Video: Product Update Briefing - YourCause® GrantsConnect® | Duration: 3248s | Summary: Product Update Briefing - YourCause® GrantsConnect®

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - YourCause® GrantsConnect®": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our product update briefing for our Grants Connect solution. We are so excited that you were able to join us for today's session. First, I'd love to get started with a quick round of introductions. So my name is Kayla Barnes. My pronouns her hers. I'm a product marketing manager with Cost Solutions with your Meg, I'll let you introduce yourself. I'm Meg Radford. Having some technical difficulties. So Meg Radford is our product manager over Grants Connect. Her pronouns are she, her, her. Been with the company for 3 years. Okay. Sorry, Meg. Were you able to come off mute? Can can you hear me? Yes. Oh my goodness. Okay. So, Kayla just covered it. Yeah. And then Andrea, is it correct? It's okay. And, Meg, apologies. We are unable to hear you. I think that there might be an issue with your mic. If you'd go ahead and unplug that, maybe join and rejoin. I'll go ahead and introduce for Andrea and Sarah. Apologies for the technical difficulties. Y'all Andrea is our director of product management. Her pronouns are she her hers and she has been with the company for a little over a year now. And then I'm also joined by Sarah Anderson, our customer success enablement manager. Her pronouns are she, her, hers, and she has been with the company for a little over 5 years. So to get us started with a quick, look at our agenda for today. So first, we'll start out with a quick overview of the YourCause solutions. From there, I'll pass the mic to my colleague, Sarah, who will cover off on important information on customer success resources. And, Andrea, I'm so sorry. Could you please mute your mic? Then we'll get into our road map conversation. That portion of the presentation will cover 3 time horizons. What's available today, what's coming soon, and what our longer term innovation plans are. A couple of quick housekeeping item for today's webinar platform. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers. So, hopefully, you all can hear me. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your brow browser is the best way to get that working. And on my end, I think I might be having a slight delay in my connectivity. So apologies if I cut off any of our other speakers and might have had a little bit of a mismatch on the audio on my end. A quick note on the q and a, you'll be able to access the q and a on the far right hand side of your screen as well. And when you're asking a question, please be specific in what you're asking just as the q and a might move a little bit slower as we're moving through the slides. We might not get to your question right in that moment. If you give us some specifics around what piece of functionality you're asking about, that'll answer your question. The chat portion that you can see on that far right hand side as well, is not open for public chat, but we can push messages through that chat for you all to see. And then finally, I want to point out the doc section. So within the documents, you'll find helpful links that we'll reference throughout today's presentation. The first link that you should see in that doc section is called the companion guide. This is a great resource that summarizes the major innovations that have been recently released and are coming soon. So great little download to be able to recap and review what we talk about today. And because this is a presentation that means forward looking statements, I do need to read the safe harbor statement in its entirety. This presentation contains forward looking statements that involve inherent risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. It outlines Blackbaud's current plans and general product direction as of the date this presentation was created. Functionality described in this presentation that is not currently available is subject to change at any time without notice at Blackbaud's sole discretion. It does not represent a commitment to develop or release specific features within the time frame discussed according to the presented design or at all. Please make any purchase decisions based on features and functionality that are currently available. So in addition to Grants Connect, which is why you're here today, YourCause also offers CSR Connect, our employee giving, volunteering, and resource group technology. CSR Connect helps companies manage the employee engagement side of their impact efforts with everything from matching gifts, skills based volunteering, peer to peer fundraising, and so much more. And we'll be hosting a product update briefing on that solution tomorrow. With integration points between these two products, companies can get a holistic view of the impact they're making in their giving, volunteering, and grant making programs. Companies and employees using these solutions also have access to one of the largest global databases of vetted nonprofits, NPO Connect, and that's our free portal that nonprofits can use to create their charity profile, get payments faster, and stay up to date. We'll touch on that more in just a moment. And last but not least, we have a new product offering, in our your cause solution set, Impact Edge. And we've created Impact Edge because we believe that CSR professionals like you deserve a solution as inspiring as the impact that you make. With embedded, we're helping busy CSR professionals, unify their data to unlock their reporting potential. And that starts by centralizing data from CSR Connect and Grants Connect and then populating that into the impact dashboard part of the solution, which is complimentary for all of our clients and currently being rolled out. All clients will have access to the impact dashboards by the end of this year, and we'll talk a little bit more about those today later in the presentation, as well as continue to encourage you and share a link to register for that product update briefing specific to Impact Edge, which will be Thursday this