Hyphen8 has designed and delivered grant management solutions on Salesforce since we were established 8 years ago.  We are proud to be considered thought leaders in this sector and are helping an increasing number of funders to process grants quickly and more efficiently.  So we welcome the news that Salesforce is releasing a new grant management product.  

As a valued Impact Partner that has designed, implemented and now supports many UK funders, we are delighted that we are being consulted for our input by the product development team.

The new product will build on the free open source Outbound Funds module.  This is an accelerator originally built in the US by a community group and is already available to install for further configuration.  Salesforce also offers a basic Community template that is compatible with this data model to accelerate online portal access for grantees (this does incur an annual, variable cost for Community Plus level user licences).

In 2018, Hyphen8 developed grantFlex, our own free accelerator for grant-makers, years ago to fast-track implementations and provide functionality that filled a gap in standard functionality.  This accelerator is now the starting point for many of our implementation and the underlying data model is the foundation for many of the solutions for over 75 grant-making customers for whom we are proud to have been selected as a trusted partner. 

grantFlex+

The exciting news is that to support the new Salesforce product, we are working hard to ensure all our existing accelerators are compatible with Outbound Funds including: 

• Online application forms and grant acceptance forms
• Funds and Programmes to provide flexibility to reflect all potential funding and budgeting models including collaborative and partnership funding
• Dynamic status-specific checklist and help content to simplify workflow for Grant Managers at each stage of the grant lifecycle
• Community Cloud configuration and template design services to enhance online engagement with grantees, external assessors and committee members
• Integrated and automated online progress report forms with pre-fill to capture latest impact and outcome data against the original estimates

In addition to our accelerators, Hyphen8 offers a range of services delivered by senior consultants with broad grant-making sector experience.  These are designed to challenge and transform processes and include service design, agile delivery coaching and user training and adoption programmes. 

I’m sure many of you are wondering why a new product from Salesforce, didn’t they purchase foundationConnect in 2019? Well yes, they did and whilst it is an excellent product, it’s a large complex application and frankly a little to expensive to have taken off in the European market. In order to thrive in 2020 it requires a lot of redevelopment and redesign and so we believe the new product will allow Salesforce to develop something better from the ground up. 

We look forward to sharing more news of the enhanced grant management product offering from Salesforce as it is unveiled.  And of course how we can offer our expertise for funders to optimise the investment to transform efficiency and increase impact.