Understand the Grant Seeker’s Experience
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how an applicant applies for a grant and collaborates with grant seekers.
- List the features available on the funding award record page.
- Plan your Grantmaking site based on the experience you want to create.
View the World Through Grant-Seeking Lenses
To this point, we covered the Grantmaking site template at a high level, and discussed the choices you have to make.
What does all of this look like in action?
In this unit, we work through an example of the Grantmaking site template for Experience Cloud from an applicant’s perspective. We follow a grant-seeking nonprofit called Hunger No More International (HNMI). The organization is applying for a grant at the grantmaker Mountain Rise Foundation (MRF).
In this example the grantmaker is a foundation, but the site would work the same way for nonprofits, government agencies, and other types of organizations.
Find a Grant Opportunity
Grant seeker Kai Mahelona, the grants manager at the nonprofit HNMI, knows that MRF has a funding program supporting access to nutritious food, which is a perfect fit with HNMI’S mission. So, when he learns that grantmaker MRF has opened a new batch of funding opportunities, he goes directly to MRF’s Experience Cloud site.
MRF chose to allow for self-registration, so Kai signs up for a user login, sets his password, and logs in to the Experience Cloud site.
He goes to the Funding Opportunities page, where he can see listings for MRF’s available opportunities. He clicks into one to review the opportunity description and application instructions.
This opportunity looks like a perfect fit for HNMI! Kai takes the opportunity back to his team to discuss.
Apply for a Grant
HNMI decides to apply for the grant, so Kai returns to MRF’s Experience Cloud site, logs in with his user credentials, finds the opportunity, and begins his application.
Kai works through the multi-phase application form to submit his application. One of those phases is to submit a proposed budget using the built-in budget tool. MRF set the budget template, Kai only has to enter his details.
MRF set up its Experience Cloud site to enable Kai to add his colleagues as collaborators, as well. Kai shares access to the application with program staff to help him fill in details and complete the application.
When Kai submits the application, it appears in Salesforce for the grantmaking team at MRF. Kai can view the application, too, by going to the Applications page in the Experience Cloud site.
Engage with Grantseekers
Kai’s application goes through the process at MRF. The grantmaking team reviews and scores it. (You can learn more about this process in Grantmaking by completing the Grantmaking Lifecycle in Salesforce module.)
The MRF team needs some more information from HNMI, so they send a message and assign tasks to Kai on his individual application record. These new messages and tasks appear in Kai’s view of the individual application record in the Experience Cloud site.
The team at MRF creates and assigns common tasks like this using action plans. Action plans help you create standardized lists of tasks and document needs related to Grantmaking records. MRF creates an action plan from a template and assigns tasks to internal users and Experience Cloud users like Kai.
View Awards, Requirements, and Disbursements
MRF decides to fund Kai’s application, so when Kai logs into the Experience Cloud site, he sees a new funding award record on the Awards page.
This record becomes a key collaboration tool—and single source of truth—for the duration of the grant.
Here, Kai checks documents, grant requirements, the status of disbursements, submits progress reports, and—if the conditions of the grant change—amendments that track updates to the funding award. And thanks to Chatter, he can use this record to ask questions and create a searchable log of communications with MRF.
Get to Work
In this module, we reviewed features of the Grantmaking site template, discussed decisions your organization must make when setting up your Experience Cloud site, and shared how applicants work with grantseekers and grantees. As the team at HNMI gets to work on their grant, they continue to use the Experience Cloud site to share updates, submit reports, and share results.
Now it’s your turn: Consider how you'll tell your own version of this story inside your organization. What experience do you want to build for your applicants and grantees? To experience your Grantmaking site as your applicants and grantees, you can set up a user with the same permissions and use it for testing.
Resources