Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager vs. YourCause

From where I stand, GLM is well-suited for use by small-staffed charitable foundations who make more than thirty (30) grants a year and distribute more than $500,000 in funds to non-profits. The software is able to handle every step in the grant-making process from receipt of a request, to the evaluation and decision regarding the grant, to tracking the pay-out, and to closing the grant when the work or the year is completed.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Foundant provides a streamlined grants management solution for reasonable cost.
• The company listens to its users, collecting ideas and making improvements. Updates to the software are rolled out several times a year. When something cannot be changed right away, the company gives context and forecasts when the change might be possible.
• While the software is easy to use, it also offers more advanced features (such as merge templates) that allow more customization for the advanced user.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Need a smother process for third party responses. Currently individuals recommending more than one student for scholarships have many emails to deal with to find the correct link to upload the correct student's letter.
• Questions that would filter which applications the applicant would apply for.

• 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.

Incentivized

We have thoroughly enjoyed our relationship with CSRconnect and YourCause/Blackbaud thus far.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is available when needed. It can be very slow at times.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have not used other online grantmaking products or evaluated others. I used to use MicroEdge Gifts, but not the online application version. It was a stand alone management system. This is hands-down better, easier to use and a more complete system

It has worked for our large company fine.

Incentivized

• Positive customer service--fairly easy to use for applicants.
• Positive--easy to run reports you have already set up, so [it] saves time.
• Negative--limited question types makes it harder to gather the data we want to track.
• Negative--our budget is more complex than can be tracked in Foundant, so we have to use a separate program.
• Negative--we have to track potential grantee conversations in a separate program.
• Negative--getting data ready to display in a dashboard takes a lot of time to manipulate in Excel.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized