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Case Study

Salesforce Grant Management Implementation

South Baltimore Gateway Partnership

To improve quality of life in Baltimore, SBGP provides capital, maintenance, and programming investments in parks and public spaces.

The Challenge

South Baltimore Gateway Partnership (SBGP) helps city government reinvest casino revenue into grants, capital projects, and services that improve the community’s quality of life.

To accomplish this vital work, SBGP manages millions of dollars in grants each year, spanning projects in environmental sustainability, health and wellness, and community development and revitalization. For years, these grants were spread across platforms that did not talk to each other. The result? A grant operation without a single source of truth.

Applications came in through Submittable, while awards, disbursements, and expenditures lived in QuickBooks. Reviewer scores, board and committee rosters, grantee contacts, and reporting were tracked in disparate places, resulting in a system where SBGP staff couldn’t see a grant’s lifecycle in one place.

Moreover, financial data and program data lived apart, requiring staff to manually cross-reference awarded funds with what was actually spent—a time-consuming process that increased errors in an already complicated system.

To bring SBGP’s grant management process into a single platform, we needed to answer four key questions:

  • How do we bring years of application, financial, and reporting history into one system without losing the connections between them?
  • How do we integrate online applications with the system to eliminate manual re-keying?
  • How do we track the full grant lifecycle, from application through review, award, disbursement, and final reporting in one place?
  • How do we tie every dollar disbursed back to both the grant and the organization's chart of accounts?
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Our Solution

We combined a new build in Salesforce with a full-scale migration of SBGP’s legacy data to create a new, integrated system that’s built for visibility at every stage of the grant lifecycle.

We built a grant management system on Salesforce using the Outbound Funds Module and Nonprofit Success Pack, moving SBGP’s full grant program onto one platform.

We replaced Submittable with Titan’s online application forms, which integrate with Salesforce so new applications become Funding Requests upon submission—no manual re-keying required.

We moved years of legacy grant history out of Submittable and into a TitanWeb-based portal. This included migrating over 520 community grant applications, 460 grant reports, and a host of reviewer scorecards, all while preserving the links between them.

We uploaded the organization's QuickBooks financial history as structured Disbursements and Expenditures records, each tied to the correct grant and mapped to the organization's chart of accounts.

We modeled the board of directors, its committees, proxies, and grantee organizations as connected contacts and affiliations, then automated contact creation so the right people are created and linked as applications are submitted.

Using TitanSign, we automated the grant-agreement signature process so the correct board chair or executive director receives the agreement for e-signature every time. We then built grantee and reviewer portal access and data-validation reporting for ongoing management.

The Results

  • SBGP now runs its entire grant program from one system, with the full lifecycle of every grant visible in one place.
  • Grantee application data flows automatically from each online application into Salesforce, saving time and eliminating errors from manual data entry.
  • More than $63 million in historical disbursements have been migrated to Salesforce and tied to the correct grants and organizations, greatly improving SBGP’s long-term reporting capabilities.
  • Staff can now see funds awarded versus funds spent, greatly improving accuracy and removing the need for manual reconciliation.
  • Grant agreements now reach the correct signer automatically, removing a recurring source of confusion in the process.
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“It's such a vast improvement over what it was before, in how automated things are and how much can happen concurrently that used to squeeze the grants team at the end. They would be getting reviews back from the board the week of the big grant review and then putting together this disgusting spreadsheet, and that no longer has to happen.”

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Liz Cornish
Deputy Director of Programs

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