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Dive into Microsoft’s Cloud for Nonprofit & Klevr Grants Management App
11/04/2024 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Thank you to everyone who attended this webinar. For those who missed this event, here is the video recording.
Webinar video recording:
Webinar Transcript:
Farid Jalal:
A quick view of the agenda for today. We’ll kick things off with introductions and a brief overview to the Microsoft Cloud for nonprofit. We’ll then jump into a deep dive demo of the end to end Microsoft Cloud and clever ground solution. And then, as I said, we’ve left 10 minutes at the end to talk through any open questions that you might have.
Farid Jalal:
I suppose I’d like to start off with a brief overview about ourselves.
Farid Jalal:
I’m from Walker. Scott, where the business applications arm of a collective called the Cloud Collective, where a strategic alliance of four leading Microsoft partners delivering solutions across 3 Microsoft Clouds. That’s Azure, Microsoft 365, as well as dynamics. So we provide the in depth expertise of a boutique agency, but with the broad knowledge and muscle of a GSI. And have a presence across both Australia as well as New Zealand.
Farid Jalal:
Why this is important to raise? As a collective, we have a deep desire to partner with organisations such as the ones you see on the slide with a long term perspective. We help realise value quickly on that digital transformation programme through industry focused IP and the offerings that each of the partners within the cloud collective bring with us once a solution that we’ll go into in depth today is clever grants and portals. Developed by Walker Scott on the Microsoft Cloud platform.
Farid Jalal:
This one’s used not just by a, not-for-profit clients, but many government agencies that could, that run grants programmes distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in the healthcare community development, independent film sectors and more.
Farid Jalal:
So on that note, I’d like to introduce your presenters for the day. I’m joined by my colleague Luke Franklin, who’s the practise lead for Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s business applications platform, kicking things off, though today is Karan Singh, from Microsoft. Karan is a technical specialist in the tech for social impact team and brings deep insights into Microsoft’s investments into the not-for-profit sector.
Farid Jalal:
You know, once Karan has provided his overview and provided those insights on the new functionality that’s available today for you to leverage, Luke will drive the bulk of today’s session with the deep dive.
Farid Jalal:
Over to you, Karan.
Karan Singh:
Hey, thank you so much for joining today. As Farid mentioned, I’m a technical specialist at Microsoft and I cover business applications and I’m looking forward to showing you a bit more into the new features coming with fundraising and engagement.
Karan Singh:
As a slide shows you at Microsoft, we we want to empower your organisation to achieve more, to be able to do more with what you have and we want you to have the best experience as well with the products and and with your constituents. So.
Karan Singh:
That’s that’s the main message there.
Karan Singh:
We also have made significant investments in the not-for-profit sector as well. So for example, we do discounted software and services and last year it totaled up to around 3.8 billion, which is a great number. And also we have a giving culture within the organisation as well. So for example people within the organisation donated around $250 million which is which is really good and also we’ve reached out to around 325K not for profits using our.
Karan Singh:
Services as well in technology so.
Karan Singh:
We want to make sure that we democratise technology for all non profits around the world, to use it, and especially AI as well.
Karan Singh:
We’ve seen a lot of different challenges across the sector. So, for example, staffing, donor retention, even being able to create personalised communication as well.
Karan Singh:
Online giving increased time efficiency as well.
Karan Singh:
We’ve seen a lot of different things around here and we want to make sure that we give you the tools and the capability to address some of these concerns and challenges across the industry. I know, for example, staffing is already being addressed through different AI techniques.
Karan Singh:
That’s coming through the products. So we’re really we’re really seeing impact with a lot of organisations being able to leverage AI for their staff to be able to do more and get through more productivity throughout the day. So it helps them focus on more stuff they want to focus on like create more impact through their work.
Karan Singh:
The nonprofit vision this is to show you a bit of a picture of how we want to give you a centralised platform for your nonprofit so you know, moving from fundraising to also moving to the back end operations as well in finance and operations, and also leveraging whatever you, the the data you get in fundraising to be able to perform marketing operations as well, which is something that is.
Karan Singh:
Natively built into the product.
Karan Singh:
Very quickly I just wanted to highlight a few cool AI features coming to the well. They’re already RGA actually, so you’re able to use them within fundraising engagement. One is the fundraising performance dashboard. So this is actually a power BI dashboard that you can use as a template to get some analytics around your fundraising performance and then you can also connect your fundraising and engagement data model to this power BI report. So you can use that and get some really cool insights into your data.
Karan Singh:
Next up, we have the likelihood to donate. This is a really cool feature that’s come.
Karan Singh:
Gaia, I think last year, December.
Karan Singh:
So yeah, so basically what it does is you can go ahead and.
