Blackbaud FIMS (formerly MicroEdge) Reviews

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

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.

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.

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.