Blackbaud invites the user to manage and improve your funding and giving process with Blackbaud FIMS, a single, customizable foundation management software solution.
It is based on the former MicroEdge FIMS product.
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Fluxx Grantmaker
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Fluxx in San Francisco offers Grantmaker, this being their grant management platform for funders, providing clear data exploration tools and customizable dashboard, dynamic workflow with audit trail, and many collaboration and sharing tools.
I believe a company starting out with a whole new database may take advantage of MicroEdge GIFTS. However, GIFTS would not work well for an organization which is transferring their old data onto the platform. GIFTS does not update well as time passes and data would most likely be lost and/or corrupted. I have not worked with the newest GIFTS online, so I do not know if that process would be smooth or not, but from what my coworkers told me upon hire, it seems GIFTS was very difficult to customize online. When attempting to use GIFTS online, our organization was told that we'd have to pay an invoice of several thousand dollars to change three words in a paragraph on the online system. Lastly, and most importantly, we found MicroEdge's customer service to be nearly impossible to reach, rude, and never helpful when help was sought out. Organizations which would need help with the program should not expect to be serviced in a timely or helpful manner.
Grantmaker is well suited for managing grant-making processes and records. It's not a very good tool for CRM. We are currently working with an outside vendor to design a module that will integrate with Grantmaker to help with CRM.
GIFTS Classics does a very good job of processing transactions. You can track workflow and enter/change important information along the lifecycle.
My favorite feature is the ability to select almost any field within the database and organize how it will be viewed, either within the system or when exported to Excel. You can relabel the column headers, sort, switch the order, stack fields, and capture all the information that will help in both processing and decision making.
I find the ability to create a wide range of templates that can then be generated and stored through the document manager tool to provide great efficiency and reduce opportunity for error.
Highly configurable for different use cases and easy to customize.
Instant insight into different job functions can be provided through the unique, customized filtered cards and dashboards for each user.
Frequent updates of new features that add more value to the product over time and create more efficiencies for staff and grantees.
Collaborative user base that is eager and willing to share best practices with lots of support from the vendor.
Friendly staff that is genuinely interested in the funding and nonprofit sectors and how they can make it easier for us to have the community impact we are all trying to achieve.
I would love to see either email or text notifications added to the platforms to remind of upcoming deadlines and tasks.
Sometimes the data that is pulled into the visuals is not accurate and is a bit glitchy.
Adding a real time commenting capability, like Slack, would help the team to stay in contact. This is especially important for remote grantwriters, like me.
I typically receive a response to an inquiry within an hour or two, if not sooner. Most tech support people are knowledgeable about our problems, and if not, they will escalate to the proper person.
I have an assigned rep who is very responsive and is able to answer any questions. Other than that, the technical support has been terrible. I often don't waste time documenting bugs because I know they likely won't get fixed or even followed-up on. Instead, I search for workarounds.
It is really a matter of priority. I can see situations where GIFTS Classic is a very strong option! Once an organization determines its priorities then it should definitely consider GIFTS to see how well it compares with mission critical functionality.
Fluxx is not only more intuitive than CyberGrants, its interface is also smoother and easier. Fluxx allows proposers to enter and attach proposal information in a more appealing platform than in CyberGrants. Fluxx also retains more historic data than CyberGrants
