About BCBSLA
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is a tax-paying nonprofit health insurer, dedicated to improving the health and lives of Louisianians. As an independent Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association licensee, BCBSLA is recognized for its community-minded initiatives and has received honors for its commitment.
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We have successfully reduced review time from two weeks to two days on applications after implementing SmartSimple.
Kellie Duhon
Corporate Giving Program Manager
Challenges faced before choosing SmartSimple
Before implementing our solution, BCBSLA encountered a set of pivotal pain points and obstacles. The foremost challenge revolved around their inability to seamlessly benchmark across various dimensions of giving and effectively assign a monetary value to their contributions, encompassing staff time, talent, grants, and other vital areas. The task of communicating these diverse aspects as a unified monetary value posed a significant challenge for BCBSLA.
The organization felt the need to develop a more user-friendly CRM and streamlined applications catering to grantees, reviewers, employees, and program administrators. Seeking a solution to enhance their customization capabilities for benchmarks, outcomes, impact metrics, and data presentation, BCBSLA aimed to effectively showcase the magnitude of their contributions in terms of time, talent, and resources. Alongside these needs, BCBSLA also sought a partner that offered highly responsive customer service support and could seamlessly facilitate a data migration process with robust security measures in place.
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Fortunately, we have found a solution that has addressed these challenges. SmartSimple has not only fixed the issue of our outdated software but also provided us with exceptional customer service. Previously, we spent hours waiting to speak with someone who could assist us with the simplest problems. However, with SmartSimple, we now have access to highly responsive customer service support, ensuring that our needs are promptly addressed and resolved.
Joe Smith
Director BCBSLA
System requirements for BCBSLA
These must-have requirements were vital for BCBSLA to manage grants effectively, enhance data accessibility, and streamline their corporate social responsibility efforts. SmartSimple Cloud was chosen for its ability to meet these requirements and provide the necessary functionality and flexibility:
- Grantee Portal: A comprehensive portal for grantees to manage applications, reports, contracts, and more, with document sharing and electronic signature capabilities.
- Multiple Applications: Ability to create and manage various types of applications with different deadlines, cycles, matching funds, and customizable coding.
- Elimination of Paper-Based Processes: Transitioning from paper to digital processes for increased efficiency.
- Grantee Reports/Benchmark Module: A module for easy submission of reports and benchmarks, tracking outcomes and impact.
- Reviewer Portal: Intuitive portal for efficient scoring and evaluation of grant applications.
- Ad Hoc Reports and Dashboard: Generating customized reports and a customizable dashboard to track volunteer hours, donations, and pro bono work.
Why SmartSimple Cloud was selected
BCBSLA selected SmartSimple Cloud as it met their requirements for a more cost-effective, customizable, and centralized system. They needed a platform that allowed staff to make changes without relying solely on the vendor, with access provided to reviewers, applicants, and staff. SmartSimple Cloud’s features aligned with BCBSLA’s needs, including a grantee portal for application and document management, customizable application processes, elimination of paper-based processes, ad hoc reporting capabilities, and integrations with various platforms and services. The system’s user-friendly reviewer portal, a dashboard for monitoring giving metrics, and comprehensive technical support were also key factors in the selection.
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SmartSimple has been great. Our new system is still not perfect – no system is. I think when we first embarked on creating a new CRM, we naively believed that this new system would be perfect. I quickly realized that for all its benefits our new system still had limitations. We would definitely recommend SmartSimple to others.
Joe Smith
Director BCBSLA
Merz North America
The Egmont Foundation
