Foundation Usergroup: Oct 2014

Last week was Dreamforce.  Among the 130,000+ attendees, lots of foundations made the trip to San Francisco. roundCorner scheduled a FoundationConnect user group where the upcoming new Grantee Portal was demonstrated. It was hosted by the James Irvine Foundation. We of course attended and these are the highlights.

• New portal will use Salesforce Community.  It provides a built-in and scalable integration with SF.
• Salesforce Community will require foundations to purchase Community licenses (price TBD).
• Licenses will be based on usage (number of grantees or number of monthly grantee logins)
• Existing portal (aka .net portal) will continue to be available and supported.

BENEFITS

1. Application Designer. This will allow you to create/update applications using a WYSIWYG type interface. The designer will show you what the application looks like as you are building it. This will be a time saver! Also, this means that users in charge of managing grantee applications might not need to be given System Administrator privilege anymore.

2. Instructional text will no longer require you to create formula fields. Having to create a new field for each instructional text has created a bit of a clutter and made maintenance more challenging.

3. Permission: currently you have to choose between individual or organization level permission. Moving forward you will be able to choose this at the grantee level. Example: grantee user with Organization A will be able to see all Requests. Grantee user with Organization B will see only a subset of the Requests.

4. More tabs:  more flexibility with how you break down your grant application.

5. Attachments: will be available on each tab. Currently all attachments are gathered under one tab. This will allow you to collect attachments all along the application, really where it makes sense rather than pointing your grantee to the Attachment tab. This will help the grantee user experience.

6. RFP: this will be supported allowing announcement to be publish via the portal.

MIGRATION

FC mentioned that efforts will be made to simplify the configuration migration (with migration scripts). You should however plan to have to do some of the work manually. Sputnik Moment will be working on options to assist foundations with this transition.

You should be able to run both portals concurrently. In other words you could migrate one request type at the time (and keep the other requests on the .net portal). This will help for a smoother transition.

NOW WHAT IS NEXT?

FoundationConnect is planning on first releasing the Community portal to partners like Sputnik Moment (late October/early November). We are looking forward to providing our feedback and making sure it is ready for prime time. We will report back soon.

Few scenarios are possible for you:

You are happy with your current grantee portal. Great! No need to update your system. The current portal will continue to be supported.

You are interested in the Community portal. Great! Maybe start thinking about what grant application would make sense to start with (Q1 2015 or later). Connect with us to start planning.