week. Beyond the impact dashboards, clients will have the opportunity to add Blackbaud Copilot to their partnership with us. And Blackbaud Copilot leverages responsible and secure generative AI to help you turn all of these numbers and data into compelling narratives. So imagine being able to create volunteer event descriptions, draft press releases, and answer questions about your programs from stakeholders in just moments. Copilot is designed to truly be an extension of your team, helping you save time and find deeper insights into your data. And then quickly, I wanna just touch on NPO Connect for any nonprofit professionals, viewing today's session. So NPO Connect, like I mentioned, is our free nonprofit portal, and it makes it easier for nonprofits to receive employee donations and manage volunteer opportunities, for companies who use our Grants Connect and CSR Connect solutions. Nonprofit administrators can register and log in at np@nonprofit.yourcost.com, which is linked in that doc section that I referenced earlier. And it allows them to manage their charity profile, which populates to the users of CSR Connect and Grants Connect. This gives you the ability to clearly communicate your organization's mission, stories of impact, and goals. You can also update your organization's logos, search tags, contact information, and more through that profile. And then you can also register to receive donations, electronically for free, up to 3 weeks quicker than I check. You can also access donor details, verify donations and volunteer hours, and create volunteer events to populate in CSR Connect. So if you're a charity on the line today and you haven't already registered, on NPO Connect, I highly encourage you to check it out. And now I'd like to pass it, to my amazing colleague, Sarah, here to represent customer success and go over a couple of customer success resources and support functions. Sarah, take it away. Thank you so much, Kayla. In addition to the charity support that nonprofits receive through NPO Connect, we also have specific teams that are here to support your success in other ways. For our client admins, we have a full team of customer success managers here to make sure you're looking meeting the outcomes you're looking for and getting the most out of the solution as you can. For your applicants, we're gonna take that off your plate as well. You don't have to answer applicant questions anymore. We have our customer advocacy desk who answers all your applicant questions on your behalf. So we are supporting your success through a full 360 degree view. Beyond the customer success and support teams, we provide a multitude of other resources around thought leadership, connecting our clients to each other, and facilitating product feedback. Today, we wanna highlight just a few standouts, including community, Blackbaud University, and our roadshow events. Let's take a look. First of all, I'd love to see you in the Grants Connect community. These are private communities that are accessible via invite only. If you haven't joined us there yet, make sure to ask your CSM for a link. Once you're in, you'll have access to connect with one of another, keep in touch with the global good network as a whole with our discussion board chats. You'll have a chance to learn to get and get the latest product updates and resources and finally engage and get access to our product events, which we'll speak to a little bit more in a bit. YourCloud solutions are also now available within our central training system, Blackbaud University. Blackbaud University is an online training learning community, and we've got all kinds of skill sets and information out there for you. We're we specifically focus on getting you up and running as fast as possible to manage your programs. Learn with us today. If you haven't taken a course yet, I would recommend the launch, course basics of processing charitable funds. It's a great course to understand how your dollars get from you all the way to your nonprofit. Stay tuned for updates in our community and through our, other events to find out when we'll have a grants connect course. Speaking of those events, we had all sorts of events throughout this year. We had regional meetups. We had our annual conference, BBCon, and numerous industry events that we attended. We're on the road all the time. Our team has brought the Global Good Network together in all the locations you see featured on this map. And for the x in 2025, we're hoping to go even more places. If you've been a partner with us and hosted us in one of these cities, we appreciate you more than you know. Sorry about that. Follow us on LinkedIn and, keep up with the events tab to, join us at an event near you in the future. One more way to get involved in addition to, the idea bank on community where you can give your ideas of what you'd like to see developed in the product next. Sometimes we have a little bit more involved customer discovery happening. So, we'll dig a little deeper into a certain feature or a certain way you do something and figure out how to make it even easier for you or how to make it, easier for your applicants. So we'd love to have you get involved with the product discovery program. You can sign up at www.blackbaud.com backslash discovery, and there's also a link, like Kayla mentioned, in the docs tab. I'm gonna pass it over to Andrea for our road map strategy. Thank you, Sarah. Wanted to thank you all for being here today and talk about our new innovation themes that will start serve as our guiding lights for future product developments. You might recall our previous themes, evolve, expand, and engage, and 2 of those themes, modernize 2 of our new themes, modernize and globalize, are familiar to those previous themes. With modernizing the platform, we're focusing on continually making user, a more modern experience for the user interface and also making it more mobile mobile friendly. For Globalize, we're focused on, how to, sorry, how to make the platform as universal as possible, really localizing that experience to where our users and our customers are. And we're focused on innovating