Karan Singh:
Hi we’ve got a VA here that friends jumped too. So basically I’m gonna show you a little bit of the look and feel of how it looks with in the application. So for example, you now have a giving model view within the app. You can go into that giving model view and see a category for each contact. So this is going to load up here and show you.
Karan Singh:
And so you can actually go ahead and see, you know, what’s that category of the likelihood to donate. So for example, Aaron Gonzalez is most likely to donate. So you can go ahead and click into his contact view. You can see the reasons why they’re most likely to donate on the right hand side. So, for example, you can see they’re they’re likely to donate because they’ve got higher donation frequency, their communication preferences, and also the events they’ve attended with the organisation.
Karan Singh:
It’s also going to show you how someone, for example, is not likely to donate.
Karan Singh:
Uh, which is Abigail. So she is not likely to donate because she has a few different things around. Address, age and donation residency. And so this model, this custom model has been built for. This is using different demographic information. It uses information around events, attended communication preferences and stuff like that. So I can show you I’ve got a document of showing you different fields it looks at and gets that data from to be able to build that category for you.
Karan Singh:
The other cool thing is that with this it helps give you that next level of reporting so you can go ahead and then build reports on who is likely to donate and who’s not, which gives you the next level of of building rich segmentation which is going to jump into really quickly. So you can go ahead and build different reporting with with that data.
Karan Singh:
I think you know you can separate the data to be. You know you can only show contacts that.
Karan Singh:
Show every contact that’s not likely to donate or everyone that is.
Karan Singh:
Likely to donate so here I think is just gonna.
Karan Singh:
Show you the primary designation and then it’s gonna go ahead and and filter out all the people that’s not likely to today.
Karan Singh:
Yeah. And then the cool thing is, once this is once you’ve actually built this this row, you can actually go ahead and create a segmentation within customer insights, which then acts as a live segment audience for you within customer insights. So then you can go ahead and perform.
Karan Singh:
Donation campaigns against this category of people. So go ahead and and build that run to customer insights and the cool thing is this segmentation will be live.
Karan Singh:
For anyone that any new contacts that get added to the database and you run that model on them, it’s gonna automatically add them to this segmentation as well. So you you get that data right there in real time.
Karan Singh:
So then yeah, if you can go ahead and perform real time marketing on those those contacts.
Karan Singh:
This is just also showing you how within because you need sales enterprise to get fundraising engagement with sales enterprise. You actually get some, some standard copilot capability there as well in Outlook teams and also the application. The sales application itself. So you do get some copilot add-ons as well with the licencing which is really cool and you can leverage that right away.
Karan Singh:
OK.
Farid Jalal:
Thanks, Karan. I think that’s really compelling. A lot of our customers.
Karan Singh:
Yeah.
Karan Singh:
Definitely.
Farid Jalal:
Actually now have started leveraging sales copilot as well, because it’s made available with their dynamics licencing and certainly helps Dr adoption. You know within the within the dynamics applications itself. Thanks a lot Karan. Is there anything else that you would like to add before we hand over to Luke?
Karan Singh:
No, I’m just happy to see everybody on the call. And yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing as well.
Karan Singh:
The demonstration that Luke’s going to do, thanks for also having me on as well. Walker Scott.
Farid Jalal:
I’d love to have you join us, mate. Look over to you.
Luke Franklin:
Thank you Tish and Karen.
Luke Franklin:
Great.
Luke Franklin:
And I think until the presentation from Fareed in in just a second and start to give you a bit of a demo of some components that make up our fundraising engagement through to clever grant scenario.
Luke Franklin:
A lot on this slide. Again, this is the slide that Karen presented at the start.
Luke Franklin:
Just drop back one free, sorry.
Luke Franklin:
This is the this is the slide Karen presented at the start. I really I really like this slide because it shows that the breadth of the nonprofit vision and it shows.
Luke Franklin:
We can pull into a single into a single place to provide an end to end scenario, not just through fundraising, but into how we market those campaigns. The finance activity that supports the fundraising initiatives and how we deliver.
Luke Franklin:
The campaign programmes as well. So we’re talking things like volunteer management and produce operations.
Luke Franklin:
Our webinar today is going to focus on that top left corner and raising.
Luke Franklin:
Component we’re going to we’re going to look at a few key parts of that solution and then how your fundraising activity can flow into our clever grants and clever portal solution.
Luke Franklin:
If you want to move on formally freed, this slide gives you a bit of an overview of our grants application.
Luke Franklin:
We support two different.
Luke Franklin:
Two different sides to that are contestable from process. We have a grant seeking side, so this is all about you guys.
