How to Move Your Grant Management Off Salesforce (And What to Use Instead)

Moving your grant management off Salesforce does not have to mean leaving Salesforce entirely. For many organisations, the right answer is to run a purpose-built grant management platform for new grant rounds while keeping Salesforce exactly where it already works well — managing donor relationships, fundraising pipelines, and organisational CRM data. The two systems connect via API, your Salesforce administrator is freed from maintaining a complex grants configuration, and you get grant-specific features that no amount of OmniStudio configuration will give you out of the box.

If you are reading this, you have probably already experienced one or more of the central frustrations: implementation partner bills that ran higher than expected, a grants configuration that only one person in your organisation fully understands, UK compliance requirements that Salesforce simply does not address natively, or a growing sense that the tool you are maintaining every week was not really built for what you are asking it to do. Those frustrations are well-founded. Salesforce is an exceptional CRM. It was not designed to be a grant management system.

This guide sets out a practical path forward — whether you want to move only the grants function while keeping Salesforce for CRM, or whether you want to exit Salesforce entirely. It covers the integration approach, what you gain and lose in each scenario, how to build the business case internally, and what a migration actually involves.

Why Salesforce disappoints in grants — even when it seemed like the obvious choice

Salesforce is one of the most capable platforms in enterprise software. Its CRM is genuinely powerful, its reporting tools are among the best in the market, and its AppExchange ecosystem means there is an integration or add-on for almost anything you need. For organisations already running fundraising, donor management, and stakeholder relationships on Salesforce, adding grants to the same system seems logical: one source of truth, no data silos, no re-keying between systems.

The problem surfaces during and after implementation. Salesforce was designed around managing sales pipelines and customer relationships. The data model, interface, and default workflows reflect that origin. Grant management requires a fundamentally different set of processes: online application intake, external reviewer portals, assessment panels, grant agreements with signing workflows, milestone-based disbursement schedules, monitoring reports, and impact data collection. None of these exist out of the box in Salesforce. Every one requires configuration.

The newer "Nonprofit Cloud for Grantmaking" offering, released in 2024, uses OmniStudio — Salesforce's low-code development toolset — to deliver more structured grant workflows. This is a genuine improvement on the previous approach, but it still requires OmniStudio licences, OmniStudio expertise, and significant configuration time before you have something that looks like a functional grant management system.

The result is a grants implementation that is genuinely dependent on specialist knowledge to maintain. When your Salesforce administrator leaves, when Salesforce releases a platform update, or when your grants programme evolves and you need to change a workflow, you are either relying on one person's institutional knowledge or paying an external consultant several hundred pounds a day to make the change. That dependency does not reduce over time — it accumulates.

This is not a reason to dismiss Salesforce. It is a reason to be clear-eyed about where it fits in your technology architecture.

The key distinction: replacing the grants function vs leaving Salesforce entirely

Before doing anything, it is worth establishing what you actually want to change.

Option A: Move grant management off Salesforce, keep Salesforce for CRM and fundraising. This is the right choice for most organisations that have real investment in Salesforce as a donor and relationship CRM. Your fundraising data, major donor records, event management, and stakeholder relationships stay where they are. You add a dedicated grant management platform and connect it to Salesforce via API, so that organisation and contact records stay in sync between the two systems. Your grants team gets purpose-built tools. Your Salesforce administrator is no longer responsible for maintaining grant workflows.

Option B: Leave Salesforce entirely. This is the right choice for organisations whose primary use of Salesforce is grants management, with limited genuine CRM use — or for organisations where the overhead of maintaining two systems exceeds the value of the CRM integration. It requires a more substantial migration but simplifies your technology architecture considerably.

The table below captures the key differences:

The integration path: run a dedicated platform alongside Salesforce

If you are keeping Salesforce for CRM, the cleanest approach is additive: stand up a dedicated grant management platform for your next grant round, connect it to Salesforce via API, and prove the value before changing anything in your existing Salesforce configuration.