inclusively so that you can give back wherever you do business. Our last theme is probably the newest type of theme in the 3 of our 3 themes, connected system. This theme focuses on bridging our powerful broad solutions and partnering with others to bring you more data, faster donation processing, and additional capabilities. While this isn't new for our product teams, we are placing an increased focus on this area to help our collective impact further, faster. Grants Connect is a modern purpose built solution for corporate community investment teams, and it has the flexibility to set up those tailor made program experiences and processes without complex customizations. Once a grants program is set up on GrantsConnect, the platform facilitates the end to end grants life cycle from application to payment and ongoing impact measurement. As you can see, Grants Connect is loaded with so many features that help our clients drive impact. And as you as we move through today's presentation, you'll notice a tag in the upper right corner of your slide that ties that piece of functionality to the functional area that are listed here to help give you context as to how that piece of innovation plays a role in the life cycle of your grants program. From application process through evaluate communication, giving with confidence, and impactful insights. Before we jump into updates, I want to recognize that we know that no CSR programs are the same. From team size to budgets to everything in between, each of you on the line today has a different perspective. But there is one thing we all have in common, time. We have a lot of exciting updates to showcase today that are focused on helping you drive efficiency in the administration of your program so you can focus on the more exciting aspects of your job. We know time is limited, but we're working hard to give you as much time back in your day as possible. You'll notice throughout the presentation a recurring theme, time savings and efficiency gains, all just better serve your, limited time resources. As always, we will present our road map to you today through 3 time horizons. First, we'll start with features that are available now and have been released since we last presented in the spring. I know Sarah and team do a phenomenal job showcasing recent releases in the monthly client admin workshop, so, hopefully, none of these are new new to you. Next, we will talk about what's coming soon in our release preview. These are features that we're already working on and can't wait to get into your hands. And, finally, we will round out with what's next for Grants Connect and your and our YourCause portfolio and share some of the work that we have planned for the longer term. Let's review what's been released in the last several months that is available today in the product, and I'm going to hand it off to Meg. Hi, everybody. This is Meg. Before we get started, I wanna make sure that everyone can hear me. Can I get an indication from the team if you can hear me or not? Yes, Meg. We can hear you. Yay. Fantastic. Okay. Well, one problem down. Well, great. I'm really happy to be joining you today, and thank you, Andrea, for passing it off to me. So jumping right in, I wanna hand highlight some of the impactful features we've released, this year in Grants Connect designed to make your job as a grant manager easier and more effective. So centered around the 3 themes that Andrea just mentioned, modernize, globalize, and create connected systems. These updates are all about saving you time and maximizing your impact. So first, let's talk about modernization. Our powerful form builder and workflow enhancements simplify processes while adding flexibility. For example, the enhanced drag and drop feature in the form builder makes form creation straightforward and more efficient. Plus the ability to restore deleted form fields means you can quickly recover from mistakes without losing progress. Both are time savers. And on the globalization front, we have machine translation to over 25 language languages ensuring that you can communicate and engage with applicants worldwide. And lastly, in terms of connected systems, GRAMS Connect is now integrated with Impact Edge and you'll be hearing a lot about that today. This integration gives you greater visibility into the impact you're making and allows you to focus on what truly matters, which is making a difference. So one more thing before we dive in. Keep an eye out for these icons. One is the light bulb icon representing features that have been informed and developed directly from client feedback. Your feedback is crucial to help us build these tools that make your life easier. And second is a heart icon. This will be highlighted on features, that are designed for the charity applicant. We wanna ensure that their experience in Grants Connect is seamless because we know that their experience represents the interactions with your programs. And on that note, I'm excited to talk about the applicant experience. As you know, Grants Connect is committed to providing an exceptional user experience for our applicants. And we've made numerous enhancements recently to improve it. So we conducted a survey recently. We gathered feedback from nearly 200 applicants in July and the results were quite gratifying. So our, the big takeaway is that the Grants Connect applicant portal is meeting our applicants' needs effectively right now, which not only benefits the applicants, but reduces the burden on you, our grant manager. So this survey will act as a baseline for us as we continue to improve the applicant experience so we can measure how how we are getting better. And as part of our ongoing enhancements to the applicant process, we've launched a new feature related to program guidelines. And after an analysis of our support data, we made this feature to ensure that applicants can understand all the details of the programs they are applying to. So, applicants have direct access, can directly access a link that shows prominently right where they need it, when they're filling out their application. So they don't have to search through