Name: Introduction to Blackbaud Grantmaking™
Uploaded: 2025-09-11T16:01:13.604Z
Duration: 29 min 40 s
Description: Introduction to Blackbaud Grantmaking™

Transcript for "Introduction to Blackbaud Grantmaking™": Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's session. Today, we will be looking at a a brief overview of Blackbaud grant making. But before we get, underway with our presentation, just got a few housekeeping items, that I'd like to cover. First of all, hope everyone can hear me today. Audio is being broadcast, through your computer speakers, so hopefully you can hear me. If you encounter any sort of issues, quick pro tip is just to refresh your browser. Typically, it does the trick. If you encounter any other issues, maybe, just sign out, sign back in. That will typically do it. A few other things to check out, docs section, I believe it's on the right hand side of your screen. We have listed a bunch of different resources that you can check out, at your leisure. There's also that q and a function there. You can submit questions throughout today's presentation, and I'll be working on the background. We got, some other folks that will be able to answer those questions as well. Lastly actually, I got two more things. We got a cogwheel on the bottom of your screen. You can adjust your settings, closed captions, anything like that. And then lastly, question we get, always, the most often is, will I get a recording of this session? Yes. Of course. You will get that in the next twenty four hours via email. Quick introduction, for someone on the line today is for Miranda. Miranda is here in the background to answer any questions that you might have about Blackbaud grant making or if you have questions about, that you wanna book a meeting with someone to chat more about Blackbaud grant making or Blackbaud products in general. You can go check out, if you go into messages, search for Miranda, you should see her and you can chat with her directly, and she'll be online to to answer those today. Alright. Well, let's get started. Oh, there we go. Again, this is a introduction for, Blackbaud grant making today. This is for prospective customers. So if you're a current customer of of Blackbaud grant making, this is not the right one for you. And quick, just disclaimer for some folks, might see Blackbaud grant making and might think this is a tool for, helping manage incoming grants. Well, we do have functionality to help with that. Today, we're looking at grant making, which is, helping those folks, give those grants out to, other organizations, individuals, etcetera. We'll get into some of those specific examples. Just wanted to call that out before we get started. My name is Blake Paradise. I'm a marketing manager here at Blackbaud. Been with Blackbaud cumulatively, about eight years. Couple things about me. Yeah. I've got a two year old daughter. I play music, go on boat here in Charleston, South Carolina. I am joined today by Lauren. Lauren, would you like to do an introduction of yourself? Yeah. Absolutely. It's great to be here with everyone today. Thanks for taking the time. Looking forward to the conversation. My name is Lauren. I'm a solutions consultant here. I work almost exclusively with our customers that are giving out grants, that are supporting the community or, doing some sort of impactful work by funneling funds into into the, into the community, into the world. And so, yeah, I I'll be driving us through our demo today and, thanks again for for being with us. Great. Well, thank you, Lauren. Few quick slides, about Blackbaud and Blackbaud Grantmaking. If you're unfamiliar with Blackbaud, we are a cloud software, company. We serve over 35,000 social good organizations across the globe. Our goal is pretty simple. It's to provide the most comprehensive high quality portfolio of cloud based applications, dedicated to the philanthropic community. So you can check out some more accolades there, but that is our goal here at Blackbaud. Now with Blackbaud Grantmaking, you know, why why is it important? Well, Blackbaud Grantmaking is built on a powerful core that enabling integrates with all the funds you need to successfully reach, your giving mission, into a single streamlined solution. Many of our competitors pull organization information from, you know, a preset organization profile, lock data collection communication to a horizontal workflow, but that can get very complicated, steps, you know, that can be very complicated, except for a grantee, but also, you know, increases the chance for inaccurate data, and really ties staff members to the need to rely on additional, data. So with Blackbaud, grant making, core of our solution, collects, holds, or reports out on your data both vertically and horizontally, really opens the collaboration that that you need at your organization. Alright. Hopefully, that slide is advancing here. Our, Blackbaud grant making delivers these capabilities. You know, we can many cloud vendors can highlight, you know, certain features, but, we deliver a rich cloud based application, designed solely for grant making, staffs. Our modern secure technology has industry leading reporting and our tailored design means that, you know, your daily experience is is efficient and simplified. There's not a bunch of, tools or things that you don't need, no clunky design. It's everything you need, to deliver those funds, those grants out to, other organizations or individuals. Well, with that in mind, and with that kinda intro to it, Lauren, I would love for you to jump into Blackbaud grant making. Yes. Absolutely. Really excited to, dive into today. Give me one second while I get my screens all set up here. Yes. Like we, you know, talked about before, I just wanna reiterate, that we are talking today about grants going out of the organization. Right? So we are talk you know, we Blackbaud does support the total ecosystem of if you are an organization that receives grants through, you know, federal grants or by, writing grant applications to other large foundations. You know, we have a definite, workflow