Otto Bremer Trust: Modernizing Grantmaking with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Otto Bremer Trust, a long-time Salesforce foundation partner, worked with Fíonta to migrate from a legacy platform to a future-ready, fully customized system for grantmaking with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.

Otto Bremer Trust (OBT) is a private philanthropic organization based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, dedicated to supporting communities across Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. OBT’s grantmaking is intentional and relationship-driven: an invite-only model focused on deeper investments. In addition to traditional grants, OBT deploys Program-Related Investments (PRIs) or low-interest loans to nonprofits. PRIs are an increasingly sophisticated tool that demands financial-institution-level systems on top of a grantmaking platform.

Why OBT Came to Fíonta

OBT had long relied on foundationConnect for grantmaking operations, but years of accumulated technical debt, combined with Salesforce’s announcement of foundationConnect’s retirement, made the path forward clear. Simultaneously, OBT was evolving its strategy: shifting from a broad portfolio of many smaller grants to concentrated, high-impact investments in a smaller number of organizations. The moment called for a modern foundation, not just a platform swap. OBT turned to Fíonta, their long-standing Salesforce partner, to lead the migration to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC) Grantmaking and reimagine how their systems support their mission.

Challenges

Moving to NPC Grantmaking gave OBT a chance to rethink several key areas of its operations, including:

• Legacy technical debt: Custom Apex code and complex workarounds built before modern Salesforce Flow tools had left the system brittle and hard to maintain.
• PRI loan management: NPC Grantmaking is designed for outbound disbursements rather than incoming repayments, interest accrual, or amortization schedules.
• Docket management: OBT’s core workflow for grouping grants into Trustee review packages had no equivalent in NPC and needed to be rebuilt.
• Geographic attribution: OBT allocates funding by region, defined groupings of counties, a nuance Salesforce’s standard address fields couldn’t support automatically.
• Selective portal access: Grant visibility in the grantee portal needed to be controlled at the individual grant level, not just by organization.
• Document generation: High-volume generation of grant agreements, promissory notes, and Trustee meeting materials all needed to be rearchitected for the new data model.
• Manual scheduling: Report due dates and disbursement schedules were tracked manually, with no automated reminders or visibility.

Our Work Together

Fíonta led OBT through a full NPC Grantmaking implementation, including discovery, data architecture, build, testing, and go-live, to design a system that replicates what existed while establishing a sustainable foundation for growth.

PRI Loan Management

Our team built a custom amortization calculator inside Salesforce. This Screen Flow generates a full repayment schedule with principal and interest, replacing manual Excel calculations. Conga Sign was configured to generate and circulate promissory notes for e-signature, with automated notifications to borrowers at key milestones.

Conga Document Generation

Fíonta re-architected OBT’s full Conga suite, including grant agreements, promissory notes, and Trustee docket reports, to align with the NPC data model while preserving the formats staff and grantees rely on.

Compliant Data Sharing for the Grantee Portal

Fíonta implemented Salesforce’s Compliant Data Sharing for the first time in their NPC practice, leveraging and customizing that base feature to build exactly the security framework Otto Bremer Trust requested, giving them full design control during the build process. Fíonta then went further, building custom logic so grantee organizations can delegate access to their own colleagues, enabling carefully controlled and transparent grant access to portal users on a day-to-day basis after go-live, putting day-to-day permission management in grantees’ hands. This reflects Fíonta’s broader ability to elicit and then meet each client’s unique portal security requirements. 

Automated County and Region Attribution

When a grantee address is entered, Salesforce makes an automated callout to an external geographic database to identify the county, then applies internal logic to assign the correct OBT region, eliminating manual lookups entirely.

Report and Disbursement Scheduling

Fíonta configured automated scheduling so that upon award, expected disbursement dates and grantee report deadlines are generated in Salesforce automatically, with proactive email reminders to grantees as deadlines approach.

Dockets

Fíonta created a custom “Docket” object and automations to fill a feature gap in NPC Grantmaking, grouping applications and awards for Trustee review, generating formatted meeting materials via Conga, and recording funding decisions in NPC’s standard objects.

Fíonta doesn’t just implement Salesforce — they understand how foundations work. That depth of knowledge made all the difference on a project as complex as ours. — Otto Bremer Trust

Outcomes

The new system brings improvements across nearly every part of OBT’s grantmaking operations, including:

• Years of technical debt were replaced with a clean, Flow-based configuration on a native Salesforce data model in a system that is far easier to maintain and extend.
• PRI loan operations moved fully into Salesforce, replacing manual spreadsheet processes with an automated, accurate, and auditable workflow.
• Grant-level portal access controlled at scale, with grantees managing their own delegated permissions and reducing administrative burden on OBT staff.
• County and region attribution is automated, supporting OBT’s regional reporting and fund allocation without manual data entry.
• Report and disbursement timelines are fully automated, freeing staff to focus on relationships rather than logistics.
• Core Trustee and docket workflows were preserved and modernized, with a cleaner interface tailored for the Trustees’ oversight role.
• A better grantee experience: the new Experience Cloud portal replaces foundationConnect’s dated interface with a modern, navigable self-service environment.

About Fíonta

Fíonta is a Salesforce consulting partner specializing in nonprofits, foundations, and associations. We help foundations navigate the full complexity of modern philanthropy, from platform migrations to custom-built tools that reflect how your organization actually works. Ready to modernize your grantmaking? Drop us a quick line and we’ll respond shortly.