Nonprofit Cloud & Grantmaking for Improving Marine Conservation Operations

Blue Ventures is an international marine conservation organization that partners with coastal fishers and community organizations in remote and rural communities. They are dedicated to restoring the world’s oceans and improving the livelihoods of fishing communities by designing, scaling, strengthening and sustaining fisheries management and conservation at the community level.

When Blue Ventures came to Passion Fruit Partners, their global, multi-currency, and highly impactful grants program did not have a turnkey CRM solution, and relied heavily on the staff team to manually manage grants with spreadsheets. They wanted a solution that would tie their operations together in a central system where the team could access and link all relevant information together. As an international organization managing grants both in and out, they needed to be able to work in multiple languages and currencies.

In order to help them achieve their goals, Passion Fruit Partners implemented Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud with the Grantmaking module. Nonprofit Cloud provided the foundation for CRM functionality, enabling Blue Ventures to track information about accounts and contacts in their network. Within Nonprofit Cloud, we configured accounts, gift commitments, transactions, designations, funding awards, and disbursements to tailor the platform to meet their specific needs and workflows.

Blue Ventures has large, complex, and diverse staff teams related to incoming funds, outgoing grants, and programs. Before engaging with Passion Fruit Partners, the process to report on the full grant and program cycle was heavily dependent on finance and did not provide agile response times for big-picture budget allocations and planning. In the legacy system, teams were dependent on their own processes without a centralized standard, which required significantly more time from leadership to properly report to key stakeholders and support field personnel.

Nonprofit Cloud’s Grantmaking module served as the base for tracking incoming and outgoing grants. This module empowers the team to create incoming grants, track progress and communications, and tie them to outgoing grants within an overarching cost center or program. This allows management at Blue Ventures to be able to report up to the minute allocations and make quick and informed decisions about which regions need resources and which strategic initiative will be most meaningful for the future.

For Blue Ventures, we didn’t want to merely make their work possible in Salesforce—we also wanted to cut down on manual work and make more time for them to focus on their mission.

• We used screen flows to streamline common processes, such as account creation—allowing for differentiation between donor and partner accounts—to enable easier input as well as accurate categorization and management. 
• We created a screen flow that allowed fundraisers to schedule the entirety of a master grant cycle, giving management a bird’s eye view of potential revenue by region and program, and improving allocation accuracy and response time for key decisions.
• To improve the experience of reporting, we implemented custom rollup fields to aggregate data. This made it simpler to provide valuable insights into fund distribution, making decision making easier. 
• We also leveraged flows to implement several automations for repetitive processes like scheduling gift receipts, transactions and designations—increasing efficiency and reducing manual workload. 
• And of course, to help them carry out their work globally, we implemented translations and multi-currency to make the platform accessible to stakeholders worldwide.

For nonprofit organizations like Blue Ventures, disjointed systems and manual processes can take up valuable time and energy—resources that are much better used when focused on delivering impact to the communities they serve. By implementing Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud with Grantmaking, we were able to help them streamline processes while ensuring transparency, efficiency, and accountability throughout the grant cycle. We are proud to play our part in helping Blue Ventures focus on achieving their vision of a world where traditional fishers have better livelihoods, and where healthy oceans teem with life for generations to come.

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Interested in exploring how we can help your nonprofit spend less time on manual work, and more time on your mission? Reach out to learn more about how we can help you with Salesforce!