and solutions to support that through our Raiser's Edge NXT and financial edge NXT solution. But Blackbaud grant making is designed to do that those outgoing grants. So if you are an organization that receives applications from either nonprofits or individuals or some other, you know, groups that you that you want to get funds to. Those applications come into you. You run them through a workflow and make some decisions on them either with a review committee or internal process, and then you provide funds to those to those entities. You're in the right place. Right? Because we're gonna be talking about those funds going out. So, as we're in the solution here, you know, we're gonna be talking through a lot of tools that help you really make sure all those pieces of the puzzle are in the right place and those workflows are are mapped appropriately. So, to kinda orient you, I'm just here in a normal browser. This is gonna populate really well from, you know, like a Google Chrome or I think I have Microsoft Edge open here. Really, easy to, populate from anywhere in the world that you are also well from your phone. If you're trying to do some work, you know, on Sunday evening before you come into the office on Monday morning, great, and easy to do. Just to orient to the page, if you are a Blackbaud user into our other solutions, you're gonna be able to use this little sandwich kinda icon here to be able to toggle back and forth if you were enabled on RE NXT or FB NXT. As an example, those solutions would show up there and you can pop back and forth right from this interface all within your secure Blackbaud ID. So below this omnibar here, though, you can see that this page is unique to me. So, you know, if Blake is on my team and he's also logging in, he's gonna have a little bit of a different flavor perhaps of the data that shows to him. Blackbaud's, grantmaking's dashboards are designed to surface and sync different pieces of data and different parts of an application workflow depending upon, you know, how they're tagged. So this dashboard here, this very first one, I have kind of configured to me of things I might want to do, you know, so sitting down with my coffee in the morning, like, the the systems would be like, hey. This is what you've got coming up. You've got this annual report that's due this week from one of your recipients. Maybe I have this phone call that I've scheduled out that I know I wanna make to someone, a site visit. You know, you're gonna be able to really configure this to do whatever it is you need to do. I always like to say that Blackbaud grant making is going to kind of fit to you. We're not expecting you to completely have to throw out all of your processes to be you know, to to map it to the system. We are really gonna be able to configure to whatever your needs are and kinda filter in whatever those key pillars and processes are of to your to your organization and to your flow. These parts are also very configurable to be able to show what you need to see. I would like to say if you can, online shop, you can, build out some dashboards. We have some basic filtering functionality here. So if you wanna filter any, you know, requests that have come in from, that are in a certain status within your, within your program or that have come in perhaps just this last quarter or this year or this month, this week, you're gonna be able to pull that together really easily and not need to come to us to build out a new visual in your in your flow. So here, you know, you can see I just really quickly just pulled a bucket of grids together, and then I can see, you know, some various ways that I I can view that that data depending upon what what makes the most sense. And then I can just drop that on my dashboard. So, again, as you look at these dashboard parts here, super easy to build. No. You know, you're not gonna need a PhD in computer science to be able to pull those together. And certainly no offense or disrespect to anyone out there that's a PhD in computer science. So, that's kind of an example of a high level of things you can do to set your reminders for yourself. I can see, you know, a bucket of incoming requests that have come in. This next dashboard that I put together is really just showing the key pillars of my granting workflow. Again, this is gonna be perfectly configured to whatever you actually want to see, and whatever the pillars of your program are. And you might have multiple programs too, also really easy to build out and track here. So for this one, I have kind of this first one is a request received. As requests are coming in through an application, Those are gonna populate here. Then as I maybe go through and I wanna, like, take a look at that information and maybe just check a box with, yep. Everything looks good here. Let's send that on to reviewers. This box will pick up ones that have, you know, had that, kind of checkbox for of my approval, filtered out here, and then they're gonna drop drop into this bucket. Then look, I've assigned those two reviewers. Those I can see where those external reviews are in progress. Once those reviews work come back, ones that have been approved or they've gone through some workflow, whether we, you know, sent those to a meeting and we've actually, you know, delineated that those are are to be approved, through a vote. However however we wanna go through that process, you know, those would then be flagged to then move to the approval bucket. You know, again, like I said, that board example here, maybe those are special ones that are over a certain amount that go to our board, ones that we just send rejection letter, and then certainly final and approved projects. Again, these are just an absolute example. Certainly, you know, we've got a lot of different use cases out there, from all the folks joining us from all over the country and the world. So, you know, there's there's a lot of different workflows, but Blackbaud grant making is really gonna configure to whatever you need. This is just an example. Another, dashboard I like to show is