ABLE and LAWO: Complex Grants Management
Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) and Legal Aid of Western Ohio (LAWO) are partner organizations who advocate for legal rights and representation for their clients in Ohio. On top of managing multiple teams running various programs, the organizations also work together and separately to coordinate a complicated web of grants and state and federal funding.
Robin Stone, Manager of Grants and Contracts for ABLE, spearheaded the organizational transition into Salesforce. Because of the similar grant approval and reporting process, Tipping Point was able to save time and money for both organizations by leveraging the same customizations across the two separate Salesforce instances.
GOALS
Create consistency around the multi-team grant approval processes for each organization
Maintain a single source of truth around funder communications
Automate reminders for grant approvals, grant reports, compliance, and more for a variety of ABLE and LAWO team members
Generate accurate reports on past, current, and upcoming grant activity
Easily share this data back to executive leadership in a way that is understandable
CHALLENGES
The existing process of approving grant applications was complicated and often not well-followed, resulting in unnecessary complexity
Grant writers maintained multiple email threads with funders and internal teams, making it hard to track communications
Files related to grants were spread out and difficult to find
SOLUTION
Layered customizations onto NPSP’s standard inbound grants processes, including the ability to create sub-deliverables and assign deliverable reminders to various team members
Automations to auto-set grant report deadlines, including complicated date automation based on the federal holiday calendar
Guided screen flow processes to allow team members from across and organization to give their approval or input at the right point in the grants process
Customized reports and dashboards and robust training for the grants management team to continue to dive into analytics on their own
Implementing Inbox so the grants management team can automatically log emails to the correct accounts and opportunities
Having only recently rolled out the new Salesforce-based solution, Ms. Stone is eager to dive in. “Hopefully it’ll reduce the number of emails that go back and forth,” she says. “And I like being able to catalog email . . . I can just pop it over to Salesforce from a funder.” Ms. Stone, who is an Excel wizard in her own right, says she’s also excited about “not having to deal with so many spreadsheets and having to download them from a platform into a spreadsheet and then apply filters and queries.” Instead, she’s now learning to do the vast majority of that filtering and querying within Salesforce, which she says will save her “hours of time every month.”
Ms. Stone has only good things to say about Salesforce, but also enjoyed the process, in which she worked with a Tipping Point team member with decades of on-the-ground fundraising experience. “The project itself has been exciting because getting to work with someone to visualize what we’ve been doing using Excel sheets and columns and just calculators . . . And then being able to speak the language with [the consultants] in a way where we’re not working with a complete novice, I like that.”
The processes built for LAWO and ABLE are complicated and include a multitude of variables – and even some formulas assisted by ChatGPT! – but ultimately, the back-end complexity will lend itself to a smooth experience for Ms. Stone and the front-line teams of these two deserving organizations.