Greater Houston Community Foundation Selects MicroEdge’s GIFTS Online For Its Robust Grants Management Capabilities

New York, NY, February 21, 2013 /3BL Media/ - MicroEdge LLC, the leading provider of solutions for the giving community worldwide, today announced that the Greater Houston Community Foundation has selected GIFTS Online as its grants management solution. GIFTS Online—MicroEdge’s leading cloud-based grantmaking system—empowers hundreds of giving organizations around the world to streamline their entire grants administration process, from start to finish, with powerful grants management tools and a high degree of flexibility and scalability.

Greater Houston Community Foundation manages its own awards. On top of this, the foundation acts as a service provider, managing grants for a number of private foundations. Yet, its previous grants management process was prohibitively manual and did not allow for the scalability needed to grow their capacity as a service provider. “Our previous process was entirely manual, with one person managing and tracking all of our grants, as well as those grants that we manage as a service, in a collection of spreadsheets,” says Ed Padar, Controller at Greater Houston. “The process was not scalable, which significantly limited our ability to expand the number of foundations we were able to support as a grantmaking service provider.” However, when the organization learned more about GIFTS Online’s numerous options for scalability, its online review capabilities, information sharing and collaboration features, and powerful reporting tools, they began to seriously look into the system.

In the end, the decision to move to GIFTS Online was an easy one for Greater Houston. “The GIFTS family of software has a good reputation and it is a name our clients recognize, so internally it was an easy sell,” says Mr. Padar. “We needed a system that was as efficient as possible and we determined that GIFTS Online was that system. Now that we can easily open access to our external reviewers, as well as the committee members of the field of interest funds we manage, we can certainly increase the number of clients we serve. We’ve always had the desire to do so, but we lacked a viable tool to make it happen. Then we decided that if we build it, they will come. GIFTS Online is the tool we decided to build with.”

“Whether it’s due to an increase in grant applications stemming from greater need in the community, the desire to provide online access to staff members, or the need to streamline an existing manual grants process, there is a growing need among community foundations for powerful, scalable, cloud-based grants management,” says Preston McKenzie, CEO of MicroEdge. “We are eager to help our community foundation clients take their grants management to the next level with GIFTS Online. And because these foundations can pair GIFTS Online with FIMS—our fully integrated foundation management solution—we can now provide them with the most comprehensive financial and grants management package available.”

About Greater Houston Community Foundation

Greater Houston Community Foundation became an active community foundation in 1995 that focuses on growing effective philanthropy by connecting donors to the causes they care about, providing excellent stewardship of assets entrusted to them, and convening resources to address important community needs. Visit their website at www.ghcf.org

About MicroEdge
Established in 1985, MicroEdge, LLC is the leading provider of software and services to the giving community worldwide. MicroEdge solutions deliver a powerful, integrated, and open framework for efficient and effective charitable giving. The company is committed to providing the best technology toolset for foundations, corporations, government agencies, donors, advisors and financial institutions. Together, these tools help organizations to work with one another to raise, invest, manage and award charitable currency. MicroEdge is headquartered in New York City with regional offices throughout the U.S. and supports thousands of clients worldwide. MicroEdge is part of the Vista Equity Partners portfolio of software and technology-enabled companies. To learn more about Vista Equity Partners, visitwww.vistaequitypartners.com. To learn more about MicroEdge, visit www.microedge.com.

Media Contact: 
Kathy Krais 
800.899.0890 ext. 3966 
kkrais@microedge.com

MicroEdge is a trademark and/or service mark of MicroEdge, LLC. All other company names or marks mentioned herein are those of their respective owners.