5 Ways to Boost Grant Management Efficiency with Salesforce

By: Heather Black, Managing Director, Economic Change CIC

With an ever-increasing demand for grants, grant makers are having to get smarter in the ways they select and manage their grantees, and evaluate the impact of their support. To do this, they are turning to digital, using solutions like Salesforce and other third party apps to reduce administration, streamline processes and increase intelligence.

At Economic Change CIC we have supported over 30 infrastructure organisations who work with nonprofits to improve the work they do and the value they give to their beneficiary organisations, so we wanted to share some top tips.

Online EOI forms to reduce admin

Demand is high and quite often resources are limited. It’s also a competitive and selective process. To help you quickly sift and filter suitable applicants, why not introduce initial EOI online forms* on your website to check eligibility of applicants?

Those which meet the initial eligibility criteria could then be emailed an online application form to complete. You could limit the number of applications you receive and cap entries. If an online application has a set of open and closed questions, a CRM can enable more quantifiable questions to be quickly sifted against criteria to shortlist suitable applicants within the CRM.

Scaling teams? Why not try Community Licenses?

An increasing number of applications inevitably increases the need for more assessment resource. You could expand access to your CRM via Salesforce Community Licenses to give external stakeholders the ability to login into the CRM to access and read applications and to complete a series of fields related to assessment criteria. This approach ensures transparency and consistency in the assessment process and speeds up administration for all those involved. If you don’t want to invest in community licenses, you could invest in Conga Composer, to enable you to print off applications in bulk!

Connect your grantees with Chatter

You could create an online directory of grantees which exposes data from Salesforce to share with others, or to introduce a Salesforce Community with public and private chatter groups to help grantees develop partnerships for B2B sales, referrals or tenders.

Build a support eco-system for grantees

If you want to offer training, consultancy or mentoring, you can use Salesforce to gather information about organisational needs, match suitable consultants/volunteers and track deliverables around this support. You could also use online forms or community licenses to empower the stakeholders who deliver the support, to feedback on their deliverables and subsequent outcomes of the beneficiary.

Shout about your impact!!

If you want to monitor the impact of your support, you can create online reporting surveys that trigger at timely intervals by email, to request impact data back from grantees. Once the beneficiaries have completed their report, the data is automatically entered into the CRM system and aggregated into an impact analytics dashboard to give the big picture.

*Online form tools mentioned above include the use of Form Assembly and Clicktools, or alternatively a visualforce page within a Salesforce Community environment. We’ve found these have been the best solution for our clients.

Interested in learning more about Salesforce for grant management? Download the Salesforce for Grant Management E-Book.