- Budget: Define and track spending for your programs.
- Funding Opportunity: Manage available grant opportunities. Include a description of the grant, application instructions, deadlines, and more.
- Individual Application: Store data about applications and track them from submission to your final decision.
- Application Review: Collect feedback from your team on each application. Use features like action plans, checklists, and defined, approved processes to standardize review.
- Application Decision and Funding Award: Manage your options and make a final decision by selecting a recipient.
Once you choose a recipient, neatly track money sent to grantees with the Funding Disbursement object and manage the follow-up process with the Funding Award Requirement object. Once the grantee fulfills the terms of the grant, compare actual spending against the initial budget for the grant before closing it out.
Track and manage the grant lifecycle.
The grantmaking process follows a distinct lifecycle made up of three phases:
- Pre-award phase: This phase includes planning and developing the grant. You’ll also share the grant and review applications.
- Award phase: As the grantmaker, your organization chooses the grantees, works to create a final agreement, and awards the funds.
- Post-award phase: Your team will offer support, check in with the grantee, assess progress, and determine the overall impact of the grant.
Each phase involves a series of more granular tasks that can quickly become disorganized. Blocking your long list of grantmaking tasks into these three phases can ensure nothing falls through the cracks and help you effectively leverage all of the tools Nonprofit Cloud offers.
When implementing Nonprofit Cloud, identify how the solution can enhance your existing workflows and how its tools align with the grantmaking lifecycle. For example, during the pre-award phase, you might create a landing page to manage the application process by using the Experience Cloud Grantee portal. During the post-award phase, you’ll need to track interactions with grantees and leverage comprehensive reports to measure impact.
Set up automated workflows.
Automation can remove rote, repetitive tasks from your workflow. This can improve data accuracy, enhance communications, and free up your staff’s time and resources for more creative tasks.
Using Nonprofit Cloud and associated tools, your foundation can automate processes like:
- Receiving and processing grant proposals, applications, and other forms.
- Routing applications to the appropriate staff members based on grant amount, type, or other custom criteria.
- Streamlining decision-making by automatically calculating scores or ratings based on defined criteria.
- Sending necessary communications to applicants, such as confirmation messages, thank-you emails, and updates.
Automation can also improve your organization’s transparency with grantees and supporters. For example, it makes it possible to send prompt updates about the application process to potential grant recipients. You can also set automated reminders for recipients to share progress reports. This allows your team to regularly gather detailed information about when grant funding is allocated and how it impacts the receiving organizations’ work.
Nonprofit Cloud’s robust grants management software helps organizations easily oversee grants, manage budgets, perform research and due diligence tasks like confirming applicants’ tax status, and measure impact. However, getting started and learning how to effectively use a new tool can be complex. Working with a Salesforce partner can help you implement the new system and leverage its full range of features.