Executive summary

The Find Your Light Foundation (FYLF) faced growth challenges due to its reliance on manual paper processes, Google Forms, and physical board books while trying to scale its arts education funding. By adopting Temelio’s purpose-built grants intelligence platform, the foundation's small but mighty team radically improved their operational efficiency, centralized their data, and exponentially increased their impact without adding administrative overhead.

• 3x more applications processed: Tripled the number of applications processed by the foundation to accommodate a surge in demand.
• 450 grants awarded in two years: More than doubled their historical output, scaling from 100 grants per year to 450 grants in just two years on the platform.
• ~65 multi-year grants: Enabled the administration of multi-year grants, awarding three-year grants for the first time in the foundation’s history.
• 4 active board reviewers: Provided an intuitive, centralized system that empowered all board members to easily log in and directly review grants alongside the staff.

Foundation overview

Founded by musician Josh Groban in 2004, FYLF operates with a distinct mission: to ensure that every child across America has equitable access to high-quality arts education. To bring this vision to life, FYLF provides direct financial support to exceptional arts programs spanning theatre, dance, music, photography, visual art, and creative writing.

They concentrate their grantmaking on underprivileged and underserved communities, stepping in where arts education programs are frequently the first to be reduced or eliminated due to funding cuts. 

Over the past 20+ years, the organization has awarded $7.5 million across 450 organizations, benefiting over 1 million students nationwide.

Despite its large national footprint and ambitious mission, the foundation is run by a small team, led by Executive Director Jeffrey Dollinger. Recent federal and state cuts to arts education and a shift in post-pandemic philanthropy from arts education to social services resulted in the foundation experiencing a record-breaking surge in applications. To manage this exponential growth without expanding its team, the foundation needed to overhaul its legacy administrative processes and embrace efficient grantmaking technology.

The challenge: High grant demand outpacing manual processes

As Find Your Light Foundation sought to expand its impact, its existing administrative workflows presented a bottleneck to growth. Before adopting a modern system, their grant process relied on Google Forms, which staff had to manually print and synthesize into physical board books for review.

This manual system was already challenged under a volume of 100-160 applications annually. With a rapidly growing pipeline and a lean staff, leadership knew this process couldn’t support future scale. To grow, they needed a unified, digital workspace for staff and board members to evaluate data simultaneously.

At the same time, the foundation wanted to unify grants record-keeping and correspondence in one place to help their fundraising and storytelling efforts. Because grantee data was scattered across multiple systems, synthesizing historical impact or gathering details for fundraising case studies proved labor- and time-intensive.

The challenges of these traditional processes were undeniable:

• Manual processing: Staff spent valuable time printing applications and assembling physical board books to prepare for reviews, instead of reviewing applications, fundraising, advocacy work, and marketing the foundation.
• Fragmented record-keeping: Grantee histories, communications, and site visit notes were scattered across spreadsheets and individual Google Drives, making it challenging to utilize past grant information and applications for returning grantee reviews.
• Inefficient storytelling: Compiling case studies for fundraising required manually sifting through those dispersed files.

The solution: A purpose-built grants intelligence system

When evaluating new software, Jeffrey Dollinger drew on his experience as a seasoned nonprofit manager, fundraiser, and grant writer to select a system that eliminated common pain points for FYLF’s grantees. After reviewing multiple options, Find Your Light chose Temelio in part because it was a purpose-built grants intelligence platform rather than an ancillary plugin added to a massive fundraising database.

Temelio stood out for several reasons:

• Purpose-built for foundations: Unlike generic databases or modified fundraising CRMs, the software was explicitly designed from the ground up for the specific workflows of grantmaking.
• A positive grantee experience: The foundation would no longer have to ask for ancillary forms to get 990s or manually conduct Charity Checks, since that functionality was built into Temelio. Plus, document storage and the notes feature empower them to form deeper grantee relationships.
• Affordability: Temelio provided significant value and powerful features at a price point that made sense for a family foundation.
• Simple interface: The intuitive layout made it easy for board members—whose primary expertise is outside of database management—to quickly learn the system and access must-know information.
• Exceptional customer service: The Temelio team proved to be highly responsive, not just for troubleshooting, but for taking direct feedback and rapidly implementing system upgrades.

“[Temelio] would blow everyone else out of the water to begin with just because you're nimble, you're responsive, you care, and you understand what our pain points are. You also take feedback and quickly and frequently implement upgrades to the system, which is huge.” — Jeffrey Dollinger, Executive Director of the Find Your Light Foundation

The results: Exponential growth and deeper trust-based philanthropy

Since implementing Temelio, the Find Your Light Foundation has successfully absorbed a massive increase in demand without expanding its staff. With Temelio, they have not only scaled the number of applications processed and grants awarded, but also transformed how they manage and support their ongoing grantee relationships.

Below, Jeffrey expands on the impact Temelio had on the foundation.

Scaled grant processing volume

Temelio allowed the foundation to handle an unprecedented surge in applications. The foundation tripled the number of applications it processed and more than doubled the number of grants it awarded.

• The impact: “Before, if we did a hundred [grants] a year, that was a huge year for us… We’re able to have significantly more volume with the exact same staffing that we’ve had and the exact same aggressive fundraising goals and marketing goals and everything else.”

Introduction of multi-year grants

The system’s robust administrative capabilities empowered the foundation to offer multi-year financial stability to long-term grantees for the first time.

• The impact: "I'll tell you the other thing that Temelio’s powerful platform allowed us to consider – and that is awarding multi-year grants. This year, we are proud to have awarded over 60 three-year grants that are now in the system."

Centralized document management

Temelio’s document and notes features gave the foundation a streamlined way to track ongoing relationships and compile stories for fundraising and marketing purposes.

• The impact: “I get all kinds of grantee correspondence – thank you letters, mid-year updates, site visit details, and grantee newsletters that help inform our marketing, strategy, and future grant-making. So I use the document and notes features every day.”

Unburdening grantees

By automating compliance checks and data entry, Temelio enables the foundation to practice trust-based philanthropy by making the application process as pain-free as possible for arts organizations. Plus, the grantee portal makes it easy for applicants to see where their application stands, view current opportunities, and more.

• The impact: "Now, because of Temelio with Candid, that takes a further burden off of what the grantee needs to provide. We really just want them to tell us the magic of their approach to arts education and the importance of their services to their communities, so they can spend less time on grant writing and more time on their great work."

About the Author

Maya Kuppermann is the Co-Founder and CEO of Temelio, a modern grants management platform built for small and mid-sized foundations and philanthropic organizations. With experience spanning nonprofit leadership, family philanthropy, and technology, Maya brings a practitioner’s perspective to building software that simplifies and strengthens grantmaking. She has worked closely with over one hundred funders to modernize their operations and improve the grantee experience. Maya is passionate about leveraging technology to increase the effectiveness and accessibility of philanthropy.