Where Brightleaf Giving Started
Brightleaf Giving is a platform providing fiscal sponsorship structure for organizations to give grants to qualifying individuals. They facilitate the raising and disbursement of $2.8 million in grants from gross donations, across over 2,000 grants annually.
Before Crowded, this high-volume, high-impact grant disbursement process was done 100% manually. The small team was wasting precious hours manually onboarding grantees, inputting recipients’ account and routing numbers one-by-one, and dealing with numerous support requests of “why can’t I see my grant yet?” Boruch, the CEO and sole account signatory, was needing to personally spend 2-3 hours a day on grant disbursements.
Once Boruch heard about Crowded’s public API for grantmaking account structure, bulk money movement, and payment processing, implementing Crowded was a no-brainer.
How Brightleaf Giving integrated Crowded to automate grant disbursement
As the Brightleaf Giving team integrated Crowded’s API into their tech stack, they started automating the once overly manual process and enjoying the benefits of streamlined, integrated platforms.
Automated Grant Disbursals
Grant disbursals are now triggered automatically as part of the grantee onboarding process through the Crowded API. The campaign manager submits a disbursal request, and Brightleaf Giving’s software evaluates the request; if it is granted, the API calls Crowded to create and fund a Per Diem account for the specified recipient.
The entire process is automated – there is no manual work required to send grants to recipients.
Per Diem Accounts for Grant Recipients
Instead of sending an ACH transfer to the recipient’s bank account, Brightleaf Giving utilizes Crowded’s Per Diem accounts. These accounts are nested underneath the grantmaking organization and are individual for each grant recipient.
Because the grant payment is made within the Crowded ecosystem, the payout is internal and instant – meaning grantees get paid faster, and there are no bounced or lost payments. The recipient can spend the funds freely with a dedicated digital debit card, track their spending and grants received from a user-friendly mobile app.
Buying back the CEO's time from 2-3 hours to 5 minutes a day saved us thousands of dollars on projects that we would have outsourced, or that would have stayed on our backlog for months.
Integrated Payment Processing
Brightleaf Giving offers custom donation pages to their campaign managers and fiscal sponsored projects. By implementing Crowded’s payment processing in these pages, they further simplify the money movement for these organizations and themselves. By collecting and disbursing the funds in the same platform, they avoid payout delays and fees that other processing platforms may incur. They also use the rich metadata provided by the Crowded Collect API to improve donation rates (i.e. captured decline reasons trigger donor follow-up sequences).
Easier Grant Tracking Reporting
The purpose of each grant, whether it is a stipend, scholarship, repayment, etc., and which campaign it belongs to is clearly designated in Crowded. This makes it easy for Brightleaf and the grantmaking organizations to filter, sort, track their grant activity, and report on it. When it comes to year-end reporting, the data is already present, annotated, and easily accessible.
