SmartSimple Blog

2020 and 2021 have been extremely challenging for all of us. A global pandemic, the adoption of remote work, and taking the precautions necessary to keep friends and family safe have exhausted many of us.

SmartSimple acknowledges this and has invested heavily in the health and well-being of all employees. Key initiatives include reduced summer hours, a "work doula," monthly mental health all-company huddles, and now – Global Recharge Week – for all SmartSimple staff.

At SmartSimple Software, our day-in-day-out goal is to simplify granting and research processes, from the application stage right through to reviews, approvals, and outcomes reporting. We’re pleased to announce yet another big step toward that goal: SmartSimple Software has officially been recognized as an ORCID Certified Service Provider. Read the full press release.

Scientific researchers and research funders alike are familiar with ORCID’s identification system, which assigns a unique ID to every researcher, and connects this ID to a researcher’s pertinent information and output: publications, citations, grants, employment, and more.

Image provided by Amazon Web Services

SmartSimple Software is excited to announce that we've received the Social Impact Partner of the Year award for Canada from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This inaugural award, announced today at the 2021 AWS Partner Summit, recognizes SmartSimple Software's role as a technology provider in helping to empower funding organizations of all sizes to create greater efficiencies within their operational processes and ultimately enrich their impact within communities.

Imagine two grantmaking organizations, A and B. They each need to buy software to manage their contact relationships, operations, and finances, but they go about it very differently. Grantmaker A buys a technology suite from a single vendor, and uses it for everything. Grantmaker B, on the other hand, buys a specific solution for each function from different vendors, and then integrates them all.

Both approaches can be successfully implemented if done right, but organizations of all sizes are increasingly adopting the “best-of-breed” model in order to maximize their productivity and impact. With best-of-breed, you select the best solutions to solve each of your organization’s functional challenges and integrate them together where needed.

The upside to the best-of-breed approach is clear enough. That is, its intent is to leverage the best technologies to manage each functional need with the idea that if you’re using the best, you get the best results. Of course, in practice that isn’t always the case. There are a million and one cases of organizations that have cobbled together multiple technologies only to end up with a Frankenstein-looking tech stack where technologies can’t fit together well because there’s incongruent flow of data between the various technologies.

Photo by Glenn Carstens

Originally written and published by SmartSimple Software COO & Co-Founder, Michael Reid, in his blog 'Charlie In The Jungle', a journal of his thoughts on what technology is, how it works, and why it matters.

I recently saw a blog post by a competitor criticizing our platform due to the inability to add fields to forms using drag and drop. I'm not going to reciprocate and criticize their platform, as I'm sure it's a fine solution for some organizations (plus, I do believe that it's unprofessional to criticize anyone's work). However, let me explain exactly why our platform does not use drag and drop.