This approach has several practical advantages. First, it removes the risk of disrupting live grant programmes — you are adding a new system, not migrating mid-programme. Second, it allows your grants team to work in purpose-built tools immediately, without waiting for Salesforce to be reconfigured. Third, it demonstrates value to stakeholders before any Salesforce costs are reduced or roles are changed.

In practice, the integration looks like this:

• Organisation and contact records are the primary sync point. When a charity applies through your grant platform, the platform checks whether that organisation already exists in Salesforce (via Companies House number or Charity Commission number) and either creates a new record or links to the existing one.
• Grant awards and payment records can be written back to Salesforce as opportunity or custom object records, so your fundraising team's view of total organisational relationships includes grant history.
• Contact data — trustee names, primary contacts, addresses — stays in sync on a scheduled or event-triggered basis depending on what your Salesforce setup supports.

What does not need to sync: application forms, reviewer assessments, grant agreements, monitoring reports, and impact data. These live in the grant management platform and do not need to be replicated in Salesforce. Trying to sync everything creates maintenance overhead with limited benefit.

Platforms like Plinth are designed to work this way — as a dedicated grants layer that connects to your CRM rather than replacing it. The API integration means your Salesforce administrator is not responsible for the grants function, but the data relationship is preserved.

What a purpose-built grant platform does that Salesforce configuration cannot

This is the substantive argument for moving the grants function out of Salesforce, and it is worth being specific about the capabilities involved rather than relying on abstractions.

UK compliance checks built in. Salesforce has no native integration with the Charity Commission register, Companies House, or the OFSI consolidated sanctions list. UK funders running due diligence on applicants must source these checks separately — either through a third-party integration or manual process. A purpose-built UK grant management platform runs these checks automatically as part of the application workflow: Charity Commission status and filing history, Companies House director records, and OFSI sanctions screening, all logged to the grant record with a timestamped audit trail. See our guide to automating due diligence for what this involves in practice.

AI-assisted application assessment. Einstein AI, Salesforce's AI layer, provides generic text summarisation and record suggestions. It does not understand the structure of a grant application, the assessment criteria of a grant round, or how to score applications consistently against a funder's priorities. Dedicated platforms are building AI capabilities that are grantmaking-specific: reading applications against stated criteria, surfacing key evidence for reviewers, flagging concerns, drafting reviewer feedback, and generating funder impact reports from monitoring data. These capabilities are available now and deploy without configuration overhead. See AI for Funders for a fuller picture of what is possible.

Faster deployment. A Salesforce Grants Management implementation typically takes three to six months, and complex OmniStudio configurations can run longer. Purpose-built platforms deploy in weeks. For organisations with live grant rounds, this is a significant practical difference.

Grant-specific workflows out of the box. External reviewer portals, digital grant agreements with signing workflows, milestone-based payment schedules, monitoring templates, KPI tracking, and grantee-facing portals are standard features in dedicated grant management platforms. In Salesforce, each of these requires configuration — which takes time, creates technical debt, and must be maintained when requirements change.

Lower administrative burden. The ongoing cost of Salesforce is not just the licence. It is the Salesforce administrator who makes configuration changes, troubleshoots issues, builds reports, and manages updates. A dedicated grant management platform is designed to be managed by programme officers, not technical administrators.

If you are keeping Salesforce for CRM: what connects, what stays separate

With a dedicated grant platform running alongside Salesforce, you need clarity about what data lives where and what flows between the systems.

Lives in Salesforce:

• Donor and major gift relationships
• Fundraising pipelines and campaign management
• Board and trustee relationship records
• Event management and stakeholder engagement history
• Any existing CRM reporting and dashboards built around these functions

Lives in the grant management platform:

• Grant round design and eligibility criteria
• Application forms and submitted applications
• Due diligence and compliance check records
• Reviewer assignments and assessment notes
• Grant agreements and signing records
• Payment schedules and disbursement history
• Monitoring reports and KPI data
• Impact reporting outputs

Synced between systems:

• Organisation records (matched on Companies House or Charity Commission number)
• Contact records for primary grant contacts
• Grant award summary records (optional write-back to Salesforce for consolidated relationship view)

The integration does not need to be complex. For most organisations, a scheduled sync of organisation and contact data, combined with an event-triggered record creation on award, is sufficient. More sophisticated real-time bidirectional sync is possible via API but is rarely necessary for the grants function.