Luke Franklin:
And organisations going out to identify funding opportunities to bring in revenue.
Luke Franklin:
We have functionality in here to help you put together a bid and secure the funding.
Luke Franklin:
And to manage your funding agreements that you have with organisations and then to meet any recording requirements that you might have and on the right hand side, we have our grants making process so.
Luke Franklin:
This is how you then distribute the funding that you’re receiving, either via fundraising, engagement and donations and pledges, or via funding that you’ve received through the grant seeking site. So it gives you the ability to announce funds to create application rounds, to receive and assess applications.
Luke Franklin:
Award contracts or funding agreements and also manage and monitor reporting outcomes that you require from applicants that you’re providing funding to.
Luke Franklin:
At the top of this and sitting over the top of your your entire dynamics ecosystem can be a self-service portal, which we’ll look at today as well. And at the bottom is the ability to integrate any of these solutions into a financial application such as business central and finance and operations.
Luke Franklin:
And the last slide I’ll show is just some of the personas that we’re going to be talking about as we go through this session. So we have our fundraiser.
Luke Franklin:
Who facilitates constituent management and executes on fundraising? We have our grants manager.
Luke Franklin:
We have our programme leader and finally we have our applicant and or our grant awardee who we’ve awarded the funding to, so these are some of the personas that we’ll touch on as we go as we go through the demo today.
Luke Franklin:
I’m going to steal the screen from you, Farid.
Luke Franklin:
And I just give that a second to share.
Luke Franklin:
As I’m going to start in fundraising engagement. So that’s the that’s the application you can see on screen at the moment when I open my fundraising engagement application, I land on a on a dashboard. This gives me an overview of what’s happening within the application. I’ve got some nice metrics on here. I can see active transactions.
Luke Franklin:
I can see revenue by campaign goals.
Luke Franklin:
I can see some information about gifts received and the different methods that we received, the gifting.
Luke Franklin:
And I can see things based on total gift received by years and different reoccurring payment schedule information. So dashboards within dynamics give you a nice snapshot.
Luke Franklin:
The fundraising engagement application has a whole bunch of different areas.
Luke Franklin:
We have the ability to develop and set up campaigns, appeals packages. We have the ability to manage gifts, so donations, pledges.
Luke Franklin:
Donation schedules we can create and manage events within fundraising and engagement.
Luke Franklin:
As well as the cost associated to those events and the revenue that we’ve received in from running the events and we’ve got some reporting and configuration areas.
Luke Franklin:
For this session today, we’re just going to look at the fundraising area and we’re going to drop straight down into our campaigns.
Luke Franklin:
And we’re going to have a look at a scholarship campaign that we’ve created.
Luke Franklin:
And we can see on our scholarship campaign that we can start to categorise a campaign. We can give the campaign the type and we can give a primary designation, which is basically a way to say how we’re going to, how we’re going to apply the money that we’ve received and how we’re going to how we’re going to use the money.
Luke Franklin:
And we’ve given ourselves a campaign target and I can start to track some values as we receive donations into this campaign. So I can see a total received revenue today.
Luke Franklin:
If I jump to my performance tab, I can then start to see some more detailed information.
Luke Franklin:
How much have we received into their campaign via registrations? How many registrations have we sold?
Luke Franklin:
How much have we received via sponsorships via product sales?
Luke Franklin:
My total donations we’ve received in so this gives me a nice snapshot of how the campaign is performing.
Luke Franklin:
I can see a donor breakdown so I can see the donor, the amount that they donated.
Luke Franklin:
And then if I can actually go and see a complete breakdown of transactions, if I wanted to associate to this campaign, So what did we receive through donations versus what did we receive through ticket sales? If there’s an event or through sponsorships?
Luke Franklin:
So this is a primary way to.
Luke Franklin:
Create a container.
Luke Franklin:
To receive revenue in through fundraising activities now what we’re going to do is we’re going to switch applications to our clever grants application, and we’re going to see how we can then use that money received in to create a fund and distribute money back out again. So I’m going to switch my application from fundraising engagement to our clever grants application.
Luke Franklin:
What’s important to note here is that all of these applications are what live within my dynamics ecosystem.
Luke Franklin:
And all of these applications share the same data source. So even though I’m going to switch from fundraising and engagement to clever grants, all the data that lives within fundraising engagement is available for me across these applications and across the breadth of your dynamics ecosystem. So there’s no sinking of data or integration of data between applications. They all, they all share the same data source.
Luke Franklin:
The little team think he’s blocking. What’s up, Sir.
Luke Franklin:
So this is our clever grants application. This is built by Walker Scott, but it’s built within the dynamics and the and the power platform, which is why it looks and feels exactly like all the dynamics applications we have. A common user interface.
