Operating Systems

Unspecified

Mobile Application

December 23, 2015

The GIFTS that Kept on Giving (In the Worst Way Possible)

Verified User

Program Manager in Other

Philanthropy Company, 1-10 employees

Score 4 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe a company starting out with a whole new database may take advantage of MicroEdge GIFTS. However, GIFTS would not work well for an organization which is transferring their old data onto the platform. GIFTS does not update well as time passes and data would most likely be lost and/or corrupted. I have not worked with the newest GIFTS online, so I do not know if that process would be smooth or not, but from what my coworkers told me upon hire, it seems GIFTS was very difficult to customize online. When attempting to use GIFTS online, our organization was told that we'd have to pay an invoice of several thousand dollars to change three words in a paragraph on the online system. Lastly, and most importantly, we found MicroEdge's customer service to be nearly impossible to reach, rude, and never helpful when help was sought out. Organizations which would need help with the program should not expect to be serviced in a timely or helpful manner.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

MicroEdge was chosen for the foundation before I arrived. It had caused many problems and headaches since it was first implemented. Our Executive Director hated the software and spent five years convincing the Board of Directors to allow her to change it. Upon my departure, the foundation was in the process switching over to an entirely new database with Good Done Great.

Implemented in-house

Blackbaud FIMS

Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager

Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

MIP Fund Accounting

Workday Financial Management

Cayuse (SmartGrant)

Fluxx Grantmaker

Bright Funds

Submittable

Blackbaud Grantmaking

Bonterra Grants Management

Benevity Grants

EGrAMS

Fluxx Grantseeker