Elevate Your Organization’s Grantmaking Efficiency Through Nonprofit Cloud

You as needed and then you will complete Door review of the application. Yeah. Salesforce does allow for creating custom questions for your applications. And Grant Seekers are completing the application through a grantee portal. We'll get to that in a moment. Using document checklists that Andrew was discussing. To help ensure that all of the And supplemental documents that they need to fill out are included with their application.

Of the applications or all the pieces of the application are submitted. That's when you can start your review. Process, which maybe you'll have a separate task list for the reviewer to complete. For example, reviewing the, etc. Now, a lot of These features that I was just mentioning happen through experience cloud which is a huge benefit to nonprofit cloud for grant making. An experience cloud site is a website that gives your grant seekers the information they need about your fundraising or funding opportunities. This has a lot of really great benefits. First, there's no more need to go update some external website with your current funding opportunities and available grants.

You can just use your existing data from within Salesforce. And display it on your experience cloud sites all updated and and kept up to date automatically. And that ensures that, grant seekers have up to date information, and it saves you data entry time since you don't need to date information, and it saves you data entry time since you don't need to go update some external site. Additionally, the applicants are able to register themselves for this site. So you don't need to worry about the administrative work of managing those registrations and and the login credentials and and the login credentials and and the login credentials and all of that. That's all handled automatically by the system. Once the users get into the experience cloud site, you can save time by communicating with them through chatter. Rather than needing to switch to a separate external email program and manage your communications there, you can chat directly with them through this site.

And as a bonus extra benefit, those messages get saved to Salesforce. So you can go back and reference them later as needed. You also, with this site, you won't need to have an external form tool for managing the applications. The applicants can fill out those applications directly through the site. Using either Salesforce flow or Omni-script. Flow has kind of a standardized look and feel that really matches. Salesforce and is great for more straightforward needs. Whereas on the script, allows for specific branding. So to really make it look like your own. As well as more complex customization. But again, that's all handled within the Experience Cloud site of the entire application process.

After they've submitted. The applicants are able to log back into that same site and they'll be able to view the status of their application on their own. So no needing to reach out to you to inquire about the current status. They can just check that on their own. And then, when you do get to the reviewing stage, You can have your internal staff review the applications within Salesforce or I know some some grant makers will have external reviewers and you can open up that review process to external reviewers through the experience cloud site as well. So they'll have their own login to that site and then you can assign the applications to them. They can review them and log their the results of that review, whether it's a decision or their notes or whatever it may be. You can use action plans internally as well as externally. So for example, you could assign an action plan to your reviewers.

To in order to create a series of tasks that will guide them throughout that review process. And they can be marking items as complete, as they complete them, which kind of allows for an this little audit trail throughout the process. And then different kinds of funding opportunities can have different action plans. With different tasks, different tasks associated with them, which means that you can really customize the list of to the specific needs for each of your funding opportunities. So we've now finished our review. It's time to log our decision. Is this a grant application going to be awarded? Or denied. The decision record inside Salesforce will allow you to have an audit log, be able to note who made that decision on the approval or denial. We've had the application which collects all of the information, a lot of the details. Which is still in Salesforce and available to you, but we now start utilizing a funding award record.

It's a simplified view. Of the grant that you have approved to move forward. We will also, in this phase start talking about the disbursement process and, the list of requirements that are needed from your grantees that are being awarded. Alright, so. The data is in Salesforce. We can now report on it. Utilizing Salesforce reporting, pull together a report of grants that need to be ratified. The project description, who the organization is, the amount. Have it approved by your board of directors as needed and then we can mass update the ratification date so we know that we are doing our due diligence during this process. Dashboards inside. Salesforce allow you to visualize number of grants awarded by program dollars this year all kinds of different data points can be created through reports and then through a series of visualizations on a dashboard. Scheduling disbursements, you may give out a grant that's one. Disbursement versus it may have a schedule of disbursements over the course of a time period. These disbursements, are created. They can also be seen in the experience cloud. So the grant recipients know when to expect payment.

I love that, the disbursements can also have dependent requirements. Those requirements are your midyear report, your final report, anything you are and are needing to follow up on after you award or maybe the grant recipient. Needs to send you a report. And so you can say, this next disbursement may go out but not until we have this. Report to do. And then automation in general, automation, whether it's, the screen flows and Omni-script that Ian referenced during the application process, but just. Automation in general is powerful within Salesforce. Maybe you wanna send, automatic emails for awarded versus. Deny grants 30 day reminders of when reports are due internal staff a little reminder for a task assignment to follow up on these things. So automation is great. There's also document merging functionality within grant making platform.

And. There's also with custom fields back when we set up that program with a budget of 5 million. We can now utilize these custom fields to say how much of that 5 million has been awarded, how much have we committed? And how much has been dispersed. So again, its sales horse is this wonderful flexible tool. There you use. And so now we've, get, we've awarded our grants and we are now entering into the post award phase. This is when you'll be monitoring and collaborating and reporting and analyzing on all of your granting. And the organizations that you're funding. So during this phase, this is when the grantees complete their reports.

