Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland
Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland
The Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland is one of four independent grant-making trusts, covering England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. They are shareholders in Lloyds Banking Group and together receive 0.5% of the Group’s pre-tax profits. The Foundation is independent of the Group. Its policies are determined by a Board of Trustees.
The Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland is committed to supporting underfunded, grassroots charities that enable people, especially disabled and disadvantaged people, to play a fuller role in society. Applications are accepted from organisations with recognised charitable status, which fit within the published grant-giving criteria.
We welcome applications from all sections of the community regardless of race, colour, gender, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, age or disability.
The Challenge
HNFI were using a bespoke solution which was due for an upgrade, however this upgrade was due to remove some of the current functionality at a higher cost which was one of the main drivers into HNFI looking to find an alternative platform.
They needed the new platform to match the current solution but also to provide more including:
- Process online and offline applications
- Allow applicants to register / login and track their applications
- Store historical data to support the reviewing of new applications
- Provide CRM capabilities to store information about individuals and contacts
- Support grant monitoring with some levels of automation around grantee notifications of information due
- Track financial payments and store details of capital expenditure items procured for an applicant (i.e. buildings).
- Simplify the generation of trustee papers providing a list of grants for review
- Improve efficiency and automation
- Track and analyse data via real-time reports and dashboards
- Encourage self-sufficiency for internal staff to maintain key components of the solution without over-reliance on external resources
- Flexibility and scalability to meet future growth and evolving needs including integrations and workflow
The Solution
With Salesforce selected as the chosen platform, we installed and customised our accelerator grantFlex and teamed this with FormAssembly to build an end to end grant management system from application all the way through to end of grant reporting and the final payment.
Key areas were the ability for people to apply for grants online, the team could then process applications, request additional information, offer grants electronically and then do reporting via additional use of forms.
With the flexibility of the solution they were able to act quickly to the COVID19 pandemic by creating an application form and end to end grant management within days.
The team also utilise the standard task functionality which enables them to assign a task to themselves or another member of the team to complete. These tasks show up on the user’s home page in a neat tile.
By using form assembly to capture any monitoring requirements HNFI are able to collate all the uploaded files and additional information on the existing record and therefore reducing the teams administration time. These monitoring requirements are automated to be sent out on the requested date, this means that the team no longer have to manually send these emails to the grantees.
HNFI use a suite of reports and dashboards grant management committees to show how many funding requests they have at each stage of the process etc. The team also use reporting to show the payments that are due to be paid.
