Overview

Each year the amount of grants made available by government agencies, corporations, and philanthropic foundations increases; so does the number of businesses and individuals looking to apply for these finance opportunities to help bring their ideas to life. Since not many people have the talent to navigate the grant application process themselves, the demand for professional grant consultants is also growing.

With a full-time team of 25 experienced grant writers and support personnel, Millennium Strategies is the largest grants consulting firm in the Tri-State area, securing $700m in funding for critical projects through federal, state, county, corporate, and philanthropic grant programs.

Millennium needed a way of streamlining their project management workflow to process an ever-increasing number of grant applications more efficiently.

Millennium’s staff had been using Teamwork as their basic project management tool, combined with Excel for analyzing spreadsheets, Word for writing memos and reports, and Outlook for emailing grant opportunities to clients, copied from Word.

The brief was to build a customized project management tool that would “converge” and streamline current systems and processes for internal client record-keeping and external client communications into one simple, integrated, and searchable tool optimized for how Millennium operates. Millennium staff would understand it as: “Teamwork that creates a memo and links to Outlook.”

Blood & Treasure was recommended to Millennium by another client of ours. We were tasked initially with creating the design and technical blueprints for the platform, and then when the blueprints were complete and it was clear how long the platform would take to build, and how much it would cost, we were commissioned for the full scope of work.

The frontend was fairly straightforward to build. A priority was an easy-to-navigate UX so that there would only be a short learning curve for users, coming as they were from a fairly complicated workflow earlier.

Encrypting 3rd party logins stored on the server proved crucial. It would be particularly bad practice to store them unencrypted. You always want to keep things up to date and avoid a breach, but if one does happen it's much worse if the damage spreads beyond your own platform and affects others. So we were mindful of building in a high standard of security.

Another security enhancement was to implement AWS Simple Email Service (SES) which includes its own private VPC (private network) rather than using Sendgrid or Mailchimp. This allows all email communications relating to potential grant opportunities to go through Millennium's private network so those messages are not as prone to being intercepted.

It is also more efficient because the API EC2 server within the same VPC is communicating directly with SES.

Our team completed the project in 10 weeks, fully tested and ready for rollout to Millennium’s staff. We are currently adding additional functionality and building out the Millennium workflow management platform.