Name: Mastering the Latest Updates to Online Applications in Blackbaud Grantmaking - Tips from the Experts
Uploaded: 2025-02-15T18:54:10.976Z
Duration: 38 min 4 s
Description: Mastering the Latest Updates to Online Applications in Blackbaud Grantmaking - Tips from the Experts

Transcript for "Mastering the Latest Updates to Online Applications in Blackbaud Grantmaking - Tips from the Experts": Alright. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our session today, which is gonna be all about the new dashboards tool here in, in Graham. Actually, you've got dashboards. That was last year. Can we actually start over there? I'm sorry. That's gonna be the one time I'm gonna mess up today. Okay. Gotcha. Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's session, which is gonna be all about the new online applications tool here in Blackbaud grant making. This is gonna be a recording where we're gonna demo the new online applications tool. My name is Henry Winseck. I'm gonna be joined by my colleague, Christy Haskell, and we're gonna be discussing some of the basics of the new online applications tool. But before we get into some of the details of what we're gonna be discussing over the course of our session, let's just briefly introduce ourselves. My name is Henry Winseck. I'm a senior instructor here at Blackbaud University located in Los Angeles, California. My hometown is Charlottesville, Virginia. I enjoy history. I love to travel and I've got two cats here in my home office. And I'm here I'm here joined with my colleague, Chrissy Haskell. Hi, everyone. Good to see you all. Thanks for joining our virtual recording of our session. I'm from Illinois. I'm from Arlington Heights, Illinois, and I also enjoy traveling like Henry, and I also like staying active on my bike or getting involved with races, marathon races. We hope that this is a highlight of your virtual BBCon experience, but we also want to make sure that you are familiar with some resources for even after watching this recording. Me and Henning are both from Blackbaud University. We are both senior instructors, and we do have available for you right now the e learning, which can be taken at any point. It is called Blackbaud Grantmaking Applications Introduction to Custom Forms and Programs. This can be taken, Henry will mention this later on, for any consumer of Blackbaud Grantmaking for free up until the end of this current year, regardless of your subscription with Blackbaud University. Around the corner, we also have our product update briefing. You can be hearing from our product managers for Blackbaud grant making. These are going to be through November. You're going to hear about the latest information about this tool plus anything that's coming in the near future. The customer success team also has a resource library for the transition to these new forms. I definitely found a lot of tips from this library and I encourage you all to find this as well. If you're not already a member of the Blackbaud community, I do encourage this because what better time to join than as you're starting to transition to a new tool. It's an excellent space to get involved with conversations, ask questions, and connect with other grant making users across the globe. For our presentation today, we are hoping to highlight the new features for this tool plus we have a demonstration prepared for all of you. We won't have Q and A since we are doing a recording, but we hope that you'll note down our emails at the end and feel free to reach out to us via email email if you think of any questions in the future. Henry is going to kick it off, letting us know about some exciting things with the new tool. There's so many exciting new aspects of this new online applications tool. Tool. I just wanna highlight five that we really want to foreground here before we actually get into our demo. The ability to edit forms without deactivating, something that folks had asked about a lot in our old online applications tool. Conditional logic, another new feature that I think folks are gonna be really excited about. Basic esignature option, which we'll actually demo for you briefly in a little bit. No more do we have to do that retrievals step. It used to be that you have to retrieve online applications. Now it'll automatically come into your grant making system and enhance screen reader accessibility as well. But these are just five new features that we wanted to highlight. Here is a far more comprehensive list of all of the new features that are coming on applications. This is in as a way of keeping an eye on some of those new features and some of those new upgrades that we're getting to this new grant making online applications tool. And here's what the process looks like broadly speaking. And Christy is gonna walk you through this. Yes. This is a refresh process to, what we are used to with the legacy forms. Now we are going to create and publish a custom form. We'll create and publish a program. Both of these steps we will be able to do with you in our presentation. We'll also point out step three here where you can share the program link with your applicants, and that is where your applicants are going to connect with the form. Once they have access to that link, whether you've shared it out via email, maybe through a social media post, maybe put it on your website, they can fill out the form, take as long as they need to, submit when they're ready, and then that comes into your grant making system where you'll be able to make the decision whether to approve or decline. And these, These two screenshots we will