Grant Tracking

Robin Evans

One of our goals for the upcoming fiscal year is to transition our Grants teams away from tracking their activity and solicitations on spreadsheets and an in-house database built by a departing member of our I.T. dept and into Raiser’s Edge.

To date we have never used the Prospect tab in RE nor have we used the Opportunities panel since we upgraded to NXT last fall.

Both members of our Grants team have always had access to RE, but have only used it to look up past gift information and have never done any data entry so I will be looking at Blackbaud University for training to recommend for them. I am thinking of having them start with a video tutorial and then move on to instructor lead classes as their schedule allows.

I’m curious how other organizations are tracking grants in RE, either in the web view or the db view, and what the pros and cons and things to watch out for based on your experiences.

Thank you.

Faith Murray

Prospect tab works well for grant applications. Making good use of the Proposal Status (prospecting, pending, approved, denied), attaching those Proposals to actions for tracking deadlines (with a dedicated “Grant Action” Type), and then setting up constituent queries or action lists to pull pending follow-up, will all be helpful in keeping your process smooth. Best of luck!

Nicole Holt

Our grants team uses Opportunities (and especially actions connected to Opportunities). They also use automations that connect actions to Microsoft Planner (which is especially helpful for non-development staff who do not have RENXT access but are still involved in grant writing/reporting).

Madeleine Holdsworth

How are you connecting actions to Microsoft Planner? If you could point me in the right direction, that would be very helpful to us for our grant tracking. Thanks,

Karen Diener

I highly recommend watching two free, on-demand webinars that Blackbaud has put together. You and the people who will be managing the programs should all watch, and discuss the appropriate values for your tables, and process for your organization.

The first one is Using Actions and Opportunities to Power your Fundraising. It is a little over an hour, but since it is on-demand you will be able to jump ahead a little bit. Regardless of the time, it is packed with useful information, and professional development and training resources such as this are always worth your time. This covers how to use Opportunities from a major gift perspective but lays excellent groundwork for grant tracking.

The second one I recommend is Tips for Tracking Grants with Opportunities. There will be an assumption that you already understand how to use Opportunities, which is why I recommend watching the other one first. But this offers some really great suggestions on how to make use of it for your grant-seeking AND major gift fundraising.

Karen

Nicole Holt

Madeleine Holdsworth:

How are you connecting actions to Microsoft Planner? If you could point me in the right direction, that would be very helpful to us for our grant tracking. Thanks,

We are using a Microsoft Power Automate workflow. I shared my workflows in another post here. I'm going to give a short talk about our workflow and how we landed on it at the BB Developers Conference next week--if you can't attend that conference, I believe it will all be posted to the BB YouTube channel sometime after the conference--and once I have finalized out my presentation I'll also be happy to share!

Madeleine Holdsworth

Thanks. I'm not able to attend the conference but would be grateful if you would share your presentation.