Salesforce Grants Management


The first thing to be clear about when dealing with grants is whether you are managing inbound grants, outbound grants or both. Inbound and outbound grants are managed very differently, and with completely different parts of Salesforce, but I’ve seen too many Salesforce consultants mix these two up, to the detriment of the nonprofit they’re building a solution for.

Inbound Grants

Inbound grants are relatively easy to manage in Salesforce as the grants process looks quite similar to a B2B sales process, which is originally what Salesforce was designed for. Salesforce has come a long way from being just a B2B sales tool, however nonprofit processes that look like B2B sales have many great out of the box features to make use of. The NPSP also has some additional features for grants management, such as milestones to help track deliverables during the grant application process, as well as any mid funding or end of funding reports that are required after the application has been successful. You also have access to standard analytics such as pipeline reporting, overdue deliverables, and actual income.

Outbound Grants

Outbound grants are trickier to manage with the standard Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), although there are additional Salesforce products that can help, such as Salesforce Grants Management and the Outbound Funds Module. If these solutions aren’t going to work for you, or you have a custom solution already built and can’t easily change to the Salesforce products, then it’s likely you have a solution that is built using either:

Opportunities - Although opportunities deal with money, and can therefore seem to be the best option for outbound grants, it can be confusing to mix income with outbound funds. Opportunities at their core are meant to help manage a sales process to bring money in, so this doesn’t make them the best object to manage grants;

Cases - Cases are more usually associated with resolving a customer service request or a technical issue, however they can be used to model any process where someone external to your organisation goes through a process with a clear end point. Cases are very effective at managing conversations across different modes, and there are often many phone calls, emails and documents required to process a grants application. Case creation can also be easily managed using web to case or email to case functionality in Salesforce so applicants can lodge a application through a webform or by sending an email;

Custom Object - It’s very easy in Salesforce to extend your data model to create a new custom object and connect it to existing objects in your system. You can create a custom object called ‘Grant Applications’ and connect it to people or organisational records in your system to indicate who is applying for the grant. You can also connect to GAU’s, a tool that allows you to code income to a particular fund, but can also be used to track allocation of grants from tied funds;

Experience Cloud - Regardless of whether you’re using opportunities, cases or custom objects, Experience Cloud can be a really helpful tool to create an online space for applicants to log in to lodge or manage their applications. Although there is a licensing fee associated with community logins, there are a couple of different pricing structures to help keep this affordable, and implementing an experience for applicants can significantly improve admin associated with communicating by email.

Reach out if you have any questions about grants management, or need some help getting your grant management processes working well for your organisation.