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The Good Exchange launches additional features for the charitable grant making community

New functionality includes CRM data sharing and WhatsApp integration

Newbury, 6th June 2019 – Not-for-profit, charity-owned on-line matching platform, The Good Exchange, has today announced significant updates to its online charitable giving solution, providing the ability to share the information its single application form gathers from charitable causes seeking funding with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems utilised by funders to manage their grant making processes. Additional new functionality includes integration with WhatsApp, allowing users to add a WhatsApp ‘share’ icon on their organisation and/or fundraising project page, enabling people to instantly message friends and family about the fundraising projects they care about to drive donations and awareness.

Developed in partnership with CRM consultancy, Hyphen8, the new CRM functionality, available to all registered funders on The Good Exchange, will allow users to create a comprehensive extract of the grant application data from all projects that have been auto-matched or shortlisted to their grant giving criteria and import the data into their CRM-based grant management systems. Any grant-giving organisation, such as a charitable foundation or trust, using a CRM system to manage their grant funding, could populate their database systems from this extracted data and use it to enhance their decision making while maintaining their own grant management and due diligence processes.

The first organisation to use the new functionality will be Oxfordshire Community Foundation (OCF) which will be importing over seventy fields of information about each matched or shortlisted charitable project directly into its Salesforce CRM system to augment the grant management process and enable the Foundation to communicate more quickly and seamlessly with charitable organisations that are looking for grants.

“We strongly believe that collaboration and integration is the way forward in the charitable funding sector, ” said Jayne Woodley, CEO, OCF. “This new functionality will allow us to quickly and easily extract the data about all shortlisted and matched charitable projects directly from The Good Exchange platform into our Salesforce CRM solution, increasing the efficiency of our grant administration processes and decision-making as well as facilitating greater engagement with the causes that we support.”

Meanwhile, the WhatsApp integration reflects the growing shift towards more private sharing and the popularity and success of WhatsApp (which has an estimated 36 million users in the UK)[1] for personal communication. Charities and Community Groups using The Good Exchange and visitors to their organisational and fundraising project pages will have the option to share links and personalised information with their WhatsApp contacts to publicise fundraising activities and drive more donations. In contrast, while sharing via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can reach larger audiences, messages are much less personalised and are broadcast to all followers.

“As an organisation with digital at the heart of our ethos and offering, we’re always looking for ways to innovate and evolve our platform to augment its charitable matching capabilities and make the grant management and application process faster and easier for everyone, ” said Ed Gairdner, COO of The Good Exchange. “Thanks to the skills of the Hyphen8 CRM services team, we’ve been able to start the journey towards a seamless integration between our not-for-profit platform and leading grant-management and CRM solutions. The sharing of information between The Good Exchange’s single application form and grant makers’ own grant management, CRM systems and application forms will facilitate the matching of charitable fundraising projects to as many grants as possible whilst allowing Trustees to retain full control over the grant making process.”

This will streamline the grant decision-making process for every grant-maker by minimising the application and shortlisting timetable and cutting the effort required. This will free up time to build deeper relationships with the charitable organisations they support and for collaborating with funders, fundraisers and donors to help close the funding gap and make charitable funding accessible to all sizes and types of charities.

“The CRM integration development is a key example of how Hyphen8’s passion to work in partnership with non-profit organisations to transform the way they work using cloud technologies can benefit the charitable industry as a whole” said Elaine Forth, CEO, Hyphen8. “We look forward to working with The Good Exchange going forward to continue to drive CRM-based innovation and collaboration in the charitable sector.”

Gairdner concluded: “Our decision to support WhatsApp integration is in recognition of the changing communications landscape, in which it has become one of the most popular apps in use across the world. Sharing fundraising information via WhatsApp brings a user-friendly, simple and instant way for everyone supporting fundraising organisations on The Good Exchange to communicate about and drive donations for the charitable activities that are closest to their hearts.

“Further platform updates are currently underway as we continue to innovate our offering; watch this space!”

[1] The global state of digital 2019, Hootsuite: https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/resources/digital-in-2019

 
press contacts

Aga Grzyb/Charlotte Martin
The Good Exchange team at Finn Partners e-mail
020 3217 7060
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