If you are leaving Salesforce entirely: what to migrate, what to archive, what to lose

A full exit from Salesforce requires more planning but delivers a simpler long-term architecture.

What to migrate:

• Active grant records and their status (in review, awarded, monitoring, closed)
• Organisation and contact records that are relevant to live or recent grants
• Payment history and financial records for live grants
• Any grant agreements that are still within their active or monitoring period

What to archive rather than migrate:

• Historical grants that are closed and past their monitoring period
• Old application data from concluded rounds where you are not likely to need it in a new system
• Salesforce-specific reports and dashboards (extract these as PDFs or spreadsheets before decommissioning)

What you lose:

• Einstein AI capabilities — though these are generic rather than grants-specific
• The Salesforce AppExchange ecosystem, including any integrations you have built
• Consolidated CRM and grants reporting in a single interface, if your fundraising team also used Salesforce
• Any bespoke automation built in Salesforce Flow that has no direct equivalent in the new system

For organisations that have been using Salesforce primarily or exclusively for grants, the list of genuine losses is usually shorter than it appears. Most Salesforce-specific AI and ecosystem features are only valuable in the context of a broader Salesforce investment. If grants is the primary use case, you are not losing much that mattered.

Data export from Salesforce is straightforward via its built-in data export tools (CSV export at the object level, or a full backup). Most dedicated grant management platforms can import from CSV with reasonable field mapping tools.

Building the internal case: cost and time-to-value

The internal case for this change is primarily a cost and efficiency argument, and it is worth being specific rather than relying on vague claims about "simplification."

Direct cost comparison:

A Salesforce Grants Management implementation typically involves: Nonprofit Cloud licence costs (per user, per year, priced on application); OmniStudio licences if using the newer grantmaking offering; implementation partner fees, which typically range from $20,000 to $100,000 or more for a complex configuration; and ongoing Salesforce administrator cost — whether an internal hire or external consultant at several hundred pounds per day. For organisations not already carrying these costs, this is a significant investment before a single application is submitted.

A dedicated grant management platform has a substantially different cost profile: a predictable subscription based on grant volume or users, minimal implementation overhead (weeks rather than months, often with in-house configuration), and no specialist administrator dependency for routine changes.

Time-to-value:

A Salesforce grants configuration that takes five months to implement carries a five-month opportunity cost. During that time, applications may be managed on spreadsheets, due diligence may be manual, and programme officers are not working in the system they will ultimately use. Purpose-built platforms that deploy in weeks reduce this cost significantly — particularly for organisations with grant rounds that cannot wait for a long implementation.

The admin dependency argument:

The strongest internal argument is often the ongoing Salesforce administrator dependency. If your organisation is paying for a Salesforce administrator whose primary function is maintaining the grants configuration, that cost does not reduce over time — it compounds as the configuration becomes more complex. Moving the grants function to a dedicated platform that programme officers can manage directly removes that dependency. Your Salesforce administrator, if you retain Salesforce for CRM, can focus on the functions Salesforce genuinely does well.

Migration plan and timeline

A realistic migration for an organisation moving grant management to a dedicated platform while retaining Salesforce for CRM looks like this:

Weeks 1–2: Scoping and platform selection Identify your current Salesforce grants configuration — which objects, flows, and reports are grants-specific versus shared with CRM functions. Select a dedicated grant management platform and confirm the API integration approach with both vendors. Plinth's free tier allows you to evaluate the platform before committing to a paid plan.

Weeks 3–4: Platform configuration Configure the new platform for your grant programme: set up application forms, eligibility criteria, assessment workflows, and reviewer access. Configure due diligence settings (Charity Commission, Companies House, OFSI). This is typically done by programme officers with platform support, not a technical implementation team.

Weeks 5–6: Integration setup Establish the API connection between the grant platform and Salesforce for organisation and contact record sync. Test with a sample of existing organisation records. Confirm the field mapping and sync frequency.

