Name: Blackbaud FIMS
Rating: 8 (14 reviews)
Author: Blackbaud

Customer Success Management Training

Help Desk

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

Accessibility Testing

Performance Testing

Virtual Reality

Development

Online Proctoring Software

Virtual Classroom

Education

Business Intelligence (BI)

Collaboration

Contract Analysis

Emissions Management

Intellectual Property (IP) Management

Internal Communications

Payment Facilitation

Workflow

Enterprise

Accounting

CTRM

Travel Management

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Compensation Management

Corporate Learning Management

HR Management

Payroll

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

API Design

Change and Configuration Management

Cloud Storage

Custom Software Development Services

Data Deduplication

DevOps

Fraud Detection

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Migration

Mobile Identity

Network Performance Monitoring

Privileged Access Management

Requirements Management

Sensitive Data Discovery

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Storage as a Service (STaaS)

Time Series Databases

Information Technology

A/B Testing

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Content Management

Content Marketing

Email Marketing

Market Research

Marketing Automation

Online Reputation Management

Product Intelligence

Social Media Management

Survey & Forms Building

Web Analytics

Marketing

Project Management

Task Management

Professional Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Sales Incentive Compensation Management

Sales Training

Sales

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management

Intrusion Detection

Secure Service Edge (SSE)

Security

Aviation

Church Management

Donor Management

Financial Services CRM

Fleet Management

Hospital Management

Internet of Medical Things

Veterinary

Vertical-Specific

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Blackbaud invites the user to manage and improve your funding and giving process with Blackbaud FIMS, a single, customizable foundation management software solution.

It is based on the former MicroEdge FIMS product.

Submittable offers tools to launch, measure, and grow social impact programs, locally and globally. From grants and scholarships to awards and CSR programs, Submittable partners with users to make a difference. The vendor states Submittable has supported over 95,000 social impact programs, receiving nearly 20 million applications, and that teams save an average of 12 hours per week and launch in an average of 14 days.

Submittable

SmarterSelect creates, manages, analyzes and evaluates online applications for the private and public sector.  This application management system  is designed for scholarships, grants and  awards.
SmartSelect, chosen by over 1,500,000 users for over 40,000 programs, was started in 2007 and is located in Dallas TX.

Create

Enhance

SmarterSelect

Blackbaud FIMS

Grant management software may refer to software used by fund seekers or grant makers.

Grant Management Software

Likelihood to Recommend

Support Rating

Blackbaud is a leading cloud software company powering social good. The vendor says they believe the world will be a better place when good takes over. Additionally, the vendor says they work every day to power an ecosystem of good, providing innovative software, services, expertise and data intelligence to more than 35,000 nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, and the individual change agents who support them. The Blackbaud portfolio is tailored to the unique needs of vertical markets, with solutions for fundraising and relationship management, digital marketing, advocacy, accounting, payments, analytics, school management, grant management, corporate social responsibility, and volunteerism. Serving the industry for more than three decades, Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina and has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Program Officer

Blackbaud FIMS (formerly MicroEdge) 2020-02-11 08:59:43

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Microsoft Dynamics AX (discontinued)

Microsoft SharePoint

Director of Grant Management

MicroEdge 2016-09-20 14:28:41

Microsoft 365

Grants Associate

MicroEdge 2015-03-27 08:00:59

MicroEdge 2015-04-03 08:31:31

TrustRadius is a technology and business research firm based in Austin, Texas. The company is known as a review platform for verified B2B technology and software reviews through a proprietary algorithm and human verification.

TrustRadius

Ad hoc

Ad hoc reports

User interface

Basic functions

Online application

Better email

Hoc reporting

Difficult to search

Email integration

Ad hoc reporting

Contract management

Good reporting

Column headers

Works for us

Reporting tools

Decision making

User groups

Ability to create

Simple layout

Support staff

Home

We use Blackbaud FIMS across the whole organization, minus the President.

