Blackbaud FIMS (formerly MicroEdge) vs Submittable

• Simple layout
• Duplication reports
• Lots of fields for organization-specific information

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• Everything related to any applicant's grant (original application, review process, notifications, all communications, site visits, and reporting) is in a central location and is connected and easily accessible. This is a HUGE timesaver.
• Submittable's features are time-saving and make grant management easy and convenient, from start to finish. The platform accommodates every stage of the grant cycle, fluidly and intuitively.

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• While GIFTS Classic is the most barren interfaces of all MicroEdge products, there are some simple capabilities I wish GIFTS could still perform such as better email integration from outlook to a GIFTS request, more efficient requirement reminders, and a wider use of Microsoft Office and other external product integration (GuideStar).
• It's disappointing that you have to purchase an additional "Customizer Module" or "Budget Module" in order to access basic functions of a GMS. This seems like a basic system function that MicroEdge takes advantage of, unfortunately.
• The online application module (IGAM) is still quite antiquated and you have to be knowledgeable of basic HTML in order to really customize your organization's online application. More flexibility and design functions would be greatly appreciated with the online application function, especially since this is a public document and represents your organization.

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• Minor feature enhancements to the platform including the ability to more easily analyze site traffic patterns without having to extract out of Google Analytics. This is a low priority though.

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• Reporting was difficult on GIFTS - often we had to place data into Excel by hand since we could not create simple customized reports. This increased time spent on tasks GIFTS was supposed to streamline.
• GIFTS did not alert us to duplicated organization records, so often it was difficult to reflect an organization's full grant history to our Board of Directors, leading to employees spending time searching through paper records to make sure all information was properly reported.
• GIFTS created duplicate contact records, meaning it was difficult to find out which contact was related to which organization and cluttered our data. This caused decreased processing and response time to "new" contacts who turned out to be previous contacts or contacts whose information was tied to previous organizations. Even when contact information was updated for a new organization, sometimes the program would revert to the first organization contact information, several times leading to checks cashed to incorrect organizations---the very worst consequence of using GIFTS to our organization. Thankfully, the money was recovered upon the few times that error occurred, but it led to me and other employees reading through out 800+ checks before issue to make sure the correct organization was in fact being rewarded.

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• The Submittable platform has saved us countless hours in legwork, creating databases and spreadsheets for tracking purposes. We haven't had to do any of those things this year. It's a huge timesaver as well, in that it communicates for you. It sends area-specific e-mail communications to everyone involved (applicants, reviewers, site visitors, etc.), and compiles all incoming communications into one mailbox that we can easily go to and get a quick read on incoming comms. So I would say time saved is the most significant positive impact we've seen with using Submittable.

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