Week 7: Parallel running and review Run the new platform alongside your existing Salesforce configuration for a short period — ideally against an upcoming grant round rather than a live one. Review the integration outputs and confirm that records are syncing correctly.

Week 8+: Go live with new grant rounds Open your next grant round on the new platform. Existing grants in progress can continue to be managed in Salesforce until they close, or you can migrate them to the new platform depending on their stage and complexity.

Ongoing: Wind down Salesforce grants configuration As existing grants conclude, progressively retire the Salesforce grants configuration. Archive data as described above. Retain Salesforce for CRM functions only.

For organisations choosing a full Salesforce exit, add two to three weeks for data export, field mapping, and import into the new platform, plus a parallel-running period before decommissioning Salesforce licences.

FAQ

Do I have to migrate all my existing grant data to move forward?

No. The cleanest approach is to start using the new platform for all new grant rounds while allowing existing grants to run to completion in Salesforce. Active grants mid-monitoring do not need to be migrated immediately. Historical data can be archived from Salesforce rather than migrated, unless you have a specific reason to need it in the new system.

Can a dedicated grant management platform actually connect to Salesforce?

Yes. Most modern grant management platforms expose an API that allows for synchronisation of organisation and contact records with Salesforce. The integration is typically configured by mapping fields between the two systems — Companies House or Charity Commission number is usually the key that matches records. The scope of the sync (what data flows in which direction) is configurable. Plinth is designed to work alongside Salesforce in this way.

Will we lose the Salesforce reporting we have built for grants?

Salesforce's reporting and dashboard capabilities are genuinely strong. You will lose the ability to run reports that join grants data with CRM data in a single Salesforce report — though you can replicate most grant-specific reporting in the new platform. If consolidated cross-CRM reporting is important, a data warehouse or BI tool (connecting to both systems) is a more sustainable approach than maintaining complex Salesforce grants configuration to enable it.

What happens to our Salesforce Power of Us licences?

The Power of Us programme provides 10 free Sales or Service Cloud licences to qualifying nonprofits. These licences are for the CRM functions — they are not grants-specific and remain valid if you keep Salesforce for donor management and fundraising. Removing the Nonprofit Cloud Grants Management configuration does not affect them.

How long does it take to set up a purpose-built grant platform?

Most purpose-built platforms can be configured and ready for a live grant round in two to four weeks for a standard programme. Complex multi-programme setups take longer, but rarely approach the three-to-six-month timelines of a full Salesforce grants implementation. Plinth's free tier lets you begin configuration immediately without a procurement process.

Is it possible to keep Salesforce and use a dedicated grant platform without duplicating data?

Yes, and avoiding duplication is exactly the point of the API integration. Organisation and contact records are held primarily in Salesforce (as the system of record for relationships) and synced to the grant platform on a scheduled basis. Grant-specific data — applications, assessments, agreements, monitoring — lives only in the grant platform and is not replicated in Salesforce. The integration keeps the two systems connected without creating two parallel copies of the same information.

What UK-specific features should I look for in a Salesforce alternative for grants?

The minimum requirements for UK funders are: integration with the Charity Commission register for status and filing history verification; Companies House checks for company-type applicants; OFSI sanctions screening; and data processing that meets UK GDPR requirements. Beyond compliance, look for a platform that handles grant agreements (including digital signing), monitoring and KPI tracking, and impact reporting. See the grant management systems comparison for a full view of the market.

Recommended next pages

• Salesforce Grants Management Review: Is Nonprofit Cloud Right for Funders? — A detailed, honest assessment of Salesforce's grants capabilities and true costs
• Grant Management Systems Compared: Fluxx, Submittable, Foundant, SmartSimple and More — Side-by-side comparison of the major alternatives
• How to Automate Due Diligence in Grantmaking — UK compliance checks (Charity Commission, Companies House, OFSI) in practice
• AI for Funders: The Future of Grantmaking — What AI-assisted assessment and impact reporting actually look like
• Plinth Grant Management Features — How Plinth works as a Salesforce complement or standalone replacement

Last updated: February 2026