Luke Franklin:
We’re going to drop down in our grants application to our funds area.
Luke Franklin:
And I’ve created a 2023 graduate scholarships fund.
Luke Franklin:
And if we look at this fund, we can see that.
Luke Franklin:
We are making available about $127,000 to support graduate scholarships and we have a start and an end date or a term that the fund is going to run for.
Luke Franklin:
If I jump across to my fund sources tab.
Luke Franklin:
We can see how we’ve made this funding money available so.
Luke Franklin:
I’ve taken 33 just over $33,000 from my scholarships campaign from fundraising and engagement and applied it to this fund. I’ve also taken another 80 odd $1,000 from a general annual campaign.
Luke Franklin:
And I had $10,000 left over from 2022’s Graduate Scholarships Fund, which I’ve I’ve carried over into this fund so we can see that we can pull.
Luke Franklin:
Money from numerous different sources and apply it to a fund to create a single pot of money that we can then distribute out as people apply.
Luke Franklin:
So, this is how we create a fund within our grants application.
Luke Franklin:
I’m not just going to change tab and have a look at the third component of this solution, which is our clever portal.
Luke Franklin:
So, our portal is a web-based interface that allows external stakeholders or external applicants or customers to interact with your dynamics environment.
Luke Franklin:
The portal products that we’ve built is solution agnostic and the one that you’re seeing at the moment is configured for clever grants, but the portal can be used across any dynamics application, and we can use the same portal to connect to different applications as well. And we can define security roles and and user permissions to dictate what they can and can’t see, so I’m logged into the portal at the moment as an applicant, which means that I see things like apply for funding and my.
Luke Franklin:
Applications and any contracts and milestones that have been awarded.
Luke Franklin:
If I go to apply for funding.
Luke Franklin:
We can see my 2023 Graduate Scholarship fund that we created inside. Clever grants are now published and available for applicants to apply to.
Luke Franklin:
We can open this fund and we can see some information about it. This is displaying information and data directly from dynamics.
Luke Franklin:
And then I can Scroll down to the fund and see my applications that I’ve made to this fund.
Luke Franklin:
And if I open an application.
Luke Franklin:
We get a process flow across the top so I can see that there there for this particular scenario, the stages are to create a draught application, submit that application and then be indicated whether the application has been accepted or not.
Luke Franklin:
I can see some information about the application I submitted.
Luke Franklin:
I can see some decision information here as well.
Luke Franklin:
As I’m applying, I get the ability to add collaborators, so if I’m the named applicant, but I’d like to invite others to help me complete my application form, I can invite collaborators and give them access to the portal and to my application.
Luke Franklin:
And then I have the application form itself that I would have filled out as as part of the submission and on the left-hand side we can break the application form into different sections.
Luke Franklin:
We have a whole bunch of different question types that we can use, whether it’s file upload fields, yes, no drop-down lists, date, time fields, text areas. We have a whole whole bunch of different data types that we can use to build dynamic forms which we can then display in the portal to capture information from external users.
Luke Franklin:
If I nudge out and jump back to my fund inside clever grants, I can go to my applications tab.
Luke Franklin:
And I can see the application here that we’ve just submitted.
Luke Franklin:
And before we open this application, I just wanted to jump to. I’m just going to have to put that down quickly.
Luke Franklin:
I’m just going to jump to another product which I have within my within my product catalogue that you guys will get with clever grants in the portal which is the portal back office tool.
Luke Franklin:
This is where you guys can build your own application forms.
Luke Franklin:
And publish these application forms to the portal.
Luke Franklin:
If I open my again, my graduate scholarships form.
Luke Franklin:
And I go to my form editor.
Luke Franklin:
I just tried that to make it was a bit more room.
Luke Franklin:
We can see that I have a a, a designer interface in here to build forms myself within dynamics.
Luke Franklin:
So, I have a whole bunch of different question types so I can select on the left hand side.
Luke Franklin:
And literally all I need to do is choose a question type and then drag it to where I want to put it on the form.
Luke Franklin:
I can give it a title. I can choose whether to make it required and then I can define a whole bunch of information about it. So, is it visible or is it not? Is it read only?
Luke Franklin:
What are the conditions? What is the validation information? This is a text field, so do I want my text field to be a number field, a phone number field, an email field, a date and time field so I can put some validation on the field itself?
Luke Franklin:
So, I get lots of flexibility.
Luke Franklin:
As a as a user of dynamics to be able to build my own forms and publish these forms myself without relying on a on a on a partner or a developer to do this for me.