become more familiar with. They are our form builder. The one on the left is pointing out the layout space. Essentially, once we start to put some fields on the form, how do we want them to be displayed? Do we want them to be in a table? Do we want them to have maybe two or three columns? Would we rather that rather see them just as their own separate field? And the screenshot on the right is our capture space. And this is where you can grab all the details that you want to be collecting from your applicants. Things like the requested amount, project description, project start date, project expectations, anything that you've built out standard fields or custom fields, you'll be able to drag and drop from that area onto the form. We have a few previews for you for what the layouts are going to look like. This first one is just simply a field all on its own And then the second one is two fields, of course, representing the two columns. And then our final one here is three columns and a space where you can upload some documents below. You'll start to realize here that there is some variety you can have when you are starting to build out your form. And I think now we're ready for the main event. So now that we have the broad pardon me, Christy. Excuse me For speaking over you. Now that we have the broad outlines of what we can expect from the time just demoing what this tool looks like. I'm gonna open up my sample grant making environment, and we're gonna show you what it looks like to broadly create a new online application. We're gonna start off by building a form, we're gonna publish it, and then we're gonna connect it to a program. So allow me just to open up our tool here so you should be able to have access to our sample version of the grant making environment, and we're gonna be spending all of our time here in the applications drop down. You'll notice here in the applications drop down that the old tool is still there. The old online applications tool is still gonna be available to you until August of next year, so those two do coexist. The new tool can be managed here by managing forms and in the program session, we've also got portal settings and form emails which we're not gonna get into in today's demo. We're gonna start off by building a form which will then connect to a program. Let's start off by taking a look at the forms menu here. Once this loads, we're gonna be able to see a menu of forms that we've previously built. They could be a draft or they could be published, or we could see all forms in one place. On the left, we'll be able to see a description and the name of the form and some and a snapshot of details about all of those forms there. When I'm ready to create a new custom form, which we'll do in a minute, we're gonna go to the upper right hand corner. We've also got a translation tool as well. Let's build a new custom form that we're gonna be walking through together. I'm gonna start off there. Always a good idea to give this form a clear name so that folks are aware what is this form for, what purpose does it serve. We're going to say this is the BBGM demo form. This is going to be for a new request and we can choose the language and we can retranslate that later if we'd like. This description will allow us to provide some more details, some more info and context about this form, and this is where we can enable that esignature option that I mentioned. All we have to do is check that box to require that esignature. I'm gonna hit create and go to form your application tool, and you'd like to import some fields from that old tool. Let's start off by going creating and go to form, and we're gonna kick things off. Once this opens up, we're gonna have a blank canvas here. We've got our first page and there's presently no fields. But now we're gonna start using our form builder to add fields and choose what kind of layout options we want. And Christy is gonna be talking about some of the different field options that we do have. Right. You'll recognize our form builder from our screenshots in the presentation already. And you'll see at the top of that, we have ways that you can filter down the types of fields that you're seeing. You can search, you could filter by category. Maybe start to become familiar with where you'll find different types of fields. I know that we want to do our request fields on this first page, so maybe we can go grab the request category and we can scroll through to see some of the options that are here. These are going to be related to a request record. I think we're going to go ahead and grab request amounts. Yeah, that one's right by your cursor there. See how it is a drag and drop space? Simply just place it where you want it to go. We don't have any layouts yet, so it's just going to open up our record and all the options we have here, and this is a great opportunity to go through the choices that you have. The first few fields are all about what I would describe as the expectations. Do you want to relabel this? Maybe you want to say instead of request amount, how much money do you want? Perhaps you want to have some placeholder text so that there's already some information where they are going to be typing. It's good to provide a description so that they know what to expect to type in. Yes, on the right side, we have a perfect preview of what we've done so far. Even if you wanted to have a little question mark icon, that's your tooltip. You can type out something helpful for your applicants and they'll see it when they hover over it. Now, what's going on below the tooltip? Those are some more unique