New Application Portal Adoptions

To fellow BBGM community:

At the Peak 2025 BBGM User Session a question was asked if anyone has adopted the new portal and any recommendations.

We have rolled out and are using the new portal for 2025 and thought I would share some lessons learned, many that were shared in the user group session.

Building the application:

• The new application has conditional logic, big Yeah!, but it can take some getting used to, Boo! Start with small things and work up to complex logic. Get a feel for where things are so that's out of the way when you get to the complex ones.
• Take the opportunity reimagine your applications. You must rebuild them so build what you want, and not necessarily just recreate what you already have. Can you consolidate applications? We had applications that were 90% the same that we merged into one and handle the different data collection based on hide/show conditional logic.
• Line up some trusted grantees to beta test your applications. We got very valuable feedback for things we thought we had right but needed to tweak once it was in front of a grantee. That feedback was so valuable.
• If you collect percentage breakdown in your existing applications, you won’t be able to do that yet in the new portal. It’s a work in progress I’m told. Our work around, is to collect numbers 1-100, for what we were asking percentages for. For now, we use these data inputs to complete the percentages field on the request coding. Makes the request form a tad busy now, with all these extra data fields, but hopefully it’s a short wait for this functionality to be implemented in the new portal. Right BB devs?

Rolling out the application:

• We decided to invite all of our previous 2023-24 grantees to an online (Teams) webinar on to explain that our application portal was changing and that they will need an account established before submitting an application.
• We are a by invitation application process, so we attempted to make it clear that attending the webinar was not an invitation to apply or a guarantee of an invitation at some later date. Regardless, some didn't absorb that message, so we did have an uptick of the “We have our profile completed, but we can find the application to fill out” emails. We do a lot of our funding in Q4 and didn’t want to be dealing with profile issues in Q4, so that drove our decision on doing the webinar in Q1.
• We setup a resource page with our webinar recording and links to the BB YourConnect resource pages. So far, it’s been painless.
• Probably won’t apply to many of you, but because our funding decisions are made by our external affairs executives across the company, we also held meetings and webinars with them. They needed to know what was coming to the grantee. We wanted them to know that there is a once and done profile activation step that could cause a delay in applying immediately after getting an invitation. Our webinar was intended to minimize that impact, by encouraging them to setup now so it’s completed when they invite them.

Here is a link to our recorded webinar and links to some BB resources we link to: https://www.georgiapower.com/our-impact/community/giving-back/nonprofit-portal.html

I've added the presentation deck to the files section. I hope this is helpful to someone.