Seeding Justice Case Study

Introduction

Seeding Justice (formerly MRG Foundation) is Oregon's leading funder of social change organizing. Supported by hundreds of donors throughout the state, Seeding Justice strengthens Oregon's social justice movements through grantmaking, organizing, and capacity building.

Seeding Justice's participatory grantmaking program cedes decision making power to those most impacted by injustice. Their activist grantmakers award over $500,000 each year to grassroots groups advancing social, racial, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice, with an emphasis on seed funding and support for emerging groups. Since 2019, Seeding Justice has been also taking on multiple community funds from sources including federal and state fundings to pass to Community Based Organizations (CBO), and the awarded amount since 2019 has been over $30 millions.

Situation

Seeding Justice was founded in 1976 to transform philanthropy and funding movements to pursue justice and liberation for all communities. Over the past few years, they have experienced significant growth and acquired a building with rental income, thus increasing the volume and complexity of data being generated exponentially. They also decided to bring bookkeeping in-house and implement Sage Intacct accounting software. Both shifts have caused a need for better-integrated systems, internal control processes, and access to real-time data.

Challenge

The growth of Seeding Justice presented several challenges:

Inefficient Processes: Manual data entry and reconciliation processes were time-consuming and prone to errors, impeding the organization's ability to analyze information effectively.
Limited Scalability: The organization's donor database system needed more flexibility and scalability to adapt to changing needs, hindering its capacity to respond to evolving circumstances.
Diminished Data Visibility: Seeding Justice required a centralized data repository to grant stakeholders real-time access to information and insights from one source.

Solution

Seeding Justice needed help integrating Bloomerang, a community-focused nonprofit donor management software, Stripe, a payment processing platform, and Sage Intacct. They considered another iPaaS provider for the integration. However, they needed more subject matter expertise of the nonprofit finance sector. They needed more context for what Seeding Justice was looking to connect. Needing an iPaaS solution focusing on finance and accounting, Seeding Justice was referred to DataBlend by their Sage Intacct implementor, Clark Nuber.

"Through the discovery process with DataBlend, it was clear that DataBlend's sales team spoke the same language. Immediately, I could tell that they had worked in and around finance for a while. I felt comfortable," said Sandee Huang, Seeding Justice’s Finance and Operations Director. During Seeding Justice's implementation, they worked with DataBlend's Jonathan Cobb whose background is in FP&A and accounting. "Jonathan is brilliant. He spent a lot of time with us to map out the logic to capture all the scenarios, and the entire process felt very secure to me because he understood both the accounting and the technology sides."

By integrating Sage Intacct with Bloomerang, Seeding Justice can code donations and transaction fees separately in the general ledger, tagging their funding sources. Before DataBlend, it was a manual process that took a significant amount of time and effort, not to mention riddled with errors. "The entire process used to take 10 to 15 hours. It was also tough to locate mistakes made by a bookkeeper when revenue was incorrectly allocated due to manual data entry. After implementing DataBlend, errors and time have been reduced significantly. It now takes 4 to 5 hours."

Conclusion

Seeding Justice overcame growth and donor management challenges with DataBlend. Looking ahead, Seeding Justice remains committed to leveraging technology and innovation to drive efficiency and spend time more strategically. "We are a small foundation without an IT person for a few more years, but thanks to DataBlend, we don't require one for our finance and accounting integrations."

Seeding Justice Scales for Growth with DataBlend

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