emails anymore or external sources to find that information. Additionally, grant managers can customize these these program guidelines, so that they can tailor them during setup. And they can even translate them so their applicants can access them in multiple languages. And the outcome is clear, accessible information at our applicants fingertips, to ease the burden on them and to foster confidence and understanding through every stage of the applicant process. So this slide covers 2 new, search features for applicants that are available now. So first, we have a new feature that is yet another example of improving the applicant experience by empowering applicants to find their own answers. So applicants can now view all the emails related to their applications directly from the my applications or the apply page. And this addresses a common issue reported by grant managers where applicants briefly contact them when they can't find an email. So instead of searching through their inbox or reaching out to grant managers, applicants can now simply click view communications, to see a table of all the emails related to their application, including the subject and the date sent. They can also see previews of emails, including cc recipients and attachments. And so secondly, the second part of this slide is we've also introduced a filter to to our organization search that helps applicants more easily find their organization. And hiding that extraneous those extraneous locations from the organization search just makes it easier for the applicant by removing all that visual clutter of an unnecessary organizations. But it also helps grant managers. So by limiting the search for eligible organizations based on a specific geographic criteria, grant managers can ensure that applicants can only see organizations from their specific regions such as a individual state or or entire countries if they like. So moving on from the applicant experience to form building. This feature is inspired by your valuable feedback about the drag and drop functionality. So we've made improvements to ensure that it works seamlessly to help you save time and reduce rework. The form builder now drops components exactly where you want them and no more misplaced fields when you're dragging and dropping. And if you have a field that's already created but not yet in the form, you can now drag and drop it right in there with no problem. And if a column or a well also already has something in it, you can cut and paste right into the field. So that is a time saver as well. So also, our new set it and forget it option for setting the formatting for the entire platform also saves time. Also reduces the risk of errors. So you can leverage this feature in custom emails where you can give your emails a consistent look and feel. You can do it in document templates to apply the same formatting to all of them And you can do it, in your custom forms to make your forms look more polished and professional. So as you know, Grants Connect already offers robust workflow level automation capabilities. You can set up these routing rules within the workflow itself, excuse me, automating many of your program tasks. This does not only save time, but also cuts down on manual work. To build, to build on this, we've added the ability to use custom dates as triggers for your workflow automation. And this means that you can tailor your program to fit your specific needs with greater precision. But we've also introduced due dates for forms. So now you can set specific due dates and use them for automation, making it much easier to manage your deadlines without having to do manual calculations. And these, both of these enhancements come directly from popular ideas submitted by you, our users. And here's another feature. We give you, more control by allowing you to specify the data you receive from applicants. So first, you can choose specific file types for each form component. And this will allow you to tailor your forms to accept only the file fields that are relevant to your program. So for example, if you managing a grant that requires, only PDF submissions, you can specify that only PDFs are accepted. You can also do max by maximum file size control. So you can set the maximum file size for each form component. And by default, the max file size is always 29 megabytes, but you can select a lower value if you if you want, to ensure that your forms aren't bogged down by large files. And we also have, error handling in there. So we've improved the error handling so that if an applicant tries to upload an unsupported file type or a file type that's too a file that's too large, they'll receive clear and meaningful error messages. This helps ensure that applicants know exactly what they need to do to submit their form successfully. And so continuing on with this recently released grants connect functionality. So as you know, while workflows are an essential and powerful tool in Grants Connect that help you manage your applications effectively and allow you to scale without compromising accuracy. So our recent workflow enhancements give you even more power to manage your applications. You can now update all user information for your workflows in one place. So you can confirm you can perform bulk updates to set up large programs quickly, and you can, assign audiences to workflow levels, which is a useful tool for managing a lot of permissions. This will allow you to create efficiencies by assigning audiences to multiple workflow levels simultaneously. Also, when you create a new sublevel in a workflow, it now inherits the user permission from the default level the parent level. And you can even configure that now to stay in sync with any changes to the parent level. So that is also a huge time saver and it really helps with accuracy and reduces, the need for troubleshooting. So that's not all in the workflow area. There are more workflow enhancements available now. As a grant manager, you can duplicate existing workflows and use them as a starting point for new ones. So this means you can easily create new workflows with similar steps without having to