that, you know, we talked about how I can have my own individual to do, but maybe, you know, Blake and Miranda are on my team and we kinda wanna have a shared view of, okay, what's out there that's in the pipeline, what's are we actively doing. Know, let's kinda have that high level rollout. Maybe we come together once a month, once a quarter to review things. This is gonna be a great way to share that information, across the team. We also can share this kind of a dashboard with others across the organization. Blackbaud grant making comes with, every package comes with unlimited view only licenses. So if you have, you know, fundraisers or folks on the finance team or folks on a program team that want to just be able to kinda have a place to log in and see, like, what kind of work are we doing in the world, what kind of, support are we providing to our community across our mission, they can absolutely log in to the system and just view this information, view these dashboards without being upcharge for additional licenses. So great call out there and and just being able to share this information across the team. I also like to mention that this is live and actionable data. So as data changes, as new requests are being approved or pending coming into the system, these bar charts are going to, you know, move up and down in real time so you're always staying on top of things. I can also click into any bucket, and you can see it easily just populates that, that list of those requests really quickly and easily. I can add columns here. I can sort this and change this however I want. I can change different views, to be able to add and and see different columns really easily. And then I can certainly click even even further into this and to pull up an actual request and be able to see all the details of that individual request, its approval status, and we'll come back and spend some more time here on these requests. But just to show you, you can get kind of that high level roll up all the way down into the nitty gritty really quickly. One final dashboard I'll call out as before we kinda jump into the application side of things, because I also really love the ability to be able to surface a lot of data really beautifully and easily without needing a ton of work on the back end. So I know when I was working in the space when I was a nonprofit, it felt like board meeting weeks were just an absolute buyer drill. Like, it was a cascading, you know, team member, just all progress stopped in the organization to just prepare for that board meeting to make sure that we had all the data that we needed to either surface to our board chair before the board meeting or actually throw into the slides or a board book, something like that, about what our our granting data and our kinda reports were on our community impact side of things. So with Blackbaud grant making, you can actually create a tab up here that perhaps you've set you chatted with your board chair ahead of time and said, okay. You know, as you come into your term on the board this year, what is the data that you would like to see, surface to our board members, you know, every month or at certain times in the granting cycle and make them feel part of that process. And then you can, on the back end, set up those dashboards to report out, like, okay. We really are trying to, you know, zero in on our ages of our individual search. Perhaps, you know, certain demographics or different parts of town, you know, whatever those key, those KPIs, those key metrics are, you can build out a dashboard, and then the data system automatically flow into these nice beautiful charts. You'll build it out one time, and then every time it's coming around for the board meeting, like, no problem. You're gonna come in here, screenshot these out, save them, whatever you need to do to get those where they need to go to get to your board. So really great easy reporting to be able to pull here. You can see a lot of different ways to to pull and slice this data. And I'm also not needing to export this, put this in putting this into Excel or building something special out, you know, in Power BI. It's all native right here from within the solution and no additional charge for this kind of functionality. So really terrific easy visualization here. Okay. So we sent a good bit of time and dashboards. Let's talk about how this information gets into the system. That's gonna originate with a request. So that's gonna be a request from either your external folks. I know we have some organizations that their program officers internally are working hand in hand with organizations, to be able to kinda co write those applications. All those workflows, very easy to accommodate. But what what we're gonna talk through today is if, you have external applicants that are coming in to a form that's been created on behalf of your organization, branded for your organization, and they're accessing, you know, via a link. Oops. It's my looks like my screen share perhaps isn't working. Did not click over. Let me stop sharing and reshare just to make sure. There we go. Okay. Yes. So we're gonna jump to this application and be able to, you know, see how that that information gets into the system. Like I said, it's branded. You've got these you know, our our logo here, the our cute little background image. But this is a website that could be shared via link. This could live, you know, on your Internet if you're maybe in a hospital or or health care organization where, you know, you have physicians in the hospital. They're applying into the foundation to get requests for funds. Lots of different ways that this form can be used. I'm gonna jump in and start a new application here. Gonna think for a minute. I can if I've applied on behalf of an organization in the past, it will automatically remember that. Or if I I can search for, our PO connect database that this is linked to, it will search for oh, okay. There we go. I'm not sure why it was oh, yeah. Blackbaud Giving Fund. I was, just typing there. It will search the a database of, registered