choices. Tab index is referring to our accessibility purposes. Then we have prefix, which is going to be great for something like a currency character. We have suffix where we can add something like US dollar. Now look at our new preview. We've got on display, so they have a perfect idea of what to place there in the placeholder area. Also, if you head to the top left where it currently says details, there's a drop down menu. Within that, you will see a couple of menu choices. This is where you can enable things like conditional logic, you can set things such as what's required or not for that field and also maybe some expectations in terms of minimum or maximum characters. But I think we're all set with that field. We can go ahead and save it. That's going to be our first one. Some other things that we might want here, maybe the project start date, project end date. I'm just gonna add these and save these quickly here. And remember, we can always do a little search. So if there's a few fields that relate to projects, we can add those. I'll put in project title. I'm just gonna briefly save this so we have it in our page. And I'll put in project end date as well. Now that I've quickly saved a few of those, let's review what we have. There's the request amount. Now there's start date, end date, and project title. But if you'd rather take these three different fields and organize them in a way that makes sense visually, that's where the layout options really come in handy. So let's go back to our form builder, and let's go to the top and take a look at some of these layout options. So there's five we can choose from. There's columns. Columns that allows me to customize the number of columns I'd like and what the width is gonna be, and I'm gonna use that in just a moment. There's also field set which allows you to have one piece of text above a field. There's also a panel which is a collapsible field which with text above it. There's a table which is nine symmetrical fields. So if you know there's gonna be a lot of data points, you can put those into that table. And there's also a well which is just a field with no text above it. So some different layout options that we have. Let's say that I wanna take all of this project info and I wanna put it into a column. Right? That could be a good way to visually organize it. Let's say I wanna drag this column over here, and then I'm gonna choose the number of columns that I'd like and what the width is gonna be for each one of those columns. And as I make changes on the right, we're gonna see a little preview of what that layout is gonna look like. So I'm gonna tweak the width here on these. Let's say that I want one to be four, another to be four, and let's say that I'm gonna add a third column, which I could also have are gonna look like. We're gonna hit save, and now I can take these fields and drag them into those individual columns. So I'll start off with project title. I'll drag that here and then we'll do project start date. I'll minimize that form builder to give us some space and then we'll drag over here. Cool. So now I've got those same three fields with their organized more neatly into this particular call. One other thing I wanna quickly highlight here in the form builder that can be really useful to highlight particular pieces of information to provide instructions, to provide some visuals. If we go down to this display option, there's a little content box that lives here in that custom text area. And just as this name suggests, this is a place where you can put in any sort of custom text. If you want some instructions, if you wanna put a hyperlink, if you wanna put an image, just drag this content piece wherever you want. Maybe that's gonna go at the very top of the screen, and this is where we can put some instructions. How to apply? We can also make some changes to the fonts. I can change the size. This is where we can insert an image, put in a hyperlink, and make some formatting choices. Save it, and now we've got that custom content up at the top. Okay. We're doing well so far. We've got our first page here. We've got some basic details about the request. One thing we might wanna do is just to rename this page. Page one is not very descriptive. I can go to those three little buttons there and I can rename. Let's just call this requests info. We're gonna save and edit that, and if I wanna have a separate page here which maybe collects organization info, I can go to new, and now I can now add a new page. Now one nifty thing that I could do rather than just starting from scratch is maybe in a previous form, I already have a page that collects organization info. In fact, maybe I wanna standardize what kind of data entry that I do for that organization. I can actually start from a template, I can choose the form, and then I can choose the page and whatever is in that particular page in that form is gonna load here onto this form. So that can be a really cool way to standardize what sort of pages you'd like, but for me, I'm just gonna hit save and edit page and that's gonna create a new org info tab, and Chris is gonna spend a little bit of time talking about some fields of data we can include there. Yeah. So let's head back over to the form builder, and I think it's probably a smart idea to capture the organization name. Let's search maybe organization. Switching our category. We could even type out name in that search at the top, and we can grab the second one there, organization name. You'll notice we've seen all these fields before like label, placeholder, tooltip, you know all about these