recreate them from scratch. And that's something we've heard a lot from from you that this would be a great enhancement. You can also quickly copy Workflows, including all sub levels, users, audiences, settings, and permissions. Everything. By maintaining settings and configuring in the duplicated workflows, you can ensure that all the information remains consistent. And this new feature was designed to come to your rescue when you have an oops moment as we all we all have and I had one earlier today in this presentation. So you can focus on your core tasks without having to worry about accident accidental deletions. It gives you the ability to quickly retrieve and re reduce, reuse deleted fields with a single click, Avoiding the need to recreate them. So it's kind of like an undo button for deleted fields, which is very powerful. And at grants connect, we continued our focus and expansion on health resources and emphasis on providing guidance. So that you can find the help you need right where and when you need it. So when you're setting up new grant program and need to create custom forms in multiple languages, the new in app help will guide you through each step ensuring that your forms are accurate. These new resources for translations are now available for grant programs and nomination programs as well as for forms and emails. And also on the translation page you'll find new guidance on more important topics like custom forms, grant programs, nomination programs and in kind. So, as you, as many of you already know, non profit organizations that are awarded grants from our Blackbaud Giving Fund are required to be listed as eligible for giving in the YourCause Nonprofit platform. This is accomplished by vetting the organization. Ensuring that it meets the criteria outlined by Blackbaud Giving Fund as well as by Blackbaud Compliance. So for organizations that process their payments through the Blackbaud Giving Fund, an understanding of how vetting works is critical. To support this important process, we've published updated instructions in the vetting required model that now offered an explanation, and links to the relevant part of articles so you can find them. And this will support grant managers with navigating this complex process so that they have all the information they need at their fingertips. We at Grants Connect are dedicated to simplifying the charity vetting process and our charity partners are noticing the difference. Here are 2 testimonials. The first one, we've experienced various vetting processes and yours is by far the most flexible and straightforward. Thank you for supporting our mission. And the second one is thank you for making things easier for everyone. With our heavy workload speeding up this process is a huge help. So that's music to our ears. We love this positive feedback and we remain committed to easing the burden on your applicants. And now I'd like to hand it off to Andrea to tell you about some of the things that we've got planned for you. Thank you, Meg. I'll offer one clarifying note in the that in this session, we are not covering every new feature and enhancement that's been made in the most recent and upcoming months. Instead, we're offering just highlights of those most impactful items for you today. For a detailed review of what's included in our regular releases, I recommend checking out the what's new section in our help content available at the grants connect at the grants connect help center. Now let's trans, let's transition to what's coming soon in grants connect. Continuing with our strategic themes, we're excited to share updates ranging from workflow efficiency improvements to new standard templates. One thing I wanna call your attention to is the QR code that's listed under the connected systems theme, which will take you to a registration page for our very first Impact Edge product update briefing. Sarah will give you a preview of what to expect in that session, but there's so much more goodness to explore that we highly encourage you to register and attend. Now I'll pass it off to Sarah. Thanks, Andrea. Before we go into Impact Edge, I just wanted to cover a little bit of the data that we already have in Grants Connect starting with this quote from one of our customers, Crowe LLP, who is an accounting and, consulting firm. It's it reads, the type and quality of data we can gather from CSR Connect and Grants Connect together is a big advantage. We work with accountant, so data is important. And having data driven insights allows us to make strategic decisions to enhance and grow our programs. It also gives the data we need for fact based storytelling to share our successes with our firm leaders, employees, and communities. And data is really one of the main reasons that people wanna buy Grants Connect. They want to get all their data in one place and be able to share it easily. So, again, before we go into Impact Edge, let's look at some of the data that's already available in Grants Connect. We have everything from data feeds that are completely customizable that can be emailed out or dropped in a secure transfer folder at any time. We have reporting templates with our ad hoc reporting so you can get a jump start on the report you're looking for with a few quick tweaks to the, filters. We have those scheduled external reports. We have 2 kinds of dashboards. We have prebuilt dashboards that are called insights for all different types of parts of the program, like your budget, your programs, and more. And then, of course, we have ad hoc where you can build the exact, kinda, dashboards you want or I'm sorry. Ad hoc is the reports you want. And then the other kind of dash boards that I didn't get into was the, dashboards on the home page that are customizable by you. Okay. So that's all that's in here now. Let's look at what's in Impact Edge. And if you don't have it yet, I am so excited for you to get it soon. So it has quick insights that are just there on your front page. And the biggest thing I've heard from customers so far is that they love when our their admins or their leadership ask them a question. They just come in here, and