One Year with GivingData: What We Learned and Where We’re Headed

Value Stream Consulting
Sep 2
4 min read

This month marks our first anniversary as a GivingData partner. With so many of you gathering in Portland for GDConnect 2025, it feels like the right moment to zoom out: why we expanded beyond Salesforce, how our role shifted, what we built in year one, and where we’re investing next.

Why We Expanded Beyond Salesforce

For more than two decades, Value Stream Consulting focused exclusively on helping grantmakers succeed on Salesforce. Our philosophy has been consistent: technology should adapt to the way foundations work, not the other way around. As we watched GivingData mature, a simple truth became hard to ignore, many foundations could reach their goals faster on a philanthropy-first platform. Partnering with GivingData let us meet clients where they are and help them get more from the systems they already trust.

How Our Role Changed

Working in Salesforce, our engagements tended to be more technical; migrations, configuration, custom development, and advocacy for platform improvements. In the GivingData ecosystem, much of the implementation is handled by the product team. Our value shifted accordingly: process design, adoption coaching, and change management. The center of gravity moved from “how do we make the platform do X?” to “how do we make our grantmaking practice work better?” That’s a healthier conversation.

Year One: Listening, Building, Shipping

We entered with a listening posture, learning from the GivingData team, from foundations already on the platform, and from the broader community. That collaboration translated into concrete outcomes:

Three successful transitions to GivingData, including two migrations from Salesforce and one from CyberGrants.
Power BI reporting for a multi-foundation instance, giving one client unified visibility across three foundations in a single environment.
Partnering on the Enhanced CRM API, opening reliable connections to HubSpot, Salesforce, and Monday, and setting the stage for deeper integrations.

These milestones are more than technical wins; they reflect trust. Our aim is simple: make the work of grantmaking easier, smarter, and measurably more effective.

What Feels Different About the Partnership

After two decades in the Salesforce world, one contrast stood out. With Salesforce, foundations often had meaningful contact with Salesforce account managers around licensing and initial setup, then relatively little direct engagement. GivingData works differently.

Success Managers stay involved long after go-live, helping teams adapt and improve.
Regional gatherings bring users and non-users together to share what actually works.
And perhaps most importantly, the community feels personal, many users know the leadership and staff by name. That access builds trust and accelerates learning in ways we rarely saw elsewhere.

Becoming Part of a Larger Family

When GivingData joined the Foundant family alongside SmartSimple, we asked the same questions you did: How will this affect identity, focus, and pace? After a candid conversation with Josh Mallamud, the new CEO, we came away reassured. The result so far has been pragmatic and positive: a sturdier roadmap, faster delivery of enhancements, and useful cross-pollination of talent and ideas. The net effect is more momentum for the platforms, and more capability for foundations.

Strengthening Process, Not Just Systems

Systems matter, but process determines outcomes. We’ve reintroduced MERL, Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning, and paired it with Value Stream Management. Together they help foundations clarify strategy, remove bottlenecks, measure results, and translate insight into action. The goal isn’t merely to “run the system well”; it’s to make better, faster, more transparent decisions about impact.

What’s Next

Heading into year two, we’re investing where clients will feel it:

Conference sponsorship. We’re proud to sponsor the GivingData Conference in Portland this September. Our team will be on site, including Karen Guile, who leads all of our GivingData implementation projects.
Advanced MERL tools. We’re developing services using Power BI and Metabase to deepen analysis of current activity and forecast trends. Two packaged offerings are underway to make this plug-and-play.
BridgePoint integrations. With GivingData’s Enhanced CRM API targeted for release in Q4, our BridgePoint middleware will deliver seamless connections to HubSpot, Salesforce and Monday for existing GivingData clients.
A broader lens. We’re exploring partnerships across the wider Foundant family, including Foundant GLM and SmartSimple, bringing the same blend of process expertise, integration, and MERL-driven coaching to more grantmakers.

See You in Portland, or Right After

I won’t be in Portland this year, and I’m proud that Karen Guile will represent us on site. Karen is our primary contact for GivingData users; she brings more than twenty years of inside-the-foundation experience to every conversation. If you’re attending, drop her a quick note at karen.guile@valuestreamconsulting.com so she can look for you. If schedules don’t align, she’ll happily follow up after the event for a short Zoom. Either way, we’d value the chance to learn about your work and share what we’re building next.

And if you’d like to follow our progress, including lessons from this journey and insights from our work with grantmakers and impact tech, subscribe to our newsletter here. We’ll keep you in the loop with stories, strategies, and opportunities to connect.