things and the same choices would be available up in the details or at least where it currently says details in the drop down. But we can go ahead and save this. I also want to capture mission statement. Now, in our sites, we currently have it as background. This is another example of when we want to make things a little bit more user friendly for our applicants. Once we bring that over, this is a good opportunity to rename it. Instead of background, let's call this mission statement. For some, mission statement is pretty brief, but maybe for others, it's longer. If we want to encourage this to be brief, I would say at the bottom where you have that show word counter, this may be an opportunity where we want to select that. Even better when you scroll up and if you go over to our details. There's our preview. In our details, if you go into validation, that's where we can say our maximum or our minimum word length if we want to encourage a strict guideline for that. We can save. We may have a variety of organization types that are applying. If we have a specific idea of those that would be, for example, this is an application just for arts and culture organizations, we might go ahead and grab organization type. This is a coding sheet and there are a lot of levels to this coding sheet and we would actually prefer it to be more narrow. Like I said, with our example, if it's only arts and culture organizations applying, we want to get rid of all those extra ones. To do that, we can go up to our drop down where it currently says Details on the left side, and we can choose this time Data. Once we choose data, we'll see all of our current choices, and you can unselect all if that's easier, or you can check the individual boxes, whatever works. What you are selecting is going to end up being the ending product over on our preview. Like I said, if this is just for arts and culture organizations, it might be a wise decision to narrow the scope so that way it's, not giving anybody an opportunity to choose something we wouldn't expect. I think that's all of the items that we'll track for an organization, at least the organization info tab. Fantastic. And I know one common thing that a lot of organizations ask for when they're building these application forms is that you're probably gonna need the applicant to include some documents. Right? Maybe there's a tax form, maybe an IRS letter. So if you want applicants to include a document and attach it here, there's a couple options that we have. Back here in the form builder, if we go back to the different categories of fields that we can include, one of those categories is files. Files is where we can include a little box where applicants can include a document for them to attach. We can see there's two different types of options here. There's multiple file upload. So that'll be one place where an applicant can attach two, three, four documents, but in one space. But if you'd rather have different boxes for single file upload, so one space to upload the nine ninety form, another form for an I another space for an IRS form, another space for maybe the full grant application, that can be an option as well. However you wanna configure it. Let's say for example, there's gonna be maybe two or three documents we need to include that relates to the request. Let's say that I navigate back to my original request info area here, and I'm gonna drag multiple file upload. So that'll be one place where the applicant can upload multiple documents. We're gonna drag that over here and we're gonna drop it. Very good idea to make sure that you use the label and the description to provide some detail about what documents you need here. So we could say like upload docs here. In the description, we can note we need the nine ninety form, maybe a budget, board info. This can also be a good place to specify what kind of documents you want. So maybe different types of word documents, PDF, maybe even like a spreadsheet, and there we've got some guidance. We can go ahead and save that, and now we will have a space down here at the bottom where the applicant will have the ability to upload files as part of their online application. And we can put that wherever we want. I can put in a new page. If I'd like, we can drop those file uploads wherever we need here in our online application. One other thing that I'm gonna add here, let's add one more new page here to illustrate this. You're probably gonna wanna collect contact info, right, maybe contact info about the organization, maybe contact info about the request, who are gonna be the people that you wanna reach out to as it relates to this request. So I'm gonna create a new page here for contact info. We're gonna save and edit this. And when I'm ready to drag some fields in here, this time we're gonna go into the contact category, and I've got one of two options here. This gives me two tables that I can plug in. This could be a contact table for organization contact info or who's gonna be the request primary contact. Let's drag request contact table in and we can relabel this if we want to call this requests primary contacts and we can put a little description. Now, if you look at the preview, you might notice that there's a lot of different columns here and they're very very specific which is nice that you have that option, but chances are you probably don't need the majority of these, right? So if you wanna be a little bit more specific about what columns that you do wanna collect, what columns you don't need, we can navigate over to the column section, and this is gonna give me a full menu