they can have it right at their fingertips. For example, on the overview tab, that gives you more information about, like, who's applying to your programs, which of your different programs are doing what, and what awards have you given. And then you also have a recipients tab that gives you a lot more information on the organizations that are receiving your awards. So, if you don't have access to Impact Edge just yet, it's coming. Check with your CSM for a better timeline. Next, why do we need to wrangle our all of our data? Our customers are global. We are seeing them all over the world with their employees and their grant applicants from everywhere. So to support this, we have over 7,000,000 nonprofits in our database with over 1,630,000 that are eligible for giving specifically. In Grants Connect, there are 30 language section settings. We have a 100 currency options, and we have a translated NPO connect portal like, Kayla mentioned before. We have automatic currency and language conversion that are on our forms, and then we also have custom form translations. Let's talk about that just a little bit more. Now, Andrea, I know you've brought all kinds of cool stuff with AI to us, and the your team included. But did you know guys that we've had machine, translations in Grants Connect for over 5 years already? So you can go into your, forms and translate them right there with a machine. You don't have to hire a service. So one of the things that we've done with this, let's see, is you we also have hidden the ones that are no longer relevant. So if you're in your machine translations, they're not going to show you every single translation that you've ever done. It's just gonna show you the ones on your current form to clean up the UI just a little bit to help you manage your translations even easier. And on that, I wanna pass it over to Meg. Thank you, Sarah. We've been gathering insights from our grant managers to improve the setup of and updating of grant programs to grants connect. So this is, we wanna put you in the driver's seat of being able to set up your programs efficiently. So through discovery sessions, we've identified some key areas for enhancement that we are working on. So, we're gonna reduce visual clutter, created integrated setup experience, improved standard fields as well as workflows. So we're now testing a prototype that's based on your feedback. And thank you to all the clients who have participated before. And as you've heard, in this presentation, we invite more of you to join our discovery program. And if you're interested, sign up at blackbaud.com/discovery or let your CSM know. So, speaking of saving time, this effort to improve our program setup will put more control in the hands of grant managers. Just like a race car driver in the driver's seat. So some of these other solutions we're working on are, understanding data relationships and sequential steps. So just like a driver, needs to understand the track, we're making it easier to see the relationships between the data elements and the order of required steps. And in in terms of reducing visual clutter, as I mentioned, think of this as reducing the distractions in your race car. So you can focus on the task at hand. And improving our standard fields and workflows, these enhancements will make the make it, more user friendly and efficient. And created an integrated setup experience. We're working on a seamless end to end setup process. And all of these enhancements taken together are designed to make your programs more efficient so that you don't have to always be a technical expert to manage your own programs. Also you may have noticed this throughout throughout the last year using Grants Connect, but we've been working very hard behind the scenes to supercharge Grants Connect's performance. To ensure that our infrastructure is scaling with our growing user base. So over the coming months, you'll notice that pages load faster than ever before. And you should be able to also notice faster response times, smoother navigation, and quicker feedback on actions that you take. This update, that I mentioned here supports a lot of the program setup work that we just talked about. Because using standard forms and fields helps you get your grant programs up quickly and accurately. Plus they follow the another advantage is they follow best practices. They also components also integrate seamlessly with other parts of Grants Connect like your templates, your dashboards, and your reports. So this can be a really powerful tool for efficiency. And maybe you didn't use the standard templates the first time you set up a program, but we encourage you to take a look the next time you create a new program because it is so much easier now. We have, also some new sponsorship form templates and, some customizable standard fields. So we've made some improvements so that you can, make some changes to your standard fields to make them more flexible. And that's available now. You can also edit the name and the description and default label of these areas. So all of these, taken together give you more flexibility to better fit your use case, and to enable you to use these tools, to set up more quickly. We're we're also committed to continuously standard tools and stay tuned for more updates in this area throughout the course of the next year. And over the past few years, Blackbaud has made significant investments in security. In our previous hub sessions, we've highlighted the updates we have made to TransConnect. We also shared changes we've implemented to our incident response plans and our vulnerability management program. Today, we wanna share with you the bigger picture of how it all ties to a common goal, which is to mature our cyber security program against industry best practices to ensure a comprehensive and effective program that we can use to prevent and detect current threats and as well as anticipate future threats. We've aligned our program to the CSA reference architecture, the NIST framework, and the CSA cloud controls matrix, which all allow us to adopt a defense in-depth strategy when it comes to protecting