Since 1992, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has worked to overcome the stigma, discrimination and neglect that keeps us from ending AIDS. Through public and private supporters and partners, the Elton John AIDS Foundation helps to create a world of love, compassion and dignity for people living with or at risk of HIV/AIDS. The Foundation’s mission is simple: an end to the AIDS epidemic.
The Start of Our Journey Together
In 2011, the Elton John AIDS Foundation sought Vera Solutions’ help to simplify and automate grant management processes using Salesforce. At the time, the Foundation’s staff spent countless hours operating a tedious, manual process for receiving and reviewing grant applications and communicating with applicants and grantees. The Foundation had also struggled to effectively monitor the progress of grants against targets for KPIs, report this information to external stakeholders and partners, and use it to inform funding decisions. The Elton John AIDS Foundation needed a central, cloud-based system to manage grantee applications, concept notes, and reporting across the entire grant lifecycle.
Co-Creating an Early Salesforce-Powered Grant Management System
After spending several months ideating and collaborating on the Foundation’s new system, its capabilities, and user requirements, Vera Solutions began configuring and implementing the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s CRM and grant management solution built on Salesforce. The solution was designed to effectively track and manage grantees, concept notes, grant applications, grant reports, and payment tranches – eliminating tedious manual processes.
Applicants used Formstack webforms to apply for grants, with application and concept note data instantly received by the Foundation’s staff in Salesforce. Once a grant application was accepted, grantees utilized additional forms to report on progress to the Foundation, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The Elton John AIDS Foundation leveraged Salesforce reports and dashboards to analyze performance at both grant and portfolio levels, allowing staff to easily monitor and report on global funding outcomes across geographies and thematic areas.
The 2011 solution automated a number of the Foundation’s processes which were previously carried out manually over email, saving hundreds of hours and providing easier and more powerful visibility into grant performance. Between 2011 and 2020, the Foundation used the system to process and review more than 4,500 concept notes from 44 countries, tracked more than $160 million of all-time grants supporting over 720 organizations, and monitored performance on 600 key performance indicators.
“At the early days of the foundation, our database really consisted of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, which grantees would fill out and email back to us. As we developed our strategy, we wanted to turn that into a system. Thankfully, we teamed up with Vera Solutions back in 2011. We worked with Vera to develop a platform within Salesforce.”
– Thomas Brigden, Elton John AIDS Foundation
The Next Phase: End-to-End Grant Management With Amp Impact
After using their Salesforce system for nearly a decade, the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s grant management needs evolved, requiring additional application management and grantee reporting functionality. While grantees were able to submit their ongoing impact reports via Formstack, they lacked insight into previous reports and collaboration with the Foundation on the data submitted — creating the opportunity to bring their processes and system into the new decade, including enabling grantees to view past reports and collaborate with the Foundation in a portal, more sophisticated impact intelligence on KPI progress, and different application and reporting templates for different funding opportunities.
In 2020, Vera Solutions redesigned the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s existing Salesforce system with Amp Impact, Vera Solutions’ Salesforce-based portfolio management and impact measurement solution. The shift to Amp Impact helped the Foundation establish a Grantee Portal, built with Salesforce Experience Cloud, that allows Applicants to submit Grant Applications and Grantees to submit Grant Reports and manage their grants throughout the entire grant lifecycle. KPIs are tracked using Amp Impact’s Indicator Management functionality, allowing the Foundation to manage a catalog of commonly used indicators or create custom indicators for grantees — who previously could only provide up to 5 indicators with limited detail. With Amp Impact, grantees can now collaborate with the Foundation to set up a detailed set of indicators, reporting at a frequency that makes sense for them and disaggregated in ways that work for both parties.
“We’re tracking more qualitative data and milestone-related targets so we really wanted to take this to the next level and that’s where Amp Impact really came in. We worked with Vera and it really has opened up our grantmaking. It’s given us so much more flexibility and freedom in terms of what’s possible.”
– Thomas Brigden, Elton John AIDS Foundation
“One of the key factors of this new solution is the Grantee Portal and it’s been a great tool for us in terms of strengthening a collaborative effort with our grantees and its ease of use for our users. It’s an easy place for our grantees to feel connected to the grants and for us to feel connected to the grantees as well, providing a partnership and closer collaboration on admin and management of the grants.”
– Joe Fletcher, Elton John AIDS Foundation
Simplified Grantee Reporting and Portfolio-Wide Impact
The Elton John AIDS Foundation defines the KPIs and allows Applicants to add custom indicators during the application stage, with Applicants submitting proposed targets for the grant. Once Grant Applications are submitted, the Submission is locked in the system unless the Foundation reopens it for revision. The Foundation then accepts or rejects the Application, and once grants are approved and underway, grantees report back regularly with narrative templates, budget items, KPI results, and attached files — with the ability to work offline before submitting their reports.
Previously, the Foundation depended on Salesforce Reports and Dashboards as well as Google Charts to analyze grant performance, but limited charting capabilities and the need for more dynamic, filterable reports led the Foundation to explore other business intelligence solutions. The Elton John AIDS Foundation now uses Power BI reports and dashboards to analyze performance at both grant and portfolio-wide levels, empowering staff to easily monitor global funding and outcomes, disaggregated geographically and thematically.
“We have integrated our solution with Power BI and this has been great for us. Going forward, we will be able to track our progress and analyze our data across the organization — from our fundraising department through to our grants department and finance department — as they all interlink into Power BI. It allows us to have one centralized area for all our analysis across the organization and gives us instant updates across every department, so it’s more transparent and we can customize our reporting across everything.”
– Joe Fletcher, Elton John AIDS Foundation