Fluxx in San Francisco offers Grantmaker, this being their grant management platform for funders, providing clear data exploration tools and customizable dashboard, dynamic workflow with audit trail, and many collaboration and sharing tools.
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Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
Fluxx is well-suited for use by both small and large non-profits. Fluxx provides an intuitive interface and accurately houses grant proposal application data. Fluxx may be less useful at organizations where multiple funding layers exist, such as at community foundations which house multiple philanthropic funds. Fluxx has been an excellent product over the 10 years I have worked with it
I’d say it’s very well suited for organizations looking to move toward AI integrations and make more data-driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’ve also used the competing product from Blackbaud, which is a very closed system — you can’t really pull out the data. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a big advantage with its APIs, allowing you to extract data, store it in Data Cloud, and do much more with it. However, if your requirements aren’t clearly defined or if there’s heavy customization involved, the implementation can get messy. So I wouldn’t recommend using Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in cases where the requirements and structure aren’t clearly laid out.
Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)
I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
I have an assigned rep who is very responsive and is able to answer any questions. Other than that, the technical support has been terrible. I often don't waste time documenting bugs because I know they likely won't get fixed or even followed-up on. Instead, I search for workarounds.
I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.
Not included above because it is not in the system is Salesforce Foundation Connect. Again, I am always hesitant with this type of question. We selected grant maker because it offered the best fit for our organization's working style and culture. There is also a personal level of service that Fluxx offers that differed from other vendors (Smart Simple is similar in this way too). At the time we made the selection, one of the main influencers was the number of large foundations adopting the platform. As they invested in features, those features rolled out to the rest of the clients. This offered us access to functionality we would not have been able to afford otherwise. We moved from another vendor whose platform allowed for customization as well, but if they built it for one client, you still had to pay for it and pay ongoing yearly fees. So, the SAAS model adopted by Fluxx appealed to us. This has paid dividends as features have been developed. For example, one large foundation added the capability to track program-related investments alongside normal grantmaking activities within Fluxx. This is not functionality we could have paid to develop, but we have program-related investments that we wanted to track alongside grants and that feature was available to us because the development was paid for by that funder. That said, most of the above vendors have compelling products (as well as others), so be sure you look at your options and talk to users (other than the ones they provide you in the reference list) and check the Idealware guides
As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
