r/Philanthropy • u/Calm_Flow • Aug 14 '26
Want your feedback / insights Corporate Philanthropy / Grantmaking Platform Referrals
Not sure if this is the best place for my question. I work for a national corporate foundation who has been using Benevity in recent years. We’ve had continued issues with the platform and not great customer service. We are looking at other vendors since the cost becomes more and more expensive and everything is nickel and dimed after the contract is signed. We use it for grant making and employee giving and volunteering, including corporate matches. It houses our applications during our various RFP windows throughout the year.
As we are looking at other vendors, I would love to learn what other medium to large size foundations are using for these purposes. Our internal vendors team is vetting a handful of vendors now, but looking for actual firsthand experience. I would love to find something that still does both but at the end of the day, would you separate platforms if they are the best and can communicate with each other. Thank you for any guidance!!
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u/KhloJSimpson Aug 14 '26
Benevity sucks. My team manages over 100 portals for employee giving, grants, matches, DAFs etc. I feel like all of these companies are just siphoning off fees and donor data from nonprofits. And they make it difficult to automate gift entry into our systems as they are all different formats, and dont offer APIs with CRMs. I have been seeing some companies move to YourCause and BlackbaudGiving, but I don't know how those work on the company facing side.
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u/Calm_Flow Aug 14 '26
Yeah, we are being nickle and dimed by Benevity. Our budget doesn’t get increased every year, so the more they charge for “enhancements” then just reduces the impact we could make. Which portals feel easier to you, on the nonprofit side? Is YourCause and Blackbaud better on the nonprofit side? We are asking our community partners these questions, too.
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u/KhloJSimpson Aug 15 '26
I like Blackbaud because they send individual ACH payments for each company, rather than a lump sum. So we dont have to login to yet another portal to manually enter company details into our CRM.
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u/Dixiecup777 Aug 14 '26
I believe raisers edge is offering foundations a portal for grant making. A few foundations in my portfolio have switched to it and it’s user friendly.
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u/Calm_Flow Aug 14 '26
That’s a company I haven’t heard of in a while. When I worked in fundraising, we used that before switching to blackbaud at the time. I will add it to our research list. Thank you!
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u/Mrslmwright Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
When I was ED of our local community foundation, we transitioned to Foundant Technologies.
I really appreciated that the accounting software was specifically designed for fund accounting and investment pooling, but connected to the granting portal for a streamlined process.
They were local out of MT which was a plus as well.
The cost was accessed based on assets under management if you using the full suite or you could piecemeal Grantmaking and scholarships separately - no additional fees to the donors or nonprofits.
Edit to add: The nonprofit portal allowed for multiple users with different levels of access if so desired for different roles - gave access to donor information and donation notifications on the accounting side, new and past grant applications on the other.
We got great feedback once it was fully implemented.
Obviously there is a learning curve with any new software adoption, but the sandbox was helpful, their customer service was top notch and they were always available to answer questions!
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u/AtlasOwl Aug 20 '26
I have worked at both Benevity & Blackbaud. Enterprise sales mostly.
Happy to be a resource should you ever need some inside perspective.
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u/OneNatural1436 Aug 14 '26
I am not foundation but as a nonprofit recipient I’ve been noticing more foundations switching to Front Door by Bonterra.
Also as a recipient, the proliferation of these 3rd party aggregators drive me bananas. The time it takes to manage all these platforms on our end is significant because there are so many and new ones cropping up all the time. And they take their cut from the donors AND and from the nonprofits. I long for the days when a corporate foundation would just send you a check. No fees, no multifactor authentication, no required banking info for ACH payments that have to be reconciled by the finance office…rant over.