Luke Franklin:
So, lots of flexibility with this. Again, what you’re seeing here is, is the portal product used for clever grants. But our portal and our form builder can be used for multiple different scenarios across dynamics applications.
Luke Franklin:
I just jumped back to our fund and I’m on my applications tab. I’m just gonna open the application that we looked at in the portal.
Luke Franklin:
You can see across the top that we’ve got a business process flow to support the application lifecycle.
Luke Franklin:
We received the application in we assess the application, we make a decision. We make an offer and then we’re now in our contracting phase of this application.
Luke Franklin:
So, within dynamics, I can see who the applicant was.
Luke Franklin:
The application round and the fund that they applied to the project that they applied for.
Luke Franklin:
I can start to categorise my applications. We have a submission dates, the amount they requested and the amount that was that was actually awarded, plus some decisions around.
Luke Franklin:
Our internal decision status and the applicant’s decision status.
Luke Franklin:
In order to get to these decisions, we’ve gone through our assessment phase. So again, I can jump across to my assessments tab.
Luke Franklin:
And I can see and hear that this application has actually gone through three different levels of assessment. We did an initial internal assessment, then we went out to an external assessor, and we got their feedback and then we did a final board review and it was approved all the way through. And we can see the amounts that it was approved for.
Luke Franklin:
In lots of cases where we have external assessors, we again use our clever portal.
Luke Franklin:
And we have an assessor security role within the portal that allows assessors to login, view the content of the application form.
Luke Franklin:
And fill out their own assessment response form and all that data again comes back into into clever grants for us to view in one place.
Luke Franklin:
So, this is how we form our assessments area. Another key part of this which is really important down here is our conflicts of interest.
Luke Franklin:
So, as we creating assessment records.
Luke Franklin:
And an assessment record is where we have an assessor joined with the application itself.
Luke Franklin:
We are capturing a conflict of interest response from that assessor and we do that each time an assessment record is created and in order to do that we display a small amount of information to the assessor in order for them to know enough about the application to be able to indicate a response and if I just go on to related and go to my conflicts of interest area, there’ll be a full audit history of conflicts of interest responses here that we can review and make decisions against.
Luke Franklin:
I just dropped back to my application, so these are my assessments. This is how we ended up with our internal decisions.
Luke Franklin:
And then the next stage, which is what we’re in over here, is our contracts phase. So, we can see we have a draught contract created for this application. So, this is the resulting funding agreement. If I open this record, it’ll take me down to our contracts area.
Luke Franklin:
This is our contract summary. So again, we see the accounts and the contact is for the applicant.
Luke Franklin:
We have the concepts in grants of having.
Luke Franklin:
A contact and a beneficiary.
Luke Franklin:
In some scenarios, in a in a contestable fund process, the money is being paid to an organisation or an individual.
Luke Franklin:
On behalf of a beneficiary, IE someone is benefiting from the the funding that we’re providing, but we’re not paying that person directly. So, we have the ability to specify a beneficiary.
Luke Franklin:
From our contract, we can go all the way back through to the application, the fund, the funding round the contract. Sorry the the projects. So, all of the data is related and we can easily navigate by clicking on any of these links to get all the way back up the chain. If we needed to.
Luke Franklin:
From the fund we had our fund sources, so we can get all the way back from the contracts into fundraising and engagement and right back into that campaign and that those donations that we received from the start. And that’s a really important concept.
Luke Franklin:
Because we want to be able to track the dollar that we received in from our campaign and how we spent that money or how we distributed that money out the other side and we want to be able to report on that entire journey. So, we can go back to our donor database and say, hey, all this money that you provided us is part of this campaign. This is what we’ve done with it, and this is the impact that it’s had. So that journey and being able to see that data related all the way through is a really important concept here.
Luke Franklin:
Again, I’ve got my categorization of my contracts. I have my total amount and my contract terms as well as the contract document itself.
Luke Franklin:
From the summary page, we can jump to financials. Financials allows us to take the amount that we’ve awarded and break this down into different budget allocations. So, we’ve got we’ve got $10,000 as our our general budget for the contracts and then we’ve taken some for claims and some for travel.
Luke Franklin:
We can then create transactions against each of those different budgets, and we can pay out.
Luke Franklin:
Against those against those against those different buckets of.
Luke Franklin:
The money that we’re providing, so this gives us some nice reporting again over how we’re utilising the funding that we’ve awarded as part of this agreement.
Luke Franklin:
Next one along from financials is our milestones area.
Luke Franklin:
Milestones are where we capture reporting requirements, so this is where we’re saying that in order to.
Luke Franklin:
Release the funding or make payments against this funding agreement. What reporting or what milestones does the applicant need to meet to providers updates on their projects initiative for whatever it is that we’re providing funding for?