nonprofits in the in The US and elsewhere to pull in approved, nonprofit organizations and good legal tax standing. So that's a great benefit, to the subscription to make sure that the organizations applying in are are good, organizations there. And, also, if you're if you're, getting applications from individuals, this is also a feature you can turn off. So I could just apply as an individual too. So I'll just call that out. We have the ability to have what's called an eligibility form. So this is where you can ask, a question or a series of questions to make sure that the applicants are within your frame of work. So I'm gonna hit submit here. It's saying congratulations. You have passed the eligibility quest the the eligibility questions. Again, you can build out more questions there. It was a pretty simple and straightforward example. And then you can have a welcome page. So your welcome page can have some text about your actual application, to let them know, you know, the progress or the what they can expect for the granting cycle. And then they can have you know, you can build out as many tabs as you want here to be able to collect the information you need from your applicant. Again, this isn't always gonna be apples to apples for every single use case out there. So just as you look at this, look at the types of things that you can put on this form, know, to to be able to customize it to your organization. So I have small boxes here. I have, required, this little kinda asterisk that doesn't allow me to submit the form unless that that text is filled out. So that helps make sure on the back end that you're getting all the information that you need. I have big boxes. I can have date boxes. I can have this kind of hover text. So if there's additional, information that, you know, you wanna kinda share that to help an applicant fill out a question, we can do that. We can have drop downs with, you know, yes, no, or, other, you know, kind of multiple fields there. We also have what's called, you know, smart, a smart form where if you answer a question a certain way, another question box can show up at the bottom, depending upon how they filled it out. So we kind of have this, conditional logic built within the form. It can also create contacts and other types of records from this one request. So I can add something new here that I can add a a, you know, a whole bunch of more detail about this individual person as well on this form. I can have them, you know, tell me their expected outcomes of a pro of their project. I can have something like a maximum word count or a minimum word count here. I can also have financial information where they can actually build out a basic budget, you know, of a variety of different, line items. And then the form will actually tally those up for them so they can do that, addition here from within the form. We can also have, them upload different multiple different types of attachments, so financial reports, tax documentation, sometimes videos, other things, you know, really great way to to collect all that information. Then all of that's gonna be stored in on the record. This isn't gonna need some sort of Dropbox or additional SharePoint. We can work within that framework if that's something that you need, but Blackbaud grant making will give you the ability to store all of those documents nestled nicely under the request, under the actual organization, and the recipients or and the, people associated with that request. We've also embedded esignature functionality into the form. So, you know, you're getting some sort of legal sign off with them, to be able to, you know, make sure that everything they have submitted is compliant. One other thing I can I can call out here is that we do have the ability to change the language of this form? So this is some a new functionality we're really proud of that I can click a different language here, and it will actually translate the application as well as the navigational text. If you give it a second to think, it will, actually translate the all of the language as well on the form. So you can see it translated not just the the text of, like, you know, the the the actual questions that would be submitted for your applicant to, provide information into, but it'll also change, like, the navigational buttons as well. So there's a lot more to be said about this form of that functionality that you need, but, a lot of our customers who who require multiple languages really appreciate that, advancement in our solution. Okay. So jumping in, I'll just kinda quickly show us and walk us through the actual what the what the record looks like so you can kinda see that. I have a record pulled up here, the Blackbaud Foundation. I didn't hit submit, so we won't have a a new application to look at. But you can kinda see here the the organizational record, of all the information that we've collected about that organization is here as well as the request. Everything that they have submitted that, the multiple requests that this organization has submitted over the years are gonna be right here. I can click into, a a record here like this one, and I can see this one's pending. And I can see all the information that came in through that form would be shown here as well. If it's an organization that we once this request has been approved, I can see the payments that we have approved and scheduled out. These are, you know, going to pull in really nicely to run our reports that once these, these payments are scheduled, the system can do an automated sweep to pull out, okay, you know, when we need to give $20,000 to this organization on this date or this date or this date, the Blackbaud will do a scheduled report to be able to pull all that information out of which payments need to be made on a given week or a given month, and then that can communicate to a solution like Financial Edge NXT or QuickBooks or whatever else you're using. Really easy and straightforward payment, functionality there. If you're an organization that wants these requests come in that you need to, push this to a