Manage Grantmaking with Salesforce

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Summarize how grantmakers can use Salesforce to connect with grantseekers and manage funding.
Describe how to use the grantee portal to collaborate and securely exchange information.

Salesforce offers both an integrated platform solution and a managed package for managing the grantmaking process. This module covers a managed package named Grants Management. For more information about Grantmaking, a platform solution, complete the Grantmaking: Quick Look module. If you’re unsure which solution your organization uses, check with your Salesforce administrator.

Invest in Work That Changes the World

Imagine a world with no poverty or hunger, quality education for all, thriving ecosystems, and sustainable cities with healthy residents. This is the world that nonprofit and non-governmental organizations across the globe strive for. They invest time and talent in work that transforms systems and communities.

But this work also takes a significant amount of money.

Grantmaking organizations like foundations, public charities, educational institutions, and other groups know that partnering with the right grantseeker, selecting the right projects to support, and measuring progress is a complex process. Why should it be further complicated by inefficient tracking of data across multiple systems?

Having a single system can help simplify processes, unify data, and allow for greater collaboration between staff, grantseekers, and other stakeholders. That’s where Salesforce Grants Management comes in.

A grantmaker on a site visit to a grantee

This module features grants from a grantmaker’s perspective—managing the process of awarding grants, scholarships, and other outbound funds. To learn how to manage and track grants as inbound funds, a critical source of revenue for many nonprofits, start with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) Basics badge on Trailhead.

Get to Know Grants Management

Grants Management helps grantmakers track, manage, and deliver funding programs in a single system. Having everything in one system leads to fewer internal barriers, increased cross-team collaboration, and improved operations.

The many benefits of Grants Management include:

Visibility for grantseekers and grantees across the lifecycle of the grant, thanks to a dedicated portal. Plus, your external reviewers can use the same portal to collaborate with your team.
Workflow and verification tools like document checklists, verification checks, reviews, and requirement records help you better collaborate within your organization, with grantseekers, and with outside experts.
Flexibility to handle a multiyear grant with many requirements or a onetime grant such as a scholarship.
And, thanks to the power of the Salesforce Platform, you can customize your processes and evolve as your programs grow and change. You can use automation tools to reduce time spent on manual repetitive tasks, which helps staff focus on high-value activities.

Grants Management is built on top of Outbound Funds Module (OFM), an open-source Salesforce data model originally created by grantmakers as part of the Salesforce.org Commons program. Grants Management adds tools to streamline processes, increase efficiency, and improve collaboration inside and outside of your organization.

Installing Grants Management requires additional licenses, so work with your Salesforce admin, a Salesforce partner, or your Salesforce account executive to make sure you have access. See the details on what you need to get started by reading the Get Ready to Install Grants Management link in Resources.

Tip
For help implementing Grants Management as a Salesforce customer, we recommend you contact one of Salesforce.org’s network of implementation partners who are experienced with Salesforce, certified on Salesforce for Nonprofits, and who specialize in grantmaking. You can work with your Salesforce account executive to be introduced to Salesforce.org network implementation partners, or check out the Resources section for more information.

Set Up the Portal for Grantseekers

Most of the grant cycle—and the back-and-forth between grantmakers and grantseekers—is done in the Grants Management portal. It allows grantseekers, grantees, reviewers, and grantmakers to collaborate and securely exchange information.

The grantee portal

To help you get started with the portal, Grants Management comes with the Experience Cloud Grantee Portal site template. The template helps you quickly build a custom website to collect grant applications and work toward common goals, no matter the size or scope of your funding programs.

Before you get hands-on with the portal, start with a foundational understanding of objects and records you can use to track your work in Grants Management. We review those objects in the next unit.