It's a great software to track your grant projects and payments.

Great grant project tracking tool!!

Pros

Workflow - It's a customizable software that we can change the system to our workflow. And, it's integrating with accounting software, Financial Edge.

Cons

It's not 100% customizable. So, you have to deal with prefixed formats of them. Now it has online version.

Better than what we had, but still doesn't deliver on all of the promise.

Pros

I like the ability to customize views and dashboards for specific users.

Cons

I'm still frustrated at the lack of integration between Blackbaud's suite of products. Part of the reason we stuck with Blackbaud when transitioning from Gifts Classic is because we were moving to FENXT for our financial software. We were promised that these programs would integrate in some way, and that hasn't happened.

It's great workflow tool for the company

Great workflow tools

Pros

It's easy to customize to the company workflow and environment. Add-on functions and report writers are good function for grants management.

Cons

It has many technical issue with implementing add-ons and customization. It can't be done without IT specialists.

GIFTS is great for good audit trail-grants processes. Although it needs major updates.

GIFTS does what it is meant to do. It helps you manage your grant making process from first contact to closure. However, it falls short in the user friendliness area and cannot keep up with other more innovative competitors.

Pros

This is a secure grant making specialised tool that is bound to give you everything needed to manage grant applications from application stage to reporting and closing. It offers great and clear ways of managing grants at different stages and far surpasses what an excel spreadsheet could do in this regards. The GIFTS plugin for outlook works great and you can rely on it to make sure all emails and documents relating to your grants process are safely stored and can be retrieved at any point.

Cons

Not very user friendly. Might have been good some years ago but now with competitors like Salesforce, GIFTS really need to catch up fast before it loses customers. We had to switch away from GIFTS as it became a burden for us to control and was full of unnecessary tools. I addition, we did not find the price agreeable for the amount of work we did with the program. The manual is a hefty 400 pages book which you cannot be bothered to read for troubleshoot. GIFTS really needs to upgrade to a newer style of troubleshooting with in-built free text searches for issues.

Small Foundation User

We are a small foundation, with a small staff, and the complexities of Blackbaud grantmaking end up being very time consuming for an already over extended employee. However, we have had a great experience with customer service and with our sales rep and consultant.

Pros

I like the dashboard features and the ease of switching back and forth on the dashboard to view different features as they pertain to our grants.

Cons

With the reviewer portal, you cannot pick multiple grant requests to send to PDFs - you have to send them one at a time. For our board members, who log into the reviewer portal, it is time consuming for them to manage. Also, when you print the PDF of the grant request, it prints out the HTML version of the grant request, causing the PDF to feature a repeat copy of the grant request in the HTML format. This is confusing for people who use the portal, but do not use Blackbaud grantmaking regularly.

Great way to organize grant information.

Helps to keep track of grant information in a database that is easy to search. Overwhelming amount of functions.

Pros

Similar to blackbaud’s other software, this database has everything I need to keep track of grants, constituents and financial transactions.

Cons

The interface is not the most up to date in its appeal and look. Also there are an overwhelming amount of functions and data that you can access that learning takes a good bit of time.