Creating ad hoc reports
Editing ad hoc reports

Good reporting (by program area, geographic area, payments, and backgrounds) for close to 250 grants per year
Due to familiarity of program (MicroEdge), not too difficult to convert to new program of Blackbaud Grantmaking

MicroEdge GIFTS Classic is one of several systems we use in managing the funding we provide to nonprofit organizations serving the greater Houston area. There are four core users, three of which rely on MicroEdge for the bulk of their daily work to track awarded/declined/pending funding requests, payments due and grantee reporting requirements. Another 10 employees have view only permissions and may use the database as infrequently as once a month. We rely on the database to track due diligence information, ensure the correct person at the organization receives funding and to send out contracts, among other key activities.

GIFTS Classics does a very good job of processing transactions. You can track workflow and enter/change important information along the lifecycle.
My favorite feature is the ability to select almost any field within the database and organize how it will be viewed, either within the system or when exported to Excel. You can relabel the column headers, sort, switch the order, stack fields, and capture all the information that will help in both processing and decision making.
I find the ability to create a wide range of templates that can then be generated and stored through the document manager tool to provide great efficiency and reduce opportunity for error.

The old-school tables format has made it particularly difficult for the system to be as nimble as the work demands. Its user interface is unappealing and general navigation makes it hard for infrequent uses to find what they need.
Ad-hoc reporting can get you far. But the set of canned reports with preset criteria and formatting is very limiting.
Because we want controls between the funding database and the financial database, we value the two systems being separate. However, the way GIFTS tracks different payment activities (cancellations, refunds, voids, etc.) and the inability to easily get 'as of' information, reconciliation with a true accounting system is problematic.

We have to use several other systems to get our work done and/or to present the information in a visually pleasing manner to key stakeholders.

We currently use MicroEdge GIFTS Classic as our foundation's grants management system. While GIFTS Classic is a complex grant management system (GMS) with an antiquated interface, after using the database closely for almost three years, I have learned that this system is capable of helping us in all of our grantmaking - you just have to know how to use it! Currently only our Grants Department uses it, but we plan on rolling out GIFTS to other departments before upgrading to GIFTS Online. GIFTS helps us in tracking, monitoring, and managing online applications, requirements, payments, contract management, and contact management. It also serves as a way to consistently allow our program staff to monitor their philanthropic initiatives programmatically, while Finance still receives the necessary payment information they need (check requests, coding, payment information, etc). GIFTS also helps us generate reports (we use Excel rather than canned reports) to use as a reconciliation report to compare with the Finance Department to ensure we are tracking the same grantmaking expenses.

Customer support is readily available and comprehensive. As an advanced user, I have been really pleased with MicroEdge customer support and every time I call, my issue is not only resolved, but I learn something new about the system or a simpler way of doing things.
MicroEdge's support staff are extremely knowledgeable with philanthropy and grantmaking. They are not just database administrators, they assist in helping their users conceptualize how to use the database to the best of their ability in a way that is aligned with their organization's grantmaking strategies and initiatives. For example, our Foundation does a wide variety of grantmaking from matching contributions to complex contract management for operating grants. MicroEdge has helped us restructure our code tables and user ability in a way that works for us.
MicroEdge does a great job at hosting user groups by geographic region so we can personally express our concerns and desires for our organization's needs. You get more than a GMS when you choose MicroEdge.

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.

Managing nonprofit contacts efficiently through contact management, email integration (GIFTS Email Plus module), and managing multiple contacts per organization.
Increased employee efficiency, especially once we roll out the system for program use foundation-wide.
Increased financial efficiency through an accountability-based management system of the grants database and the Finance Dept database.

MicroEdge GIFTS was used organization wide by four of our five total employees. As the organization is a private foundation, GIFTS was used to manage contacts, applications, reports, and payments of grants for our Grants Program. GIFTS was essential in keeping track of the application and payment history of the international organizations which applied to our foundation for grants for over three decades.

Simple layout
Duplication reports
Lots of fields for organization-specific information

GIFTS system had many inherent bugs
Difficult to search for information in GIFTS
Customer support was difficult to reach
When reached, customer service was rude and unhelpful
GIFTS system could not put addresses in alphabetical order by country
Upon updates, GIFTS system would crash and data would become corrupted
GIFTS often would freeze and crash when exporting information to Excel
GIFTS would not allow for the deletion of certain program codes even when user had full administrative privileges

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.

Blackbaud FIMS
Formerly MicroEdge

Overview

What is Blackbaud FIMS?