Tell us about your role at the Robins Foundation.
I'm the Director of Organizational Learning and Operations. I've been with Robins Foundation for nine years and worn a lot of hats along the way. I run our grants management, manage a couple of capacity-building partnerships for nonprofits outside our core focus areas, and handle budgeting, HR, benefits, board meetings, and our technology needs.
Tell us about the foundation's mission.
Robins Foundation was established in 1955 and was significantly funded in 1995. We focus our grant-making within the Richmond region with focus areas in early childhood care and education, and “dynamic community;” things like green spaces, public events, and local journalism, which make our region a better place to live.
What does your grantmaking process look like?
We run five distinct grant programs. Our largest early childhood grant program, SPARK, runs twice a year through GOapply with a two-phase process: an eligibility quiz and pre-grant questions, followed by a required conversation with our program staff before the full application opens up. SEED grants support early childhood settings specifically. Mini Grants are invitation-only and support emergent and capacity-building needs. Our Dynamic Community grant program is invitation-only and is a mostly upload-based application. Lastly, our board members have limited funds to support organizations through grants. akoyaGO's GOfund made that possible in a way our previous system couldn't, which was actually one of the biggest reasons we decided to make the switch.
How has GOapply changed things day to day?
It's saved an enormous amount of time, from a few different angles. Our old system required editing individual HTML fields one at a time, and changes to one application could unintentionally affect others. GOapply's form builder is a completely different experience, quick to set up and just as quick to update. On the grantee side, we've heard directly that people find it simpler and more intuitive than what we used before. And most of our staff don't even need to go into GOapply itself, since they work inside the main akoyaGO system.
What about record keeping?
This has probably been the single biggest quality-of-life change. We used to save emails as PDFs just to keep some kind of record tied to a grant. Now, with the Dynamics plugin in Outlook, we can track emails directly to a request record in a couple of clicks. It's a huge time saver, and it means if a staff member leaves, the next person can see the full history on a request instead of starting from scratch.
Tell us about GOverify.
GOverify might be my favorite feature. We used to pay for a separate due diligence check, downloading and manually uploading confirmations twice a cycle. Now it just runs in the background with a banner right at the top of the record. Automating due diligence is exactly how an efficient grants management system should work.
What was it like introducing GOfund to your donors and board members?
Better than expected. Most of our board members had been wanting something like this for a while, since it gives them direct access to their grant history and balances instead of waiting for board meeting materials. We were one of the first private foundations to roll out GOfund. We do have one board member who still prefers email, so I use the impersonate feature to submit and record her grants on her behalf, which keeps her experience consistent with everyone else's.
What would you tell another foundation's operations team considering akoyaGO?
If your organization already runs on Microsoft 365, it's an easy recommendation. The Outlook integration and shared licensing make everything feel like one connected system rather than a patchwork of tools.
Any final thoughts on working with the akoyaGO team?
Our account manager, Sarah, has been an amazing resource for us, and I get a lot of great support on tickets from the support services team. Overall, the team has made this a genuinely good experience. We consistently feel grateful we made the switch!
Ameliea Dulaney brings more than seven years of marketing experience rooted entirely in the philanthropic sector. Her career began at a small nonprofit in her hometown, where a lifelong passion for mission-driven work and a natural gift for storytelling found their professional home. Over the years she built her expertise across multiple nonprofit organizations before transitioning into the foundation world, where she led marketing for a community foundation. That experience gave her a deep, firsthand understanding of how foundations operate, what they need, and how to communicate their impact. She joined akoyaGO to bring that perspective to the technology side of philanthropy, helping foundations do good better.
