SmartSimple Blog

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become a widely adopted blueprint for organisations to map and track their progress in addressing global challenges like poverty, clean energy, and climate change.

For many however, effectively tracking and measuring their overall impact remains elusive, especially when many have different philanthropic program types (i.e. employee volunteering, donations, fundraising, etc.). How for instance, do you track overall impact if your volunteer programs use volunteer hours as a base metric, while your donation program uses Euros raised to track progress?

Building from our last upgrade in March, we focused a lot of our energy on bolstering password security configurations and elevating the ease of use for both administrators and users through portal editing enhancements, UI design, and applicant experience features. 

All of these upgrades were built to help you gain more control of the look and feel of your system and help you achieve your goals quicker. A full upgrade summary of all features and enhancements can be found on our Wiki, or by attending our Upgrade Webinars.

Staff collaboration within MS Teams or Slack. Video calls for board meetings. Grant distribution via ACH and Bill.com. This is the “new normal” for philanthropy, and it’s happened in the span of weeks instead of years. Yet, with such a rapid change, how are grantmakers adjusting to a reality where technology is at the center?

In the course of just a few months, our communities across the globe have been fundamentally changed. Every aspect of how we go about our lives has been affected in some way – from healthcare and retail to food service and essential services. As a result, each sector has had to rapidly adjust to an unprecedented, and invisible, threat to normalcy and our previous status quo. Philanthropy is certainly no exception. 

Board meetings are a core part of governance within foundations and the grantmaking process, where the information discussed drives decision making to act on. Despite board meetings being such a critical piece of the grantmaking cycle, they can often cause considerable challenges for teams – from preparation and scheduling to hosting and following up.

Whether you are coordinating reports, creating a board book with up-to-date details, or sending out invitations and navigating availability conflicts – board meetings are no small task. Until now.