Pillar leverages Fluxx grants management solution to scale their operation while improving communication and collaboration

Fluxx’s Community Manager Shawn Garrison met with Tiffany Ramos, Director of Operations at Pillar to discuss their mission, and how Fluxx has been an integral part of their operation.

About Pillar
Pillar was conceived out of the hardships realized by business from the COVID pandemic. Pillar saw a need to help small businesses survive during the tumultuous economic times by providing grants and loans to the small businesses within the Rainier Valley and Greater Seattle area in Washington state. As a result of their work, hundreds of small businesses are thriving today and continue to be a vital part of their communities.

The Need for Efficiency and Transparency
As the pandemic continued to impact small businesses, Pillar saw an increase in their grantmaking to ensure they kept to their mission within the community. They wanted to find a solution to help fill in some process gaps and be more efficient in their grantmaking. Additionally, they wanted to have greater visibility and control into how they were collaborating on grants and ensuring the right people reviewed the grants at the right time in the process. These needs ultimately led them to Fluxx.

Scaling the Grants Management Operation with Fluxx
Ultimately, Fluxx had all the capabilities they needed to scale their operation and was able to quickly implement a solution that met their timeline and grantmaking needs. As a result of Fluxx’s grants management solution, Pillar was able to process significantly more applications and have them reviewed by the team. Since Pillar has a two-step review process with both community reviews and financial reviews, the workflow and automation helped to ensure that the reviews were on time and properly routing to the next steps in the life cycle.

Collaboration Internally and to the Community within the Fluxx System
For Pillar, another key capability that has had a major impact is the ability to automate the communications and alerts in the grantmaking process. With Fluxx, they are able to send out automated alerts and communications to applicants and future potential grantees automatically within the process. This has given them a wider connection not only just within the grantmaking process, but to the wider community, which is a vital part of Pillar’s mission.

Fluxx has made all that possible for Pillar.

Looking to Build a Repeatable Model for Community Giving
Pillar was founded out of the challenges brought by the pandemic, and as the need to help small businesses has begun to subside, a new chapter for Pillar is opening up. They have taken their processes that have been automated through Fluxx and created a repeatable model that they can hopefully pre-package to other communities in need throughout the country. So as the door closes on their mission in Seattle, they have a model and the best practices to open doors in other areas in need. With that potential need in mind, Fluxx will be able to help them automate and create visibility and control for the future.


For more information on Pillar and to learn about their mission, visit them at https://www.pillarimpact.org/