GRANT MANAGEMENT AND ALLOCATION WITH SALESFORCE COMMUNITIES
THE CLIENT
Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) strengthens and supports artists, cultural organizations, and communities throughout our region and beyond. The organization achieves this primarily through its national traveling exhibition programs, innovative leadership development, and strategic grant making. M-AAA is committed to enriching the cultural life of historically underserved communities by providing high quality, meaningful, and accessible arts and culture programs and services.
As a nonprofit, regional arts organization—representing Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas and beyond, M-AAA focuses on strengthening communities and improving lives through extraordinary cultural experiences. M-AAA partners with the state arts agencies of our region along with artists, cultural organizations, funders, and other stakeholders in providing access to cultural experiences and growing creative economies across its region.
CHALLENGES
M-AAA was previously using a variety of software programs to track its constituents, exhibitions, grantees, and grants. This grant management system limited the organization’s ability to improve its processes and create efficiency with workflows. M-AAA’s leadership team recognized that the existing technology was time consuming and prevented its staff from focusing on achieving their mission.
M-AAA was also looking to offer a better experience and reporting interface for its grantees. “We needed a solution that would allow us to engage better with our grantees and exhibitors and track pertinent information. The lack of a self-service approach for our grantees and exhibitors was slowing our grant and exhibition booking lifecycle and created a somewhat laborious process with multiple data entry redundancies fraught with the potential for inaccuracy,” stated Todd Stein, CEO, Mid-America Arts Alliance.
THE SOLUTION
After thoroughly evaluating the ecosystem of grant management and CRM applications, M-AAA chose Cloud for Good to create its next generation technology with the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Success Pack, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Communities Cloud for their constituent, grant, and exhibition management needs.
Using the Salesforce platform and several integrated applications, Cloud for Good created a “one-stop shop” for the client’s programmatic needs. “We turned to Cloud for Good’s expertise for assistance. They came strongly recommended by one of our sister Regional Arts Organizations who completed a similar grant management implementation project with them. Their consultants spent extensive time with our team to evaluate and document process mapping to ensure we were designing a system that allowed us to scale capacity to serve our constituents more efficiently,” said Stein.
With the grantee community, built using Customer Communities with the Lightning Experience, grantees can submit requests for funding, view active and past requests and reporting deadlines, and submit grant reports. Within the community, there is also functionality for panel reviewer management.
Additionally, Cloud for Good implemented solutions for exhibition management and contracting, including document merge and e-signature tools to streamline the contracting process. Automation was built to focus the client’s data entry to those items that specifically require a personal review. Reports and dashboards were built both for internal Salesforce users to gain visibility to specific metrics and deadlines.
Data was migrated from their legacy system, making the needed transformation to accommodate the change in structure. Training and ongoing support was provided to ensure that the solutions could be managed by the client team and that small adjustments could be made as they began using the system with grantees and constituents during active grant and exhibition cycles.
RESULTS
Cloud for Good’s solution enabled M-AAA to accept online grant applications, saving the organization countless hours and precious resources each year. “We are realizing an envisioned future in which we increased our productivity by allowing us to work smarter and serve our constituents much more efficiently, “ added Stein.