Luke Franklin:
So, because this is a scholarship scenario, we’d have one milestone at the moment, which is proof of education milestone.
Luke Franklin:
And if I click into this milestone again, we can see that we have a process flow across the top. We create the milestone; we approve the milestone and any associated financial transactions that might be linked to this milestone being approved. We then monitor the milestone, which is where we’re waiting for the applicant to respond via the portal. We sign off on their response and then we close the milestone off.
Luke Franklin:
Milestones themselves have a due dates.
Luke Franklin:
They’re also obviously linked back to the contracts and the projects itself, and we’ve got our ability to categorise by type and report across this.
Luke Franklin:
If need be, milestones can then be broken down further into objectives. If you’d like more a more granular way of of receiving reporting or updates from whoever it is that you’re providing funding to.
Luke Franklin:
If I’ll just drop back a level, I’m just going to jump to our portal view again. So back as an applicant.
Luke Franklin:
We’ve looked at our apply for funding and the application process.
Luke Franklin:
As an applicant or a funding recipient, I can now go into the Portland, see my contracts.
Luke Franklin:
We have a nice way of creating different views of tables so active contracts contracts that might be coming up for renewal or revisions, all contracts and then I can click into one of these records to see some information. Again. This is displaying data directly from dynamics as well. We don’t actually store any data behind the portal itself we read from and write directly to the dynamics ecosystem.
Luke Franklin:
I can see that contract document that we had on the record as well and I can click on this document and download a copy. I can see the milestones that I need to respond to, and I can see any transactions that I have associated to this particular contract.
Luke Franklin:
Now what’s important to mention on here is that this is configured purely for this demo. The portal is completely customizable.
Luke Franklin:
And we can choose what data we want to display from dynamics applications. We can choose what our menu items are across the top. We can choose how we sort and filter different records and all that can be achieved without writing any code. We can do that purely by going into an admin area behind the portal and again we get a nice designer interface where we can create pages and we can define the layout of the pages.
Luke Franklin:
And that’s important because in some scenarios we actually don’t want to show.
Luke Franklin:
The funding recipient, all of their individual transactions. We might only want to show them their master as and deliverables.
Luke Franklin:
In other situations, we do want to show them their transactions and we may even want the applicant to interact with these transactions. We have a lot of scenarios where the applicant needs to come in, open a transaction and provide an invoice and submit that invoice to be reviewed within clever grants by you guys and then that needs to be approved before it’s paid. So, lots of flexibility with how we can configure the portal to meet various different funding scenarios.
Luke Franklin:
And we have a whole bunch of functionalities to support the life cycle of the contract as well. When the contract is active, we can create contract revisions and contract renewals. We have a revisions tab up here. Everything is audited. So, every time we take a revision of the contracts, we take a whole snapshot of everything, the contract, the financials, the milestone statuses, and we store that away, which means that you can report over all the different revisions that have happened in the contract’s life cycle. We can suspend contracts; we can cancel contracts.
Luke Franklin:
A whole bunch of audits in and reason codes and things to support that process as well. And as with everything dynamics and all the pages we’ve seen, all that functionality is controlled by security roles and permissions as well. So, we provide the right users with the right functionality across each application.
Luke Franklin:
And that probably brings us to the end of the demo today.
Luke Franklin:
I will say this is this is a very a very small piece of hard clever grant solution and an even smaller piece of Microsoft’s cloud for non profit and their fundraising and engagement application. There is a whole bunch more functionality within both of those applications that would love to show anyone that is interested. So so please do reach out if you would like to find out more information about these solutions.
Luke Franklin:
I’ll hand back to you for.
Farid Jalal:
Thank you, Luke.
Farid Jalal:
Happy for any of you to potentially add a message on chat. I can, you know, allow.
Farid Jalal:
Either audio or video access and we can have a conversation if that helps.
Farid Jalal:
And while we wait for a chat, Luke, one of the things that I did wanna ask was would you be able to touch upon communication?
Farid Jalal:
You know, in the perspective of the overall solution, right, I think for example, whether that’s communicating with constituents or applicants or even external assessors, for example.
Luke Franklin:
Be talking by the timeline, the timeline communication.
Luke Franklin:
Yep.
Luke Franklin:
Absolutely. I’m just gonna read.
Farid Jalal:
Or just some options available right? Whether that might be the timeline or an e-mail template, or the ability to add an external assessor or might, or even a customer journey. Probably don’t need to show all of it, but you know, certainly I’m sure the group will be interested. Yep.
Luke Franklin:
I reshare my screen, yeah, I reshare my screen to you just so I can click through a few things as well.
