The key to lasting impact is the ability to scale and adapt. When you’re able to share, reproduce, and generate impact beyond your original reach – everyone benefits! A key way to truly scale is with technology. A robust grants management platform brings with it automation and efficiency – saving foundations from having to overhire in order to meet their needs or overburden their current employees. Not to mention how much easier tax season becomes when data is centralized, safe, and easily referenceable.
Need more reasons to invest in a platform that can help you scale and grow? Then keep reading!
A critical reason to invest in scalability now is to avoid future bottlenecks. When a foundation only has one person who knows how to process a grant from beginning to end, this can create frustrating bottlenecks when that person is sick, takes time off, or leaves the organization. Like any industry, the philanthropy space has its fair share of turnover. No foundation wants to discover that the keys to its grantmaking processes are held in convoluted spreadsheets or documents that are dependent on a key player that is no longer available. Sure, foundations will always have to train new grants managers in the case of turnover - but training them on a systemized platform with built-in automation is far easier than training someone on a home-grown and unrecognizable system!
The need for automation heavily contributed to the rise of software as a service (SaaS) platforms. Technologists recognized that there was a growing need for teams to automate and scale in the digital age. At Fluxx, we saw a need to automate key grants management tasks and processes so foundations and nonprofits could focus their time on relationship building, impact, and insight.
Imagine if you were at a foundation that focused on homelessness and poverty. Instead of spending your days stuck in Excel spreadsheets and passing documents back and forth via email, you are now able to spend time analyzing impact updates and measuring your data to pick out key trends, and therefore you’re able to observe how prison reform is closely linked to homelessness. The only way you can begin granting more dollars and widening your focus into prison reform (without having to hire another team) is by automating cumbersome grants management tasks so program officers are able to focus on real-time data and impact.
A foundation’s impact is closely tied to its ability to build capacity. Enabling nonprofits to make the most of a grant is a great way to reduce your grantee’s burden. Efficiency opens up so many possibilities – the most important being the potential for rapid response grantmaking. A key example is the sudden swell of rapid response grantmaking we’ve seen in response to immigration reform and sudden policy changes. If foundations weren’t able to quickly grant, then how could the boots-on-the-ground nonprofits be expected to doll out the help that is so sorely needed?
We define efficient scalability as the act of expanding and taking on new challenges as an organization, while simultaneously alleviating burden. Philanthropy is changing rapidly. Our world is changing even more rapidly. The only way to keep up is to capitalize on technology so your teams can be set up for success.
To learn more about how you can scale and grow your grantmaking, request a demo today.
As much as I am excited about the emphasis on data, measurement, and impact, we need to talk about the disproportionate emphasis on “impact” alone.
You may not be ready for impact evaluation right now, but that doesn’t mean that you are not ready to begin the journey.
How do you know you’re making an impact? The simple answer is elusive. There is no silver bullet. But answer the question we must.