our systems and data. And finally, well to highlight the obvious, this slide is kind of a lot. And that's really the point of it. The slide is meant to represent all the different layers, in our security approach that we have implemented and show how all of our controls work together to protect our systems and our data. So taking this defense in-depth approach to cyber security is important because it provides the multiple layers of prevention, of protection, sorry, as a wide variety of threats. As we all know, cyber threats are currently evolving and no single security measure can be 100% effective. So by implementing these multiple security layers approach, using a defense in-depth strategy, it ensures that if one layer fails, another, will continue to provide protection and minimize the likelihood of any successful attack. There are a lot of benefits of this approach but, some of them are, well, as I mentioned, multiple layers of protection, but reducing a single point of failure, enhancing detection and response, as well as increased resilience. So, with that, I'll hand it back to my colleague, Sarah, to take us through the next portion of this presentation. Thank you, Meg. This is Andrea. I'm gonna take it from here. And now for our final section for our road map conversation, the next step section. This section will represent what we're pursuing in the longer term around our three themes. So I'd like to do a little bit of vision casting when speaking about our major focus areas for 2025 and beyond. So if we go top to bottom, from a modernize, we are continuing to make improvements to the interface and mobile responsiveness and making the technology more frictionless for you, our our clients and users. For Globalize, we plan to expand global partnerships and continue to innovate those new and existing features to be as inclusive and localized for the user experience as possible and connected systems. Let's lean into those opportunities within the Blackbaud ecosystem. Let's flex flex those Blackbaud muscles. Let's connect the things for our, not only for our clients and our grant administrators, but, also, let's connect for our nonprofits that are being served by our grants programs. Let's let's, make more data available to to enable informed decisions and understanding outcomes and impact, and let's expedite the the giving process by making it all tied together throughout the that blackbaud, ecosystem. For Globalize, we will continue to expand strategically to better facilitate impact for our customers. As you can see here, we've enabled our German partner, Haustis Diftenc and Grants Connect. We're resuming cross border giving to India, and we are the very first vendor to bring an in market global processing partner to in Mexico. And we are super close to being able to share more details, so keep an eye out. And for connected systems, so a connected system's kind of infographically start at at in this way. 1st, we would like to identify an event and add charities supporting relief efforts and using keywords and key phrases to populate these identified charities in an org org search or an organizational search for for your users. Then we would, facilitate contact creation for disaster and crisis relief using, allowing, clients to launch quickly, and then connecting to the NPO Connect Charity events to support charity specific programs for disaster relief. And then at the end of it all, expedited processing to get those funds to charities even faster. Another major component of our connected systems, vision is a much more streamlined delivery of funds to charities. Every year, our YourCause platform and processing team facilitate the collection and disbursement of 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to our 100,000 charities around the globe. And ensuring that secure and speedy delivery of those funds is top priority for us, and we've had multiple efforts underway to drive shorter, more predictable processing cycles. The core Ur Conn's processing life cycle includes, as you see from left to right, requesting funds from companies for prior month transactions, then receiving and applying those funds to relevant accounts and invoices, and then finally, dispersing those funds to charities. We now create and process charity disbursements on a regular schedule for each charity processor in our network, and we disperse the US charities through the Blackbaud Giving Fund 2 times per week, which is the most frequent in the industry. That all adds up to a shortening of our average diverse disbursement cycle by about 20%. We currently are in progress for transitioning our YourCause customers to in phases to receive auto generated funding requests or otherwise known as invoices. The intent is quicker turnaround times on multi funding requests while maintaining the same degree of review, to ensure accuracy. And coming soon, we will be introducing even more ways to accelerate the receipt of funds at the charities your company wants to support. Say stay tuned in early 2025 for more exciting updates. One way we're exploring connected systems is connecting it connecting third party data sources to our YourCause products, especially Grants Connect. And an example here is Candid's population serve data into our nonprofit profiles. It will provide detailed insights you need to make better decisions and, ultimately, to do more good. Benefits include accessing that detailed information about the populations being supported, including which include characteristics like age, sex, race, and ethnic ethnic heritage, and capturing different characteristics of the intended population with multiple codes, providing a nuanced view of who is benefiting from the grants. Imagine this being able to help you better target your grant making programs as well as measure that impact and be able to report on the impact on your communities at the end of at the end of it all. Better track and report on all those grant details and help you demonstrate your grant program's impact to stakeholders. And for modernize, we have a lot in store for Grants Connect. From embedding AI technology, adding mobile