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 CSRconnect
Score 8.5 out of 10
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CSRconnect 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. It supports global programs with multi-lingual settings and multi-national credit card processing features.
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Pricing
FIMS
YourCause CSRconnect
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FIMS
YourCause CSRconnect
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.
It is a great solution for a company that is looking to have a one-stop shop for employee volunteering and giving. It integrates with VolunteerMatch and Workday which is very helpful as the former feeds community volunteer opportunities to our company portal, and the latter is how payroll deductions get processed
Dollars for Doers Volunteer Grant program features are very easy to use and manage.
Cause cards are a great incentive available through CSR connect.
Searching for charities to contribute dollars to is easy to navigate.
The Engagement Elements are very user-friendly and easy to update on the admin side. Our employees love them and how easy they are to find and click through.
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.
Date/calendar feature is rough - it automatically puts in a year out so you have to correct that and the time zone needs to automatically populate as it's a huge list that confuses most people.
The search feature overall - not intuitive and clunky and usually inaccurate - needs to be fine tuned as well as broadened to include everything associated with a particular event or user - having said that they have made great improvements in this in the recent future so that's something to be grateful for.
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.
The implementation of CSRconnect takes way, way too long. Having to take down your entire CSR site for weeks, if not months, is an issue. Issues still arise from the implementation in terms of ensuring that reports and statistics on active users are pulling properly, as well as the transfer of information from one system to another. Some of this is definitely to be expected, as transferring this much information is a challenge. However, I would hope that issues would have been resolved by now
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.
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.
