The SmartSimple Blog

SmartSimple’s July 2016 upgrade takes the Arcadia X user experience to the next level, giving you even more reporting and communications options. We’ve introduced new On-Demand features that bring life to your reports and dashboards. And, our enhanced email offering makes it easier to add contacts and quickly edit your communications based on specific, pre-filtered records already in your platform. List View Charts (On-Demand Feature) SmartSimple empowers you to create dynamic and impactful charts directly from your current list view without needing to use Report Builder . List View Charts instantly aggregate your data into easy-to-understand, vibrant charts. This flexible new feature requires next to no effort to use, maintaining the current columns and filtering the information you want to share directly from your list view. There’s no need to re-input any details. Seven descriptive and colorful chart types are available to display your data in a meaningful way. This f...

With the final results of the Brexit Referendum of 52% to leave the EU and 48% to stay, the majority of UK citizens have voted - albeit by a small margin - to leave the EU. A surprise to many, the result has lead to not only the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron, but created a great deal of turmoil in the country, leading to massive speculation about the future. News articles abound on the impact of Brexit on the automotive industry, energy and climate change, investments , and technology . But what about philanthropy, or, as it’s commonly known in the UK, the third sector? After all, more than 732,000 people are employed in this industry by an estimated 162,000 organizations that spend approximately £38 billion annually on initiatives to assist people in need. 1. Economics and Funding for Philanthropy It’s no surprise that the initial reaction of the global markets was panic; financial institutions never cope well with change. Not only did the pound plun...

The SmartSimple team is excited to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has selected SmartSimple to their newly launched AWS Government Competency Program . This brand new program includes a number of well-known organizations like Accenture , Trend Micro , Lockheed Martin and Unisys . A mazon Web Services powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in the cloud. Their customers are located in 190 countries around the world and include a wide array of businesses, including entertainment, travel, manufacturing and IT companies. The AWS Competency Program recognizes Amazon Partner Network (APN) partners who have shown not only a high level of technical proficiency, but a proven track record of customer success in specialized solution areas. “By achieving recognition in this prestigious program — and as the only Canadian organization to do so for Government Competency — SmartSimple has demonstrated we’re an organization that offers mission-critical solutions to gove...

Enter the term “trends in granting” into Google and you’ll get back 38,700,000 results. You’ll find a wide range of documents, including reports from well-respected organizations, blogs written by grantmakers, case studies and fact sheets. That’s a lot of information, and few have the time to sift through it all. Yet grantmakers need to keep up to date on the latest trends to learn what will be a short-term fad and what’s going to impact how they award funding in the future. How is the granting space changing? We did some digging ourselves and discovered three major topics of note that all revolve around the predominant theme of transparency in the granting industry. This is thanks to a range of factors, including the prevalence of smart technology and social media that has lead to the growing use of digital media to share outcomes. This topic is heavily influenced by the millennial generation moving into more senior, decision-making roles. We’re also seeing an increasing f...

SmartSimple Ireland hosted its third annual Community Conference this past Tuesday at the beautiful Gibson Hotel in Dublin’s city center. Dublin has emerged as Europe’s primary hub for technology where other major players in the industry have also headquartered their European operations, including Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.   This year’s conference marked the largest gathering of SmartSimple clients and potential clients in the conference’s history. Many regions of Europe were represented, including attendees from Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France. The day started with our State of the Nation, sharing what’s new and what’s coming at SmartSimple. As with SmartSimple’s Spring Community Conference 2016 in North America, the Community Conference 2016 Dublin, provided an opportunity for our European clients to network, meet the SmartSimple team and learn about new product releases and enhancements from SmartSimple experts.   “T...

Our April upgrade, focuses on improving communications. New features like Field Annotation and the Privacy Policy Hyperlink, continue to add transparency and engagement tools to improve the user experience. Field Annotation With Field Annotation, you can create notes on any application field and make edits to these fields while keeping the rest of the application locked. This offers you an additional communications vehicle for both internal and external contacts. Field Revision Annotation works much like the current Notes feature but targeted towards individual fields. For example, let’s say one of your grants administrators is reviewing an application and notices that a particular field needs to be revised by the applicant. With Field  Annotation, the administrator can highlight this field with an annotation and send a comment to the applicant on what revision to make. The applicant will be advised that there is a note for them and provide them with the opportunity to revis...

It’s officially spring, and that means the SmartSimple Spring Community Conference 2016 is only a few weeks away. SmartSimple community conferences offer a unique experience for both clients and the SmartSimple team to come together for a day of engaging conversation, learning opportunities and networking with peers in your industry. Gain insights from other SmartSimple users, share ideas for enhancements and meet your peers from across the United States and Canada. Get On the Right Track Based on your feedback, we decided to expand this year’s conference to include more targeted sessions and client participation. In addition to adding more ways to get to know other SmartSimple clients, we’ve expanded the scope of topics, increased the number of sessions and created two SmartSimple user tracks . General User Track Industry-specific sessions for system best practices and usage This user track will be broken down into industry-specific sessions for non-developers and IT...