reviewer committee, I've jumped over to our reviewer portal. So this is an external portal that tack on kind of the side of Blackbaud. Where here, I'm logged in as Lauren Winklevan, a reviewer. So someone that maybe on your volunteer committee or something like that to be able to, provide my vote or feedback on some individual requests. So here, the the grant admin has pulled it pushed out those kind of four requests to me. I've clicked into one, and this is where I can see all the data from that individual request. Then I can fill out a rubric down here at the bottom. You can, change this rubric to look like and feel like whatever you need to be to match your process. Really simple and straightforward there. I also can view any documents that have been associated. So there's additional attachments they've provided. I can view those as well as discussions. We have this kind of missy, discussion message board, between your reviewers that they can log in and, take a look at that. A couple other things that the system can pull out for you is really beautiful branded reports. So here is where I have done something called a write up, and I can, you know, pull in a whole bunch of information about our overall granting history. So you can see down here, it's gonna have a nice report of all of the grants that we've given. This is, again, could be something else that you share internally or provide to a board. That's kind of a high level roll up, but it can also do individual, reports. So here is, you know, an impact moment that we want to share to an audience about we're pulling out some information from that request. We're pulling in some information from other audiences, like perhaps the manager letter of approval that was provided as well through a form. And then here, we actually have a note of thanks from that recipient and a photo as well. The system's gonna pull all this together really well through our write ups feature, functionality and be able to share that, you know, however you want. But, again, I just really love that this is all done natively from within the solution. A couple of things I'll call out is that, you know, on that review side of things, we can also track the reviewers that, are helping us. So I can actually have some visibility into who's completing those reviews. And, you know, if I need to prompt a reviewer to, you know, maybe I've noticed that they haven't opened up the portal. It's a great way to have visibility into that reviewer process. We also have what's called requirements, which is another feature that once those grantees have once they are kinda out there rocking and rolling with their grant request, maybe we want them to complete progress reports, we can have them we can assign out different kinds of reports to those groups, and the system will, number one, send some automated emails to them or some automated communications prompt them to either come back into that portal. Oh, gosh. My screen has stopped sharing. I just realized. I'm so sorry about that. We can send some communication out to those grantees to make sure that they are, you know, staying on top of what they need to do to stay, you know, compliant with our cycle and the information that we want from them. So here is where I can assign out different types of reports, to be able to get that information from them. So it'll either push them back to the portal and allow them to kinda log in and provide updated, you know, reports or, you know, just financials, interim reports, those kinds of things, or just narratives about what they've done overall. And then that can also allow us to have a roll up of what their progress has been. So if they are if they are kinda logging in once a quarter and telling us, like, okay. We served, you know, 5,000 people once it this quarter and then 5,000 next quarter, we can actually collate all that information and have these really beautiful views visuals about the overall impact that our granting has done. Similarly, here on the exceeded met, partially met, we can see how they are reporting against their objectives. Is that if that's the kind of granting that you do. So it just really gives you that, data and visuals, on on the overall work that you're that you're doing. So I know we've flown through a ton here. So, please, this is just meant to be a teaser for you to to see a little snippet of what Blackbaud grant making can do and some of the power that it can unlock for you and your organization. We'd be delighted to do a deeper dive with you, kinda pop the hood on what your current granting, is doing and what your needs are, and then we can do a more customized demonstration for you or just a more personalized conversation to help see if the solution could be a fit for you and for your team. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Lauren, for that awesome presentation and of that kind of, yes, sneak peek of Blackbaud grant making. Yeah. As as everyone could see today, you know, Blackbaud grant making can absolutely and effectively manage your entire grant cycle, from accepting those online applications to assessing and communicating outcomes. So it really is that one, you know, all in one purpose built solution, for grant making organizations. I know we just got a about a minute here. So if you guys have any questions, please put those, those questions in the Q and A function. Again, Miranda is here on the line if you'd want to. And in the doc section, there's a way you can schedule time with her there as well. But feel free to submit any questions, now while we're still on the line. But we thank you very much for your time today. Again, a, on demand recording link will be sent to your email in the next twenty four hours. They'll also have an option to schedule a call there. So if you wanna learn a little bit more about Blackbaud grant making and what that would look like for your organization, please fill that out there. But Again, thank you for your time today, Lauren. Thank you for your time, and Miranda, you as well. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thank you.