Here’s a thought: What if we had a platform for nonprofit grant writing like the online Common App that colleges and universities have adopted with such great success? That was similar to the initial inspiration for my guest on this episode of What the Fundraising, Gauri Manglik. Gauri is the CEO and Co-founder of Instrumentl, a platform that brings grant discovery, research, and tracking to one place. With Instrumentl, development staff are more effective and efficient at finding the right grants for their nonprofits and in this episode, she talks about the journey to creating this powerful tool and a lot of lessons and insights she gathered along the way. 

Gauri challenges nonprofits to integrate a more data-driven, tech-inspired orientation, while also offering important advice for startups that aren’t quite there yet. I love that she talks about who is and who ISN’T right for Instrumentl - alignment is everything and it’s clear that Gauri doesn’t just want more organizations on her platform, she wants the right organizations on her platform. We touch on Instrumentl’s functionality, which includes robust prospecting, calendaring, collaboration, and tracking tools. Gauri shares thoughts on building blocks nonprofits want to have in place before focusing on grant writing in a significant way, including establishing baseline traction as an entity and adopting an empowerment mindset. We also talk about why metrics aren’t robust enough in the nonprofit space and how a commitment to leveraging a more data-driven approach can yield payoff in terms of conversion rates, and help identify formulas, and the right levers to pull.

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Please note: This episode is a part of a very special series called The People Behind the Products. More than ever, nonprofits care about the company behind their technology and service providers. What’s the underlying mission and vision of the company? What do they stand for? And how are they thinking about the sector and serving nonprofits? This series is an opportunity to get to know some of my favorite nonprofit technology companies so that the next time you’re making a tech decision, you can understand a little bit more about the people behind the product. There is no sponsorship or industry money behind the production of this series and the editorial content was at the sole discretion of the What the Fundraising team.