Formerly from Blackbaud and based on the former MicroEdge FIMS product, FIMS is a software solution used to manage requests, approvals, and declinations for grantmaking and scholarships.
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YourCause
Score 10.0 out of 10
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YourCause is a SaaS-based platform that is a fully hosted and managed solution used to engage employees in volunteering, giving, and sustainability initiatives, along with helping grants administrators manage corporate and foundation philanthropic programs.
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Pricing
FIMS
YourCause
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FIMS
YourCause
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Product pricing varies based on company needs and employee size.
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.
In my experience I feel YourCause is well suited for: Companies that need to manage multiple corporate giving, volunteering, and grant making programs, etc. on one platform. For companies looking for an easy and effective way of vetting non-profit organizations. Those organization focused on employee engagement and looking to measure employee participation and using data to share impact and storytelling. Company platform super users or platform admins looking to influence new products and ideas as early adopters.
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.
There is not a blogging feature, it would be great to have that as an innovative feature in the future. Many firms are lookign at new ways to always share their stories, story tell, and allow their employees to share their volunteer and charitable giving passions.
It would be very beneficial if external NPOs could create events within CSRconnect on the compamy's behalf. This would help drive volunteerism and the administrative burden.
There are a lot of steps to "Give" to an NPO and also request a company match.
There are no generic toolkits to help onboard new companies to show them how to set up different features i.e. playbook. There is not a guide that outlines the different tools and functions, etc.
The usability of CSRconnect is light years ahead of our last program and we are so thankful for this. Some of our employees get intimidated by using the computer so it is helpful when the site is user-friendly and welcoming for our employees. They are also easily able to find events in the portal.
We do have issues with having to reload pages when we are working on reports or engagement tiles. If we dont reload something the information that we have been working to input in to the site or the reports do not save. This can be frustrating when we are on time constraints
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.
The implementation process was a bit rocky but ended up okay. The account manager is new and still learning himself so many of our questions are answered with "let me look into that and get back to you". He absolutely gets back to us and is very nice but not always very knowledgeable which can get frustrating.
It was a little challenging doing training on line i think in person may have been a little easier. we also did training before we had access to certain things so when the time came to use that training we had questions that came up that were not apart of the initial training.
I wasn't involved in the decision to go with Your Cause but I came on as the implementation was happening. It was clunky at best but that was mostly due to our previous account rep not being in a role that suited his talents along with YC being new and us being a very large global company with lots of IT/HR challenges
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.
When we chose YourCause it was because of the access to data and the fact that their CSR and Grant platforms "spoke" to each other. Also YourCause seemed to be more forward thinking and innovative. The fact that YourCause platform supported giving with so many countries/languages was impressive as we were expanding. Their platform for the end user was also significantly more advanced, easy to use and modern than others.
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.
We have been able to more accurately track global volunteerism.
Having an online platform for employees to organize their team volunteer projects has been wonderful. They are either doing more of them (we are so busy) or they were always doing all these activities but we are just finally aware of them because there is a platform to use now.
Reporting is not as flexible nor robust as we need it. Still doing many manual steps to get the data how we need it.
