Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager vs. YourCause

This product is great and well-suited for smaller organizations who are interested in doing an online grantmaking system for the first time or upgrading from a simple survey-type application. You would love this product for basic applications and reports; [...] [its also great] if you want to do some light reporting. This is not a product that is robust enough to handle complex budgets, contact or email management, or complex outcomes metrics. It also will not work if you are trying to track your conversations with potential grantees before they apply.

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

• Customer Service: Foundant is always super helpful and speedy in their responses to my questions, whether it's an email or call.
• Connections to other users: There's a great online community that's willing to share what works for their organizations.
• Company Response/Development: Foundant is continually updating (where it needs to) to make their product the best it can be, and is willing (and does) take comments and suggestions from clients for how the software could be improved.
• Training: A variety of training options- ranging from in person conferences to web-based tutorials. Very helpful, and updated as the product is.

Incentivized

• "Automation" of the matching gift request process and gives employees the ability to "self-serve" by making the request directly when the make a financial gift.
• It also allows the employee to track their own giving so they know what they've used (or donated) and how much is still available for matching. It further allows
• employees to dictate the amount of the match request, regardless of what their actual donation might have been.
• Automated communication emails when employees sign up for events or change their participation status.
• Reporting - volunteer event participation data, charities supported, etc. Easy to get lots of data.

Incentivized

• I don't think about what's lacking. This is much better than our previous grants management software.
• The landing page could have a snappier design.
• I wish our grantees could see more than one follow-up for a process at a time. Sometimes there needs to be a project mod submitted while that is an active renewal going on.

Incentivized

• Creating engagement elements is not intuitive, I had to learn some coding and a lot of trial and error.
• Lots of functionality that my organization just doesn't use. I wish we could pay less because we are essentially only using volunteers.
• There are always updates with no warning and no explanation and support is not always there.

Incentivized

With such a long transition and history, it's difficult to transition to anything else.

Incentivized

It is easy to use but if there is an error or something is not working correctly, it does not tell you where the error is. The site will just simply not let you publish or move on and it can be very frustrating to try and find the problem, especially when it is something very minor.

Incentivized

So far we havent had too many issues with availability

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

Our account manager has been great - she is quick, takes very detailed notes, and is proactively staying on top of issues and outstanding items. The support team answering the chat and email is also very fast and responsive. Some tickets that we have opened have taken a long time to be resolved; hence the 9 rating instead of a 10

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

We had a relatively smooth implementation with the exception of some SSO issues that should have been easy to resolve. The fact that they cannot clone their DEV/QAS environment into Production leaves it wide open for human error. The other surprise we had was in implementing payroll integration. They were not able to help with ADP integration, which we were led to believe.

Incentivized

I used GIFTS more than 10 years ago. Their development was glacial, and it was clumsy software. They took much longer to develop the on-line application process.
I also reviewed Philan Tech. They did not offer the same flexibility that Foundant's GLM did. Nor did the company have the depth of software engineering experience that Philan Tech had at the time.
Finally, I used a back-office support company for a short time that has an on-line grant management component. This option proved to be too cumbersome and too expensive. And I did not personally get along with the staff there. Definitely not a good fit for the Replogle Foundation and me.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It has worked for our large company fine.

Incentivized

• This software has made it much easier to work with reviewers (panels of community volunteers who provide scores and comments for the grant applications). While we only use the Evaluator function for two of our many grant programs, the merge templates have saved a lot of time in assembling the materials to send digitally (one PDF per application) for the other grant programs. In our old database, I had to download each document from the application, convert to PDF, then combine. That was very labor intensive! In this software, I create a merge template and all the documents that I want included are automatically converted to PDF, in the order I want them. This was a big reason we moved to this software and it continues to be a fantastic feature.
• The automatic email reminders that have been built into the software (this is one example of an excellent improvement that has been added since we got the software - showing their constant efforts to get even better) have saved a lot of time and effort. I used to set reminders on my calendar every year to write a long involved email to all the grantees for a particular grant program, to remind them to submit their grant reports. And then, if they still forgot, I had to chase them down. Now, I just set up the reports in the software and there is an automatic reminder that goes out two weeks before; if they still forget, there is an automatic reminder that goes out one day after the deadline to let them know that it's late. I still have to chase a few of them down but the majority are taken care of.

Incentivized

• Our employees love the platform, for the most part. It takes our associates some time to launch the CSRconnect platform, and we can't determine if that is a firewall issue with SSO causing the delay in CSRconnect loading or a connection issue on the vendor's side.
• We need to spend more time in the reporting and Tableau features, but our account manager Alexandra Harland has really helped us pull reporting when needed, She has also been very good about recording trainings and sharing those trainings with us after so we can easily reference them.
• Payroll has been a constant issue between the vendor's team and our team; after a few months of trying different things because we were experiencing exceptions with every report, we finally just in October pulled a report with no exceptions.

Incentivized