Luke Franklin:
In in most areas of dynamic solutions and in most areas of clever grants, we have an activities tab on records, which is a timeline.
Luke Franklin:
Timelines are awesome. They they basically show you all interactions that have happened with this particular record. We can put things on the timeline as different events happen. So, in the context of a contract, for example, when a contract is activated or or revived.
Luke Franklin:
Or suspended. We can stamp those things on the timeline so you can see what’s happening, but you guys can also create an add items to the timeline yourself and a couple of important ones is the ability to record phone calls and create appointments and emails from this area as well.
Luke Franklin:
Now if you Create an e-mail from here.
Luke Franklin:
You just click on it actually and you’ll be taken to an e-mail screen that was very much like like an email would in Outlook.
Luke Franklin:
You can choose who you’re sending it to. You can copy people in, you can populate a subject and a body copy to the e-mail, or you can insert an A predefined e-mail template which you guys can manage from the settings area yourselves. That e-mail template can contain e-mail attachments, and then we can send this e-mail from within dynamics.
Luke Franklin:
Now to the recipient. That’s going to look like it’s come from, from me, from my global admin user, so they to whoever we’re communicating with. It just looks like a normal e-mail.
Luke Franklin:
And they can respond to that e-mail within Outlook. That response will come to my outlook account and to my standard inbox. And I can continue to e-mail back and forth via outlook if I choose to, but that entire thread is tracked into dynamics and is visible on the timeline as well. So that gives me the ability to use Outlook, which I’m familiar with, but it creates visibility across the organisation. It records that communication within here.
Luke Franklin:
Exactly the same with booking appointments. I can book an appointment; a teams call from within Dynamics. It goes on the timeline but appears in my outlook calendar. If I make changes in outlook, it changes things in dynamics as well.
Luke Franklin:
Over on the right-hand side, we are we are tightly coupled with teams. So, I can start a teams or signed in but I can start a teams chats with inside within dynamics about this particular record and that whole communication can be handled within teams. But I know that that communication is trapped the timeline as well. So again, we’re breaking down some of those silos.
Luke Franklin:
But allowing users to still work in in tools that they’re familiar with.
Luke Franklin:
So, there’s some of the key communication options that we have within all Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications, whether they’re a Klevr solution or a Dynamics first party app.
Luke Franklin:
And then if we were to bring dynamics, customer insights or marketing into the mix as well, we start to enrich that even further with the ability to create e-mail templates based on a library of media collateral that we’ve created.
Luke Franklin:
An organisation and to apply different forms of communication, whether it’s e-mail, text, messages.
Luke Franklin:
Social media posts into a a customer journey and we can target communication at different points and that can be over a schedule, or it can depend or be dependent on how that particular person is interacted with us. So, this goes right back to the start and what Karen was showing you around.
Luke Franklin:
The new view of being able to see the likelihood of donors interacting with your organisation and being able to create that segment. That segment is a dynamic list of people that we want to communicate with, and we use that segment and apply it to a customer journey and we define how and when we’re going to communicate with that person and from that point it’s it’s completely automated.
Luke Franklin:
So, a nice example from a from a fundraising engagement side is that if someone makes a donation.
Luke Franklin:
Over a certain amount, they might automatically fall into.
Luke Franklin:
Like a say a mid-tier donor segment and that mid-tier donor segment might have a customer journey flow that says is this the first time that this donor has made a donation and if it is, let’s send them a bunch of information about this as an organisation and the impact that that they’re going to have by making that donation. If it’s not, then let’s send them some different communication that says thank you for your donation. We’ve noticed X amount of activity within your profile.
Luke Franklin:
Now gonna communicate with you in a in a, in a different way. So, it’s a really nice example because it shows the the power of the dynamics platform and how we can bring different applications together across a common a common data model, a common data source. And we can really get that that end that end-to-end lifecycle.
Luke Franklin:
Through in whether it’s interaction or whether it’s through the distribution of funding money or whether it’s through constituent and donor management.
Farid Jalal:
I appreciate that, mate, and you know, with everything that Luke just mentioned, if it makes sense to dig deeper into those particular elements of the end-to-end solution as well, happy to.
Farid Jalal:
Schedule some time and to have those conversations.
Farid Jalal:
Richard, you’ve just put in a couple of questions in the chat window. So, does the portal support any document management capabilities?
Farid Jalal:
That’s one. The other is sorry, maybe you start with that low.
Luke Franklin:
I can start with that one. Yeah. So, yeah, the portal, the portal absolutely supports document management. Our portal out-of-the-box integrates directly into SharePoint.
