We’ve been hearing this past year that many foundations are
looking at their grants management solution to do more than just manage their
giving, they want their solution to help them manage more of their foundations overall
activities. We are seeing this shift
from the large corporate foundations all the way through the smaller family
foundations. This shift is a result of many
things including foundations trying to do more with less, foundation
stakeholders wanting to see more results based data, foundations expanding
their giving programs to have more of a reach in the communities they serve and
giving institutions wanting to connect their giving with their employee
engagement.
Some examples that we’ve seen
are foundations that have extended their grants management solution to include grant
pipeline management, scenario planning, outcome measurement, workflow, data
management, grantee communication, payout planning and portals for either board
members or grantees. Their focus was to give
broader access to internal and external stakeholders like board members,
financial staff, grantees/applicants and other non-grant related staff. We’ve seen other foundations take the first
step in moving towards foundation
management with providing more of a dashboard type view for their executive
staff like we have delivered in an interactive way with the GIFTS Alta and
GIFTS Online interactive dashboards, with the advanced SQL reporting or the way
Giving Data provides a one-way push of information to their dashboards.
This real time access to
information has been great for the casual stakeholders who want to see the
grant information at their fingertips but what is that next piece of critical
information stakeholders need access to?
Last summer we conducted a survey with all of our users and the number
one benefit our respondents cited for using MicroEdge products was having all
of your data centralized in one place.
The 2nd and 3rd most cited benefits were reporting
and ease of use. What’s interesting to
us is that executives that responded were half as likely to cite reporting as a
benefit and 30-40% of all users wanted to see decision making and efficiency
improved in the system.
This means that we need to help
our users harness the power of that information in their system so we can help
you and your stakeholders make a successful move to a broader view of your foundations
giving.
In addition, we are seeing more
and more stakeholders interested in viewing their foundation information on a
mobile device or remotely on their laptops, so they can have that anytime
anywhere access to their real-time data to help them make decisions. More and more foundation leaders are turning
to mobile devices to inform them of their giving.
Foundation Management, things to
consider
Mobile Giving
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