Over the past year, we have seen a growing number of funders using Salesforce choosing to invite their grant recipients to interact via an online portal.  There are many associated benefits; funders can share and collect data in a secure environment avoiding the need for a long trail of emails back and forth; data is more open so funded organisations can access their entire history of applications and have access to future requirements and payments. 

Once a grant is active, a portal provides a much more efficient way to respond to the specific needs of a funded organisation.  This blog focuses specifically on how ongoing dynamic engagement can help with the management of grant reporting including a case study featuring Comic Relief.

How does portal engagement help with grant reporting?

• Clear and open information – grantees have instant access to content to clarify reporting expectations, provide instructions on reporting requirements and advise how information will be used. This can be populated directly from programme records in Salesforce and controlled by internal team members.  This makes changes very quick and easy
• Full visibility of what is needed and when – Logged in grantees can view a full list of requirements with due dates with the option to filter to see those that are due soon
• It makes it easier to save and resume incomplete forms instead of searching for a link in an email
• Provides the flexibility to capture reporting data in multiple ways – the upload of documents or completion of a form so that responses can feed directly into reports.  Or both!
• Queries can be posted in the context of specific reports to provide a full audit trail of communications

Salesforce Grants Management product includes an allocation of Community log ins per user.  The out of the box templates for data capture forms, content and navigation are extremely flexible so can be tailored for different external stakeholder profiles.

Funder case study – Comic Relief

Comic Relief manage a high volume of ongoing grants programmes many of which are funded by UK and international partnership organisations.  There are 3 levels of Monitoring Evaluation and Learning designed to scale the information requested for a specific grant round.   

• On a programme round record, internal teams can manage the default level of monitoring will apply to grant recipients (defaults can be edited by users with the required permissions)
• Reporting data is captured from grant recipients via a Salesforce community portal where they can log in to submit responses
• Forms can be saved and progressed if they need more time to prepare answers
• Cumulative totals of the number of beneficiaries are auto-calculated based on previous progress reports submitted
• Respondents have the flexibility to update the team on any activities since the last report
• Reporting data all feeds into reports and charts for instant visibility of impact that can be filtered by geographical region or named programme 

If you would like to know more about how grant reporting can be managed on Salesforce or how our Service Design team can help you to define how you measure grant impact, get in touch team@hyphen8.com