And update their budget information as needed. These reports are reviewed internally as needed and then disbursements if there are those scheduled disbursements that Andrea was mentioning. This is when those will get approved to send those out. And then Additionally, sometimes a grantee requires some sort of adjustment, whether that's to the timeline or to the scope of the the grant or to the the dollar amount and we can record all of those changes within Salesforce using the funding award amendment. Record. Now I know I already talked about Experience Cloud earlier, but we were coming back because it really is just such a powerful tool. Within experience cloud, your grantees can log in and upload their reports and complete their budgets. Within that site and it'll all get saved directly into Salesforce, just like their applications. They can also view those scheduled upcoming disbursements and any other information that you, may want to share with them there.

So they can all, they can just access all of that information right there on the site after they log in. No, Andrea mentioned, there were, there's the option of, either uploading budget information or that you can ask them to fill out these budget templates. And if you do use a template, then At this point when they are uploading or updating the information with their actual spending dollars or amounts. There will be a variance column that will display what is the difference between what it is that they had budgeted or planned to spend versus what they actually did spend. So the, the grantees can see that within the experience cloud sites. And then grant managers can also view that within Salesforce. And it's all laid out in in a nice table so it's really easy to view.

You can also use, automation, at this phase. So Andrea had a few examples. In the last phase, but, you could also have some automation that maybe when, when the last report is received and reviewed and the last isversement has gone out, automation could automatically close out a funding award and market as completed. So your staff don't need to take that. Step and go manually updated. And then when you're wanting to manage and monitor and analyze your work, you can use dashboards and reports and list views. To get at this information at a glance without needing to click around a lot of different records in order to get the information that you need. For example, you could report on submitted grantee reports that need to be reviewed this week. You can, have Salesforce automatically pull that report for you each week and there's your to do list for the week.

You don't need to go and find those records. Salesforce will serve that up to you. Automatically. And speaking of those reports and dashboards and things, Ultimately, since this is since nonprofit cloud for grant making is built on core Salesforce. All of that core Salesforce functionality is available to us like the reports and dashboards. This makes it really easy to, communicate that data. It could be internally or whether you're producing an impact report or some other external communication. But gathering that information and data together and analyzing it becomes really easy because it's all available within the Salesforce.

Reports and dashboards functionality. It also means that we can capitalize on Salesforce's security features. To ensure that only the correct users have access to make certain changes. Or view specific data within the system. For example, we could restrict the ability to create and complete the decision records to only specific users. While other users can only view that information. This helps to just keep the data clean and maintain compliance with your data. You can also use Salesforce's, controls over record access, in order to post private invitation only funding opportunities. Invitees are still able to view those, opportunities through the experience cloud site. They're still able to apply there and work with it.

The same way as all the others, but it'll only be available to the specific grant seekers that you invite. And then since nonprofit cloud is built on core Salesforce for industries, it means that you can use some of the the newer tools that are newer to nonprofits, it means that you can use some of the newer tools that are newer to nonprofits like Business Rules Engine, which you can use to automate calculation of eligibility or numerical decisions. And then finally Salesforce continues to improve the platform every year with 3 releases per year. These releases are fixing bugs or improving the user experience or adding new features. That are all designs to help make your job easier. And that ultimately really is the purpose and the point. Is making your job easier. In designing nonprofit cloud for grant making, it does really feel like Salesforce was thoughtful and deliberate in their design process, thinking through each of these grant phases and what's needed for you in each of those phases and throughout the process. And then of course, no, no platform can provide all the answers. Immediately. But Salesforce remains extremely customizable and adaptable.

Being able to add new custom features, new automations, all of this gives you the flexibility to really. Hone in and build the perfect solution for your needs within nonprofit cloud for grant making. Thank you so much, Andrea and Ian. We do have a few minutes. If anyone wants to put any questions in the chat or the Q&A, I did see Heather, you asked if the recording of this webinar will be sent to participants. Yes, we will definitely be emailing this out to participants so you can share it. Let me see. We did have a question that came in in advance. So if Andrew and Ian, if you could answer this, what are some of the challenges we should be planning for before moving into nonprofit cloud for grant making. Oh, you're on mute, Andrea.

Thank you. A few ideas. Come to mind. Salesforce is a powerful platform. Let's think about, planning for your technical capacity and how we change applications and the format and things just so we make sure that everyone's getting trained as we need to as your business processes change. A year over year as needed. It's really helpful for us. If you think about your processes in general and define them. So clearly saying for this grant type, these are the documents. That we know are needed for each applicant of this type. We would love it if reminders were sent out 30 days in advance. So that'll just, if you know your process in advance, that is super helpful for us. Alright, I don't see any other questions coming in so we can go ahead and wrap for today.

Thank you again Andrea and Ian for your expertise and thank you all for joining us and learning today. Have a great day.