of all of those columns. And I can actually click disable all and then start from So maybe I want their prefix for, like, a title, first name. And on the right, if I wanna make a field required, I can do that. And let's say we also want required, and now on the right, this is what it's gonna look like when they're doing their data entry for that request contact. I'm just gonna scroll down to the very bottom and save it, and this is what we're gonna be able to see here in our contact info page. Now, we've spent a little bit of time here filling out a lot of different fields, right? We've got some organization fields, org type, mission statements, bunch of request fields. Now maybe you had that experience in the old online application tool where you've gone through a form and you can't remember, hey, do I have that field in here? I can't remember. And if so, where is it? One of the really great things that the new form builder gives you is this currently on form tool down at the very bottom. When I select that, it gives me a menu of all of the fields that I presently have on this form. It gives me the ability to edit it quickly, and it'll actually take me to where it is on my form. So a really nice reminder of, oh, yeah, we do have org type and it's over here in that org info page. Good way to remind yourself about what kind of content you presently have. Okay. If we're feeling good about our form, we can go down to the save drop down. I could just save it and continue working here if I'd like. I can also save and close if I wanna go back to my forms menu. We're gonna do that. Let's say we're ready to save this as a draft. I'm gonna show you where that lives. There's our BBGM demo form. We can see the date, and this tells me this is still just a draft. Now when we're ready to actually connect this to a program, we're gonna publish it. I'm gonna do that in just a second. I could keep editing it. I could also copy it. So maybe there's a form that I built before that I wanna reuse. I can make a copy of it, make some tweaks, kind of like a nifty file save as option. There's a translate tool and I can also remove that draft form if I'd like. Before I publish it, let's do a quick preview. Let's make sure this looks good. The layout is right. We've got all the fields we need. Here's a preview of our demo form here. There we go. There's our request info. How much do we need? Project title. There's the column. This is where they can upload documents. There's the description, collect information about the organization. In the drop down here are the org types that Christie specified, and here's where they can add that contact info. I'm just gonna hit the back button. We're obviously just in a preview, so we're not gonna do that data entry. We're gonna find our demo form, and let's go ahead and publish it. I'm gonna publish it. Once it's published, Chrissy is gonna walk us through what it looks like to connect that published form with the program. It looks really good so far. Let's go ahead and jump up to applications. We have our form published. It's time to plug it into a program. Once we get to the program area, you'll see that all existing programs are already on display, and it is a list that you can search by. That's search by in the top left area, maybe you want to type in a keyword. Also in the top right, we have a drop down menu. It's a filter if you wanted to maybe narrow down the list of programs. These will be really helpful as you start to collect more programs over time. We're going to start a new one, so that'll be in the top right. We'll click on New, start our new program. All this information here will be applicant facing, so we're just keeping that in mind. Program name, we can enter in. Yes, what we're thinking, Henry and Chrissy's program. We have our default program language. We're definitely going to plug in our form that we built a few moments ago and published, and we're going to go ahead and link into a workflow. All set. Program is created. It's going to bring us to a page where we have some decisions that we can make. We already fill out our details, although we will want to scroll out a little bit more. This is going to be where we can drop in an image. Here we go. For our program background, and this is actually going to be required. We do want to make sure we plug something here. Perfect. If we scroll back up, let's go ahead and click on settings. This will be a good thing to scroll through. There are a lot of options here that I do recommend you visit. Basically, you are choosing to allow some things, maybe not allow some things. Like if you want to have maybe just individuals being applicants, or maybe you only want organizations to be applicants. Perhaps you want to allow people to collaborate or not collaborate. These are all choices that you'll find on the settings page. Yes, lots of checkboxes, radio buttons, drop down selections, some things to look over. If we head over to the left in cycles, this is a required component. Anything that has that little red asterisk will be required, so we need to have at least one new cycle. This is essentially building that window of time for your application period. We've called it false cycle. We've got our start time and dates, end time and date. There's also a checkbox at the top there where it says always open if that's the case. We will need to select our budget, and then we're all set to click Select. That's just our first cycle. If we wanted to add more, the capability would be in the top right once we do click Save. Yes. Add new cycle if we needed to do more than one. Back to