It was already a busy year at Salesforce with the release of several new products such as Program & Case management. Well, today, Salesforce.org announced
It was already a busy year at Salesforce with the release of several new products such as Program & Case management. Well, today, Salesforce.org announced its latest product: a new Grants Management System (GMS). Coupled with Sputnik Moment’s brand new Grant Management Quick Start, Salesforce.org’s new products will ensure Grant Making organizations are in a great position to deliver resources, and facilitate meaningful change within their communities.
At Sputnik Moment, we have worked with many foundations and grant making organizations over the years. Let’s dive into the details…
This solution is built as a complement to the Outbound Funds Module (OFM), a foundational component offered to track and manage funds like grants and scholarships. Outbound Funds Module is a free, open source product that was recently brought into the Salesforce.org family after being developed for the community by community members.
The initial release is available today and is a great fit for organizations with simpler grant management processes including emergency response grants. It should go without saying that the missions and operations of foundations are more important now than ever before as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
1. GRANTS MANAGEMENT and CRM
Salesforce is known as the world’s #1 Constituent Relationship Management (CRM). By choosing Salesforce as your GMS, organizations will benefit from the core CRM features: track & segment all contact and organization records, log calls & emails, integrate with Outlook/Gmail. All staff, not just grant program users, can get all the CRM information they need in one place.
2. MODERN GRANTEE PORTAL
The Grantee Portal is based on Salesforce Communities. Salesforce includes a template to quickly deliver modern online experiences for your grantseekers (and reviewers). Grants Managers will be able to customize and style their grantee portal by easily adjusting fonts, colors, images/logos and online forms.
3. STREAMLINE GRANT PROCESSING
What’s on your to-do list today? If you’re like most grant makers it’s jam-packed with tasks like follow-up phone calls, reviewing requests, and processing new information. Unfortunately, you can’t manufacture more time to get it all done (there are only 24 hours in a day, after all). But you can get more out of the hours you have by using automation. Salesforce provides ways to automate routine tasks and clear more time to work on the important stuff. For example, automatically send reminders to grantees or route grants to the correct program officer.
4. FLEXIBLE ANALYTICS
What do you want to learn from the data you collect? Each foundation will answer that differently but generally, it comes down to two categories: evaluating your own grantmaking process and evaluating the impact of your grantmaking. In addition to these needs, Salesforce comes with a reporting engine which allows grants managers and all users in general to customize their own reports. Out of the box, the system comes with predefined reports such as “All Grants grouped by Status” or “Upcoming Payments”. But you could easily design reports & charts based on your own data needs.
5. DATA MODEL
Until this point, there have been multiple GMS available on the Salesforce platform. Now that Salesforce has officially adopted Outbound Funds, this solution will become the standard data model for storing grant information. Having a common data model simplifies data management and app development by unifying data into a known form and applying structural and semantic consistency across multiple apps and deployments. In short it will promote standard and consistency which will increase collaboration and, in the future, would allow funders to more easily share data with each other.
While this is the first release and future iterations will bring more, this solution is adaptable to each foundations’ business processes and can accommodate even the most complex aspects of their review and approval, all while creating a standard, unified data model for the philanthropic sector.
We are looking forward to helping our grant making clients take advantage of this new GMS. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