Luke Franklin:
And it also integrates into different forms of Azure storage if we’re dealing with larger, heavier files such as videos and images and sound clips and things like that. So, we get 2 different options depending on the type of file that we’re storing and what we obviously also integrate directly into into standard dynamics.
Luke Franklin:
File storage as well if need be.
Farid Jalal:
And I think another question is if we happen to have similar funding opportunities, is there a way to build templates into the system?
Luke Franklin:
Yes. So along with the core clever solution, we have a suite of clever utilities.
Luke Franklin:
Those utilities provide.
Luke Franklin:
Bits of functionality that we’ve determined as being useful that we can apply to different areas of the solution. One of those is the ability to copy records, so this gives us the option to create a template for example.
Luke Franklin:
Like maybe a like a contract template that has a predefined set of milestones and a set of pre-defined set of deliverables that we use.
Luke Franklin:
So we can create a template and then we can use our copy function to create a copy of that contract template each time you want to create a new record. So it saves you some save you some of the manual data entry. If you’ve got some common funding scenarios.
Luke Franklin:
Absolutely.
Luke Franklin:
Yeah.
Farid Jalal:
And you could utilise that for creating copies of campaign templates in the fundraising engagement application or application templates as well that you’d like to reuse for multiple funding rounds and and even assessment templates.
Luke Franklin:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I’ll clever utilities the same as our clever portal. Their solution agnostic. They can be used across any dynamics application.
Luke Franklin:
There’s things like the the copy function. We have a whole of like record approval mechanism as a utility. We have field lockers so we can lock fields depending on certain statuses of records. I think there’s about I think there’s about 9:00 or 10 different solutions that we’ve got within that utility suite at the moment. But you could you can apply them to any dynamics application.
Farid Jalal:
Thanks Luke.
Farid Jalal:
Hein. I think you’ve added a question in the Q&A section. So that’s is it possible to communicate with applicants through the portal, for instance, if they’ve missed some information on their report submission, can I add a comment that they can see?
Luke Franklin:
Yep, so a whole bunch of different ways that we can we can handle communication but also handle that specific scenario that you just mentioned.
Luke Franklin:
So within our applications area and and within the assessments area, we have the ability to raise supplementary information requests. So for that particular scenario, you may want to go down that route because it’s it’s more formal, you’re creating a record and attaching a form that the applicant can respond to and it goes as like an like an appendix or an extra item against their application application. So it’s a little bit more structured, a little bit more formal.
Luke Franklin:
If you’re just talking about general communication, then yeah, we absolutely can. This goes back to the the timeline feature that we looked at where we could create emails and tasks. We can create posts as a record in that timeline, and those posts can be visible in the portal and they can be viewed and responded to via the portal applicant as well. So that gives you a nice mechanism to communicate via the to use it in the portal, but it keeps it all in a single place. It keeps it all with your emails. It keeps it with your.
Luke Franklin:
Appointments. Your phone calls your team’s messages, and it’s all in that timeline, and in that order. And that timeline is is you. You’ve got the ability to sort and filter and and and view what you need to on that timeline. So if you wanted to filter it by just portal posts, then it’s really easy to do that as well.
Farid Jalal:
In did that answer your question? I’ve just enabled both your video and your mic. If you’d like to jump on and talk that through.
Hien Vu:
Yes, that that’s really good. Thanks Luke.
Luke Franklin:
Awesome. Thank you.
Farid Jalal:
We’ve got another 8 minutes to go.
Farid Jalal:
I might just take a couple of minutes to talk about the needs assessment workshops that Microsoft have kindly made available.
Farid Jalal:
They’ve made $4500 available for each organisation to go in into a little bit of detail.
Farid Jalal:
You know, with the help of Walker Scott, for everyone who’s joined us today, I will be dropping an e-mail with the deck and the recording from today’s call. So you’ve got that information and you can simply reply to me to arrange for that.
Farid Jalal:
It’s really compelling. We find a lot of our, you know, organisations that we work with do leverage the needs assessment workshop.
Farid Jalal:
We’ll use it as a way to understand your key requirements better. Dig a little deeper into how the dynamics solutions both in the CRM side as well as on the ERP side. You know, once payments kind of flow through and the clever grants solution can be leveraged to drive efficiencies within your organisation and of course scale your impact as well.
Farid Jalal:
If there aren’t any other questions, I might just give you 10 minutes of of your time back.
Farid Jalal:
Thanks again everyone for joining us today and investing your time with us. Thanks, Luke. Thanks, Karin. Appreciate both of your inputs today.
Farid Jalal:
Look forward to seeing you all again on a webinar not too far away.
Luke Franklin:
So thank you, everyone. Thanks for joining.
Karan Singh:
Thanks everybody for joining today. Thank you.
