The Common Grant Application is a hosted solution. The grantmaker and applicant do not need to buy, install, support or maintain any hardware or software. The only requirement to use the system is that a user has access to a Web browser. We maintain and support the hardware and software on our server(s) as needed.
All a user needs to access and use our system is a Web browser. We maintain and support the hardware and software on our server(s) as needed. No software, database schema, or Web page customizations are manually performed to setup an account. Accounts are managed and maintained by a Web-based interface. We do not customize our software for specific users although we do welcome suggestions from all of our users for ways to improve our system. Any changes or improvements we make to our system are available to all users of our system.
We only interact with one 3rd party through an API, and that is our payment processor. Our payment processor does not have access to any system information other than what is necessary to make a credit card charge. We push the information to them, they cannot pull any information from our system.
Support is offered during normal business hours (Monday through Friday between 8:00 - 5:00 PST). If a user needs support, we make it easy for them to communicate with us. We may be contacted by email or phone. We monitor email outside of normal business hours. We have found there is a minimal need for support. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain, and the site is designed for easy navigation and use.
We do not have any escalation procedures since all members of our company are informed of all bug reports and suggested feature enhancements.
Either our system is working, or it isn't. If it isn't, our target is to restore service as quickly as possible. There is not discrimination between users, all users reside on the same system and as such if we have an outage, all users will experience the outage.
Either we've fixed a problem or we haven't. If we have then we've identified the root cause. We do not consider problems fixed unless we have identified and can explain the root cause.
We do not have a formal change management process. Like our training and support model, if you have a feature or change you would like to see in our system, call or email. We'll talk to you about it, and if it makes sense and we have the resources, we'll commit to implementing and deploying the suggested feature or change.
We do not publish a schedule of upcoming changes. We use the agile software development model. We deploy new features, enhancements and fixes on an ongoing basis as they become available and after they have been thoroughly tested. Deployment of new upgrades and updates is done without affecting the service availability of our production system (i.e., our system architecture allows us to update the software and database on a running system).
All application data in our system is easily exportable by grantmakers into CSV files.