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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WizeHive Zengine
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Wizehive offers Zengine, a cloud-based submission management platform for grants, awards, scholarships and other kinds of awards ands applications. Zengine can be used to track customers, job candidates, projects or more and replaces paper processes, outgrown spreadsheets, or generic software products.
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Pricing
Blackbaud FIMS
WizeHive Zengine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud FIMS
WizeHive Zengine
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Zengine by WizeHive is a flexible platform that can be set up to directly address the needs and requirements of your organization. As such, pricing is determined after a thorough discussion about your process and goals. Pricing does typically fall into three areas, each determined by the complexity of program, features required, and the number of programs being managed in the platform.
It is a very robust system and with the various modules you can accomplish much of what is needed for traditional transaction US-based grantmaking. If you have more complicated grantmaking, deal with foreign currencies or want to have tighter alignment of finance and budget numbers, GIFTS may not meet your needs. Additionally, some of their core projects have limited accessibility in terms of various mobile devices or access from outside the organization's network.
I highly recommend this software, as it has allowed us to be much more transparent with the delivery of benefits and their applications, also the hours of work in this regard are less, allowing staff to devote to other tasks. A very useful and necessary software.
It has made the application, which is almost identical to the application questions previously displayed by our old service, seem less daunting and more user friendly to grant applicants.
The grant review team has exclaimed that the side-by-side review option is the best feature ever invented and has saved them loads of paper.
Internally, I appreciate the ease of use of the back end system. Being able to easily assign grants to reviews both in and outside the organization, easily create queries for the stats I need, and the ability to move application through the steps of the system seamlessly make this my top choice since I'm the only staff member dedicated to the Foundation which leaves me with lots on my plate to balance.
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.
The platform is very basic. On the other and, our staff does not take advantage of its full capabilities because such features did not work well for us/fit our needs
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.
We didn’t really use their support. I wish they would have told us more about the fact they were changing to get rid of the flash player as that was the main reason we left.
Their design team gave us the option to save some money by creating the forms ourselves for both the submission and review portals. This also allowed us to get to a point where we felt very comfortable in any future changes that would need to be made to forms since we were so immersed in creating them.
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.
SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo are great to use for other programs and events that require collecting fairly basic responses and feedback, however, these don't provide the level of information and data that is needed for our grants processes. WizeHive provides a number of tools and other benefits that are just beyond these products' capabilities
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.
Zengine is definitely a time-saver, but there are a myriad of grant management software platforms on the market that save just as much time, some even more time-saving. But if you have a basic need to offer an application process of any sort (grant, scholarship, etc.) to the public, Zengine can be very helpful in saving time and keeping everything related to the grant handy in one location, and all connected (application, reviews, final reports, etc.).
