Apricot by Social Solutions vs Grant Lifecycle Manager

• Site administrator is able to custom design forms and reports to organizational needs.
• Excellent training, resources, and technical support.
• Case management framework for human service-oriented organizations.

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• I like the features that allow me to look at and provide input to applicants and grantees as they fill out applications and reports while they in progress. This is beneficial to both of us and helps us to build a good working rapport.
• I like being able to review applications in the side-by-side with the my score sheet. It makes my reviews more efficient when I can look at the application while I'm writing my notes. No more printing things off. I can do it all online.
• I like that there are multiple ways to find the grant information that I'm looking for within the system. The dashboard is easy to use and intuitive. I can usually find what I need fast.

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• Customer support could be a bit more personal. As an organization, we do not pay for any extra support packages, which means that all of our support tickets are resolved over email. This can get frustrating when troubleshooting could happen more efficiently by phone - but again, we have not purchased additional support packages.

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• GLM has gone beyond the bounds of what I need. The company is still adding functionality for other users whose organizational needs differ slightly or enormously from mine. I hear about these new additions because I receive an email newsletter regularly with updates on new functions and uses. Sometimes I discover that there is a functionality that I didn't think about until Foundant Technologies mentioned it - and then I have a ah-ha! moment. That's fun!

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• Increased speed of reporting, allowing us to provide data quickly when requested on the fly
• Ease of use, reducing training costs
• Employees able to access the program from anywhere, increasing productivity

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• This software has made it much easier to work with reviewers (panels of community volunteers who provide scores and comments for the grant applications). While we only use the Evaluator function for two of our many grant programs, the merge templates have saved a lot of time in assembling the materials to send digitally (one PDF per application) for the other grant programs. In our old database, I had to download each document from the application, convert to PDF, then combine. That was very labor intensive! In this software, I create a merge template and all the documents that I want included are automatically converted to PDF, in the order I want them. This was a big reason we moved to this software and it continues to be a fantastic feature.
• The automatic email reminders that have been built into the software (this is one example of an excellent improvement that has been added since we got the software - showing their constant efforts to get even better) have saved a lot of time and effort. I used to set reminders on my calendar every year to write a long involved email to all the grantees for a particular grant program, to remind them to submit their grant reports. And then, if they still forgot, I had to chase them down. Now, I just set up the reports in the software and there is an automatic reminder that goes out two weeks before; if they still forget, there is an automatic reminder that goes out one day after the deadline to let them know that it's late. I still have to chase a few of them down but the majority are taken care of.

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