Make Decisions About Your Grantmaking Site

Learning Objectives

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

Describe the decisions related to user management and access.
Explain the options to set up application forms.
Explain the ways you can help applicants and grantees to find answers to their questions.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Experience Cloud is a versatile tool, and there are many ways you can customize your site when you start with the template.

In this unit, we discuss some important questions that you must consider as you set up your Experience Cloud site. Involve your Salesforce admin, grantmaking team, and implementation partner and decide together based on your processes and capabilities.

If you’re an admin who wants to set up and manage an Experience Cloud site, check out the Expand Your Reach with Experience Cloud and Customize Your Experience Cloud Site badges.

The grantmaking team at the Mountain Rise Foundation works together to make decisions about their Experience Cloud site.

First question!

How Will You Manage New Users?

Your Experience Cloud site can enable your stakeholders to register and create user accounts and passwords. The Grantmaking site template includes a registration page to get you started.

Alternatively, you can manage access to the site by creating user credentials for your applicants and grantees. That decision limits who can access the site.

What Will Users Be Able to See and Change?

After users log in, what can they do?

For example, can users edit their own organization profile, or would you prefer that they request changes for you to approve? What can users edit or change on an individual application under review?

When considering user access and capabilities, follow the principle of least privilege: Every user can access only what they need for their job. Then, decide when changes can be made and by whom.

When and How Will Funding Opportunities Be Displayed Publicly?

One specific example of access revolves around funding opportunities, which list and track the grants you offer. Who can see funding opportunities: registered users, a subset of registered users, or any site visitor? At which status does a funding opportunity first appear on the site, and when does it no longer appear?

Will you have invitation-only or private funding opportunities? If so, see Securely Share Grantmaking Records in CRM or Experience Cloud Using Compliant Data Sharing.

What Objects and Fields Will You Display on the Site?

Apart from funding opportunities, there are many objects and fields that are crucial to your processes, which may not be important for applicants and grantees to access.

Which objects can users view and edit? Which fields appear on records and in list views?

Review the objects you use at every part of the process. Decide what is available to users, when it’s available, and what fields are displayed and editable.

How Will You Structure Applications?

Applications can be collected through your Experience Cloud site using built-in tools that can give you reusable, multi-phase application forms. How many different types of application forms do you need? How many stages or phases does each contain?

After you answer those questions, use Grantmaking’s application form framework to save staff time by simplifying the process of creating and managing application forms. After you create a form template and relate it to a funding opportunity, you and your applicants can complete and review the form using Omnistudio and Flow. The framework is flexible enough that you can add sections to grant applications as needed to go beyond the sections defined in your template.

To create a multi-section form to collect applications, use the Application Stage Definition, Action Plan Template, and Individual Application Task objects with Omnistudio, Flow, and an included Flow Builder template that launches the form. For details, read Create a Grantmaking Form in Salesforce Help.

Will Users Be Able to Collaborate on Applications?

You can choose to enable grant seekers to securely add collaborators to help complete grant applications. For example, a development director who’s completing organizational summary information in an application can add their program director to complete details about their programs and the planned budget for the grant.

See Securely Share Grantmaking Records in CRM or Experience Cloud Using Compliant Data Sharing for details.

What Else Do You Want to Include?

Also included in the Grantmaking Experience Cloud template is a single-page view for external reviewers to easily and securely submit their feedback on grant applications. Plus, the template includes components for users to submit and review progress reports.

But Experience Cloud can do a lot more than what’s included in the Grantmaking template. What features do you want to add?

Also consider how you want applicants and grantees to find answers to their questions.

If you want users to ask you questions on their individual application or funding award records, surface Chatter on those records and keep a record of the running discussion on those records.
If you want users to track and complete tasks using your Experience Cloud site, use Action Plans and Document Checklists. You can then assign and display the associated tasks in your Experience Cloud site.
If you want to build a searchable library of frequently asked questions and add them to your site, add Lightning Knowledge.
If you want stakeholders to collaborate with each other on your Experience Cloud site, add community features.

You can learn more about setting up Experience Cloud with some of these interactivity features in the Customize Your Experience Cloud Site trail.

Choices, Choices, Choices

These decisions and upfront work will save you staff time, and prevent applicant and grantee headaches in the future. After you decide on each of these questions, how would your grantmaking lifecycle flow? How would the site fit into your processes? In the next unit, we follow an example of an interaction between a grantmaker and an applicant who are using an Experience Cloud site to collaborate.

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