capabilities, reimagining workflow management, and improving those outcomes by surfacing more data, I am really excited about what's in store. This is a major area of focus for Grants Connect, and I'm gonna turn it back over to Meg to go over each of these areas in a little bit more detail. Oh, great. Well, thank you, Andrea. I'm excited, to tell you about it. So, first up, I'd like to introduce you to our latest AI powered feature that we're tentatively calling Program Polish. This innovative tool will, is designed to perfect your forms and enhance your applicant's experience. But please note that this product is still in its conceptual stage and being refined. So program college will leverage the power of AI to provide actionable insights to you to help you create forms that are not only efficient, but aligned to your mission. The feature will allow you to polish your forms before publishing it. And, making sure that it's optimized, for your applicants, but also for your reporting. And while this is a conceptual mock up here, it gives you an idea to a glimpse of the potential. And, here's how it might work. So after you've created your form and you're ready to publish, program polish will step in. It will offer you a choice to refine your form. And at this point, our efforts are focused on 3 key areas. So an AI powered spell check and grammar check for your forms. The ability to consolidate redundant information to allow you to streamline your application, to make it easier for your applicants. And also something around, ensuring alignment with your goals. So the AI could ensure that every question that you ask aligns with your stated pillars or goals. And that will help you make sure that your outcome reporting is as meaningful as possible. So in short, it should act as your trusted assistance to help you maximize your forms and make the whole process go a little bit smoother. So while it's still in the conceptual phase, we're excited about its potential and look forward to your feed to help us refine it further. And, another one that we're working on, this feature is also still conceptual, but we invite you to discovery to help us develop this idea. Essentially, it's reviews anytime, anywhere. You can, you could imagine reviewing a grant application while commuting, or during a coffee break, or on the metro like this woman in the screenshot. We with our mobile friendly interface, your grant reviewers can access and evaluate these applications anywhere at any time. And additionally, we're working on email approvals. So, you could imagine that you get an email about a grant application that needs your approval and instead of having to log into the portal, you can approve it right there in your email. This should make it really, make the approval process really quick and convenient so that you can handle your tasks wherever you are. And so we've talked about workflows a few times in this presentation, but I just want to take a step back, to focus on what they do. So as mentioned, in Grants Connect, they automate and streamline the process paneling grant applications. But they empower you to set up a structured process for reviewing and improving grant applications. This includes defining different levels and sub levels of review and they automate the routing of applications ensuring that each application reaches the right person or committee at the right time. So they help grant they help manage who can view and edit at various stages to ensure that sensitive information is only accessible to those authorized users. So in essence, Workflows help you manage applications, more effectively and allow you to scale. And because these workflows are so crucial, we're setting off on an exciting journey to improve them. And we'd like you to come along. So by joining our discovery program, you'll help shape a powerful feature within Grants Connect that will make managing grants, much more simple, more intuitive and more powerful. And your insights will be key in creating a workflow experience that exceeds your expectations. So don't forget to sign up for Blackbaud Discovery at blackbaud.com/discory. And before we wrap things up, let's take a quick fun break with a super short survey. It's just 5 questions. And we would really like to hear from you because your feedback helps us fine tune Grants Connect to fit your needs. So think of this as a chance for you to do the talking and let us know what's important to you. The survey link is in the chat, so go ahead and share your thoughts. Oh, I can't wait to hear what you have to say. So that is it for me. I wanna thank you for your time and attention and most importantly your dedication to making an impact. I'll hand it back to Sarah to finish our presentation. Thanks, Meg. Okay. I wouldn't be a customer success manager if I wasn't giving you homework. So while you're filling out that survey, make sure to scan this QR code real quick so that you can get access and sign up for the product update briefing for Impact Edge. This is the first time ever they've had their own separate product update briefing, and they've got some very cool things that they wanna share with you, and I don't want you to miss it. We also have our CSR connect product briefing this week. So along with that homework, sign up for this product update briefing, fill out the survey, sign up for, discovery. We all just wanna thank you for oh, sorry. I skipped ahead. Don't forget about our growing self-service resources. We've got answers in the help center for all kinds of things. We've got your video library that you've got access to. We've got your community, Blackbaud University. We've got our monthly customer admin workshops. I'll see you in the next 6 minutes if you're coming to the Grants Connect November 1 and more. So make sure you're using those resources. Make sure you're hitting up your customer success manager. I just didn't know how how much homework I was giving you. But, seriously, on behalf of all of us today, Kayla, Andrea, Meg, and myself, thank you so much for taking the time to listen to these important product updates, and we look forward to connecting with you again.