the left on Forms. This is where we can connect to an eligibility form if we did build one and you can see some of our existing ones are there, but definitely there is a default form that we built with all of you we've selected. On the left with workflow, we have our single workflow selected, but if you are having maybe requirements or maybe you had several stages of forms, this is where you'd be taking care of those. Finally, communications. There are some prebuilt communications for you, but I encourage you to visit them and make sure that you are approving the text that is going out because these are going to be automated. When an application is submitted, this is going to be an e mail that goes out to the applicants. If there's a request for revision, if there is a request for, or I should say, if there is that notification for approval, all of those reasonings are listed and you can visit the very left, I think Henry pointed it out already, the context menu. This is where you can create a copy of this or you could preview the templates. I believe that's everything we want to go through with our program. You can go ahead and publish just like we published with the form. Looks like we missed the required field. That's okay. It always lets us know. Looking good. If we scroll to find our program, there it is, Henry and Chrissy's program. All the way to left, you do see it's published, but most importantly, this is where you grab the URL. This is where you grab that link. Context menu, copy link, and this is the ticket folks. This is what's going to connect your applicants to the form that you just filled out. Henry's copied that for us, and when this is pasted into a new window, the applicants are able to sign in, they can create an account, or they can utilize their existing Blackbaud ID. That is start to finish. How to build a custom form, how to publish a custom form, how to start a program, connect that form to the program, and publish it. Throughout the presentation, we share with you a lot of our tips, but we definitely wanted to highlight them just in a consolidated space, some of our favorites. Conditional logic is something we recommend to get familiar with, so that way maybe you can minimize the need for extra forms. If you are starting to build a lot of forms and lots of programs, it's best to establish some naming conventions, That way there is an expectation for what you are calling your new forms and new programs. You have an understanding of what their purpose is, and maybe if you want to copy from them, you don't have to drill into them. You can maybe just understand what they do based on the name of them. Henry pointed out lots of great opportunities to copy from existing. These are great things to take advantage of, so you're not always starting from scratch, but you're maybe starting from something you've already spent time on, already had approved. It could really make your process more efficient. As you're going through your applications and maybe considering what information you want to have in order to make a decision, anything you need to have, anything you feel like is make or break, definitely require those fields so that way the applicant has no choice. They have to fill in that information in order to click Submit. We've pointed out the space where you can connect some eligibility forms. This is great if you are going to maybe practice qualifying or disqualifying your applicants. It's just again going to make the process smoother for you, so that you're only reviewing applicants that are qualified for that application. We also pointed out for you the abilities to maybe enable a word counter, so you can streamline those expectations for what people should be filling in. Makes it easier for them, makes it easier for us. I believe Henry also pointed out the portal settings, but those were in the application menu. We didn't visit them, but I believe we pointed to them. You You probably want to visit these because you can establish your branding, your colors. That way, your voice, your familiar brand is being represented through the portal. Lastly, speaking of voice, if you want to make sure that it's your organization's voice that's going through those automated communications, visit the emails and make sure you're creating your own. If you're curious about the legacy forms, they are active until 2025, so this is a perfect time to begin transitioning. To make that transition easier, if you do go to your legacy form, on the form you can export form fields, and then you can come over here into a new custom form, find in the top right corner that import form fields capability, and you can plug in that same file to make your process more simple, quicker start for sure. And finally, we're just so excited to share with you some of the details of this new online applications tool. What we would recommend right now if you want to do a deep dive on this tool is to take a look at the free e learnings tool that'll be available to you on this online application space. That'll be free for the remainder of 2024. We're hoping early in 2025 to get some live VILT classes so you can really get a more hands on in class approach to learning the new online applications tool. But for now, I would take a look at that e learning. You can find some details here on screen if you wanna learn some of the details of this tool that we discussed today. But thank you all so much for your time today for joining us here on this recording. My name is Henry Winseck. I'm joined here with Chrissy, and we really appreciate your time today. Thank you, everyone.