Sometimes, we need to get creative with our tech tools to ensure they are working alongside, instead of against, each other. The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation integrates their tech tools to reduce reporting burden for both grantees and staff—let’s dive in to how we made it happen together.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation is a private grantmaking organization serving the state of Arkansas with a commitment to funding change and pursuing equity. WRF employs a broad set of philanthropic tools, from general operating support grants to program- and mission-based investments, towards building an Arkansas where everyone can earn a livable wage, get a quality education, and build generational wealth. WRF also actively funds technical assistance for partners, strategic communications, and convenings. Their mission to “relentlessly pursue economic, educational, social, ethnic and racial equity for all Arkansans” is a stirring call, honouring the legacy of their founder.
Grantbook has been working with WRF for years, first meeting over 10 years ago at a conference and entering a formal professional partnership in 2017. Since the beginning, our team has been blown away by WRF’s values-forward approach to their important work, the true empathy they exhibit for their community and their constant search for future-focused, scalable solutions—both for their grantees, and for themselves.
Those of you in the philanthropic sector will know that a noble mission and clear vision cannot always overcome operational challenges. It’s heart-wrenching to feel like your processes and technology are not adequately enabling the important work you need to do for your community, and may in some cases be actively impeding your grantees, stakeholders, or your own team from accessing the information and resources they need.
WRF has been using Fluxx as a grants management system for several years, and Grantbook has been helping support them by customizing their Fluxx build with new fields and workflows, recommending and configuring integrations, troubleshooting, and providing ongoing training and upskilling to their team. WRF is a very values-focused foundation, and one of the trust-based actions they embrace is to reduce grantee burden by easing reporting requirements.
WRF had a specific need to alleviate administrative burdens from their program team in the post-approval stage of their grants. Specifically, grants managers require reports from grantees to check-in about the progress of a grant. In Fluxx, this translates to adding report records, which are tied to the grant; for WRF, there can be up to four per grant. In their grantee-centric efforts, the Foundation, rather than asking grantees to actually submit reports, invites them to online meetings to talk about all things grant-related. These meetings (typically held over Zoom) are conversations between grants managers and grantees, designed to assess their needs, progress, and obstacles, and are a requirement for receiving and renewing funding. This human-centric approach to reporting alleviates burden for grantees; by leveraging technology, WRF is able to kick it up a notch and alleviate burden for their employees too.
WRF has been recording these Zoom meetings for their own reference—and recently, they have adopted Trint, an AI-powered transcription service that automatically tracks and labels speakers throughout a conversation, providing users with an accurate transcript at the end of Zoom meeting. The missing link has been the connection between Fluxx and Trint: WRF issued Grantbook the challenge of attaching the Trint transcription file to the correct report record in Fluxx. Our Fluxx experts stepped up!
Deep Dive on Fluxx
Note: the details and intricacies listed out below were written by a Grantbook Fluxx developer, for Fluxx admins and super-users. If you’re curious about any of the terms or processes, we would love to have a conversation with you!
The challenge: to attach the Trint transcription file directly to the appropriate grant, and specifically the correct report record tied to that grant.
The approach: Trint can either receive an uploaded file (i.e. mp3, mp4) or be invited to a Zoom meeting to do its thing. Afterwards, the WRF employee is prompted to verify the transcription record, ensuring the words are correct and attributed to the right speaker. The Grantbook team added on the use of Zapier, a middleware tool which is often used to automate actions across different, siloed tools. In this instance, checking the box to verify the transcript triggers Zapier, which then sends both a notification in Slack (WRF’s preferred internal communication tool) with the Google Drive link to the transcription and recording, and automatically adds that same link to Fluxx under the appropriate report record (which is tied to the grant record). Let’s zoom in on that process:
- When the PO confirms the accuracy of the Trint transcript, they also update the Trint filename to include the Grant ID from Fluxx
- The Grant ID is the key here: it gives the Zapier integration a target, providing the missing link between Trint and Fluxx; it is the text that needs to match across the two disparate tools
- The Fluxx-savvy among you can also likely spot the issue here: within a Grant ID, there can be multiple reports or even different report themes (for any grant, WRF has multiple ‘Meetings & Check-Ins’ reports, but they also have other reports under other themes including annual or year-end reports). How does the Zap drill down to attach the Trint transcription to the correct report within a grant record?
The magic: The rules for identifying the correct report within a grant record are a series of increasingly narrow IF conditions:
- IF the Report State is ‘New’
- IF the Report Theme is ‘Meeting and Check-In’
- IF the Field [Transcription URL] is ‘Empty’ (meaning the integration has not already worked its magic on that report record)
- Finally, if after the above checks have been made and there are still multiple eligible reports, the integration will target the report record with the earliest due date.
The extra mile: Even with all of these rigorous rules and parameters, integrations may occasionally break or malfunction—and if we put ourselves back in the shoes of our hardworking grants management team at WRF, we know that receiving an unspecified error message is frustrating and time consuming to resolve.
Our team proceeded with extensive error testing, asking questions about abnormal or infrequent processes, challenging assumptions, and digging in to understand all of the interactions and exceptions that might interfere with the code. This ensures that, despite all the safeguards above, if something does still break or go wrong, detailed errors are logged that will allow WRF to pinpoint exactly where and why the error occurred – and, therefore, how to rectify it. This is a key, and very robust, part of any code build: unique error messages for each potential condition means that even if you don’t get the outcome you want, you still learn something about how to get the integration back on track.
The cherry on top: Now, the team at WRF has taken things a step further by integrating ImpactMapper, which collects, parses and visualizes data using a customized taxonomy system, allowing the WRF team to pull out stories and insights from their reporting. Not only can the tool “tag” transcripts with key themes and impact areas, allowing the team to easily identify mechanisms for change, it also creates stunning visuals of those themes for reporting purposes to really impress stakeholders and board members.
Throughout our relationship with the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation we have seen first-hand the impact that leading with values can have on a team that embraces them, and on the communities and changemakers they serve. We have also learned a lot about Fluxx and how it plays with other apps and integrations—our team is energized by new, challenging requests from our clients, and we love sharing our learnings both internally and with our broader audience.
We want to give a big THANK YOU to our friends over at WRF—they have been incredible partners throughout the work we have done together, and their passion for optimizing tech processes while embracing human-centric practices is inspiring and definitely worth sharing with you all. If you have questions about WRF’s tools and integrations, we would love to hear from you!
