This guide is intended for those who will be responsible for building out the application forms in Benevity Grants (NGE) – your new Community Investment platform. It should be reviewed by the Program Administrators to ensure preparation for and completion of the implementation activities.
What is Benevity Grants?
Benevity Grants is a community investment browser-based SaaS platform that will streamline your processes to make program management more efficient, more impactful and better aligned with your strategic goals. That means your program runs smoothly while your administrative load gets lighter. Configuration is divided into two parts: Applicant/External facing (forms, surveys, and emails) & Admin facing (Management Interface).
Overview
Application forms, an early step in the lifecycle of a grant request create a space for applicants to showcase their work, while providing you with the critical information you need for your grantmaking decisions. Our Benevity Grants teams will partner with you to build a custom form that captures the right information for your program.
Objectives
Throughout the Benevity Grants implementation, we will work to ensure that your application forms:
- Match your theming requirements
- Provide a positive experience for the applicant
- Provide your internal teams with all of the critical information required to make funding decisions and report effectively
Technical Details
There are several technical requirements for the Application Form(s) that will be required during your implementation:
- Theming specifications and image
- All application form text and questions (complete with dropdown responses if applicable)
- Conditional logic associated with questions (if applicable)
- Currencies that should be available on your form
- Introduction and legal text (if applicable)
Recommendations
We find that our clients have the best post-launch experience when they consider Benevity’s best practices and recommendations. Here are some related to the Application Forms:
- Clearly define your program eligibility, what you fund and what you don’t fund, as we will be calling out that criteria on your application form to eliminate submissions that would never be successful at receiving funding
- Don’t ask for what you don’t need! If your existing form asks questions that doesn’t factor in to your decision making, lets eliminate them from your application.
- Always try to minimize typing with drop down lists instead of free text fields. This will streamline your data input and make it much easier to report on.
- Example: If your application asks for the State or Province of the cause, we recommend providing the pre-defined list rather than having the applicant type in the values
- Properly sized requirements - The time taken to fill out an application form should be proportional to the funding amount that will be awarded. Consider trimming down the application form for smaller grants, increasing requirements only when providing larger, more strategic and/or multiyear funding.
Next steps
Get a head start! Review the Technical Details above and start work on gathering the technical requirements prior to kicking off your implementation.
Items you should gather for your application form(s) prior to implementation are:
- List of all questions for each form (including eligibility questions)
- Theming requirements
- Client Logo: 200x500 pixels (png or svg)
- Image for Landing Page: 1080 pixels wide rectangular high-quality image
- Colour Codes: for action bars and buttons
- All options for dropdown lists (office locations, focus areas, countries of operation, etc)
- Any text or agreements that your legal team will require to be displayed on your form
