If you’re a grantmaker, you understand how vital it’s to have a dependable and environment friendly software program system that may enable you handle your grants, observe your influence, and collaborate along with your stakeholders. You most likely additionally know that the world of philanthropy is altering quickly, and your software program must sustain with the brand new challenges and alternatives that come up.

Over the previous 30 years, Blackbaud Grantmaking™ has been serving foundations and nonprofit grantmakers with software program that continues to evolve with you.

Inspecting The Previous: Historical past and Timeline of Blackbaud Grantmaking

Imagine it or not, what we all know as Blackbaud Grantmaking has been round for the reason that Nineteen Nineties in a single type or one other. MicroEdge was established again in 1985 and launched their Grants Administration Software program “GIFTS On-line” in 2009. Blackbaud acquired MicroEdge and inherited what we now know as Blackbaud Grantmaking in 2014.

As a path blazer within the social influence house, Blackbaud had already been serving a big selection of nonprofit and public sector organizations. It was now trying to develop their providers even additional to assist resolve the ache factors of grantmakers. Since MicroEdge was acquired, there have been a big selection of modifications to the product interface and performance to maintain up with the wants of recent grantmakers.

In 2020 Blackbaud Grantmaking made the total transition to Blackbaud SKY. Blackbaud SKY is an built-in open cloud platform uniquely constructed for the social influence neighborhood that many different progressive Blackbaud options run on, together with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT and Blackbaud Monetary Edge NXT.

With Blackbaud SKY got here a streamlined, trendy consumer interface and an built-in expertise, bringing collectively Blackbaud options, best-in-class third celebration options, and the Blackbaud Companion Community. This additionally meant making it simpler for Blackbaud to ship progressive product enhancements on an accelerated schedule and provides prospects entry to industry-leading cloud providers to make sure their knowledge is backed up and safe. At this level, Blackbaud’s imaginative and prescient of a completely built-in suite of merchandise constructed for nonprofits, academic establishments, hospitals, foundations, and different social influence organizations was effectively on its manner.

Flash Ahead to the Current: Onwards and Upwards

Since Blackbaud Grantmaking transitioned to SKY view, Blackbaud has continued to prioritize fixed enhancements and modifications to supply a fully configurable GMS that may be constructed round a corporation’s distinctive processes and workflows. It’s a system that’s intuitive sufficient for the common consumer to make use of however can be modified simply with out intervention from builders or needing to name Blackbaud’s assist each time a change is required.

We’ve heard from prospects that Blackbaud Grantmaking has already saved them hours of time to allow them to deal with what’s vital—their mission. Among the newest updates we’re enthusiastic about embrace new doc administration capabilities, new methods to delete knowledge in bulk, a totally reimagined applicant-centric portal, and the introduction of SKY API®.

The artwork of organizing: From chaos to readability

Via participating in discovery calls with grantmakers, we now have discovered that administrative duties like managing paperwork and coping with massive quantities of knowledge is a large time suck for his or her organizations. Grantmakers had been coping with cluttered recordsdata stuffed with paperwork that they needed to continuously re-download to view or make modifications to. That’s the reason we’re making it attainable to view and edit Microsoft paperwork immediately inside Blackbaud Grantmaking. What’s extra, these paperwork are tied on to your contact information, so your employees members can have every part they want at your fingertips.

Delete with goal: time to declutter

Along with the sheer quantity of things to maintain organized, we discovered that worldwide prospects had a creating must take away knowledge after a sure interval to respect native privateness legal guidelines. We knew we would have liked to make it simpler to handle massive knowledge units so we added new choices that make it simpler to delete request and make contact with information in bulk. We additionally added new search fields, together with “Declination date” and “Contact final up to date” to assist additional slender your outcomes

Empower candidates and grantees whereas saving time internally

Our contemporary applicant and grantee expertise will deliver with it thrilling new updates in three totally different areas:

1. New methods of managing submitted functions

We hope to save lots of grantmakers much more time by offering intuitive search capabilities and the flexibility to govern columns to simply discover what you might be searching for and keep organized.

2. A reimagined applicant-centric portal

Filling out grant functions will be an all-consuming course of for people and nonprofits which can be in search of funding, and as a grantmaker you play an enormous position in making that have as clean as attainable for potential grantees. The quantity of care you place into crafting an equitable software course of will immediately affect your capacity to create and domesticate optimistic relationships along with your grantees. Not solely will it save your candidates tons of time, however your grant employees may anticipate to obtain greater high quality and error-free functions in return. It’s a win win! That is why we now have optimized the applicant portal to save lots of candidates time by making it simpler than ever for candidates to submit an software and observe its standing.

Pondering past the thrilling new items of performance, one outstanding shift is that with the introduction of this new applicant portal we now have additionally added Blackbaud Grantmaking to the record of Blackbaud options that makes use of Blackbaud ID. Because of this organizations can register utilizing one login for all their Blackbaud options and think about each software that was submitted utilizing a Blackbaud resolution in a single place.

3. A streamlined type builder

Now we have lowered the time it takes to construct a single software type and the variety of types wanted by introducing conditional logic. It’s even simpler to handle model controls and format your type, so it isn’t solely visually interesting, but in addition simply is smart. For our international viewers, we now have launched type translation capabilities that may translate types into 30 totally different languages, together with French, Spanish, and Welsh simply to call just a few!

Broaden what’s attainable with integrations and companions

SKY APIs are industry-standard REST APIs that make it a lot simpler to amplify the facility of Blackbaud Grantmaking™ permitting prospects to combine and lengthen the product’s capabilities with different options of their grantmaking ecosystem. Endpoints for Funds and Organizations are already out there right now, with extra thrilling information to roll out by means of to the tip of the yr. Keep tuned!

The Future Is Vivid: The place We’re Headed Subsequent

Seeking to the longer term, we’re continuously maintaining an eye fixed out for brand spanking new AI use circumstances for grantmakers that may assist resolve actual and significant challenges. Keep in mind that amidst all of the hype round AI, Blackbaud has been incorporating AI into its merchandise for a few years. For instance, our Knowledge Intelligence portfolio already permits our prospects to faucet into billions of {dollars} of unrealized income. As a frontrunner in important software program for social influence, Blackbaud’s Intelligence for Good® technique acts as our framework to make sure that we create AI that’s accessible, highly effective, and reliable.

With the introduction of SKY API and new endpoints being added on a rolling foundation by means of till the tip of the yr, we will probably be closely centered on constructing extra out-of-the-box integrations and including companions to the Blackbaud Market.  A few of our most extremely requested integrations embrace a deeper connection between Blackbaud Grantmaking™ and Monetary Edge NXT™, DocuSign, and Microsoft Energy BI.

Is there something you wish to present suggestions on? A use case that you simply really feel could possibly be made extra highly effective or productive by means of new performance or AI? Keep updated with the newest product enhancements and supply suggestions to our product group by becoming a member of Blackbaud Grantmaking’s neighborhood group and don’t overlook to register for our Product Replace Briefings!