Long before GiftedMatrix was built, our desire to create something that solved the problems we saw in digital processing fostered some simple ideas. With the industry moving away from individuals to massive blanket solutions that solved generic problems, we couldn’t quite shake our belief in people. A belief that people with the right platform for them can maximise their resources and deliver amazing things. With Gifted, we wanted to put the personal back into business. We wanted partners, not clients. And we wanted to provide these partners with an intelligent, enduring platform to grow and thrive on.
Creativity isn’t something often mentioned when dealing with digital processing best practices, and in some cases, for good reason. There are ways of doing things that are proven to be efficient. But that doesn’t mean they are exactly the same for everyone. We imagined giving people the backbone of best practice running through their organisation's structure but letting them move the rest of the body freely. GiftedMatrix wasn’t going to be built to encourage people to randomly change key underlying aspects of their systems away from the tried and tested. It was going to give them the power to keep their individuality, to be efficient and unique, and to be able to evolve application and organisation together.
So, we decided we needed to build a platform with the tools to solve problems rather than any general solution. We spent years creating this ‘toolkit’ to allow users to take full advantage of their ideas without being restricted by having to code them. A Business process management system that is accessible. Digital process automation that can be harnessed by anyone in minutes. And the flexibility to do it your way. That’s what we wanted to create; and as Gifted grows and develops, and we work with our partners to build and improve solutions to their digital processing problems with the unrivalled speed and customisability of no-code, we think we might just have managed it.
Our journey in building software for the NFP sector began over 30 years ago. Over the last three decades, we’ve had several products under several guises, and as our knowledge and experience has grown, so has our client base. Each iteration of our product solved new problems but also created new challenges. We journeyed from our initial idea of flexibility being key, through a shift to best practice and a focus on understanding processes deeply, eventually landing where we are now; at the intersection of both.
Our Gifted Solutions are a culmination of our work and experience over the past 30 years, offering a cloud-based fully flexible solution built on foundations of best practice. Where standard business rules are needed, you can plug them in, meaning legal, financial and best practice compliance is assured. They were developed in GiftedMatrix - our no-code configuration platform designed to simplify and streamline digital processes in an intuitive, fully cloud-native application - and are an extension of the GiftedMatrix toolkit. They are also hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform to give you 24/7 availability, security and robustness.
The beginning - Flexibility
Just over 30 years ago, we started thinking about creating dedicated software for charities and NFPs. At the time, specialised solutions were scarce, and those who were trying to come up with them instead landed on clunky generic databases with sales driven contact trackers and spreadsheets. It seemed like an impersonal blanket solution to a very specific problem and had the feel of another corporate and soulless answer – we thought we could do better.
Our first version of the product – alms for windows (1994) – was a hit. It was built to fill the void in the work of competitors; to be flexible to the needs of the industry. Users were able to configure their own screens, tables and views, and arrange them as they pleased. This flexibility became our hallmark, and with the release of Visual Alms (1997) 3 years later, we didn't just pile more features and capabilities on top but designed them specifically to be highly customisable.
To our delight, organisations seemed to like this more personal approach, and our client base grew. We began investing now serious sums of money, creating strategic relationships with some significant clients to understand the challenges they faced. We responded directly to their needs, and some fundamental principles were established – even picking up the odd award on the way! What we didn't foresee, however, was this flexibility bringing with it some confusion, where the interpretation of the best way to use it was varied and often inefficient. It became clear that there was no prominent framework to guide clients as to the best way to tackle processes.
Next up – Best Practice
As we grew, we wanted to harness the power of our customers' experience and expertise. We decided to have a more in-depth look at exactly what they were doing. We found everyday tasks and processes being performed in different ways under different names in different orders. Having put them under the microscope, we wanted to look past these differences and instead focus on collating the commonalities across our clients. This process of real analysis led to us diverging from the previous path of flexibility, with a new focus on maximising the efficiency of operations. Best Practice was the motto for alms.NET, our new on-premise client-server solution. We realised that by understanding processes deeply, we could provide precise and efficient solutions. Organisations like Unicef, Salvation Army and Mencap began using alms.NET to process millions of transactions for millions of supporters.
Where we are today – experience and back to flexibility
We'd done our time, and with this hard-earned experience behind us, felt that we could confidently look at developing a cloud-native solution. In designing our new product, we wanted to combine the flexibility of our alms software with the wealth of process knowledge accrued from our clients. We strived to provide complete 'configurability' and a framework for our clients to express their requirements through a toolkit. Enter GiftedMatrix – the no-code configuration platform for everyone. You can define data, forms and tables and orchestrate them to reflect your workflows. Where standard business rules are needed, you can plug them in, meaning legal, financial and best practice compliance is assured. It is also hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform to give you 24/7 availability, security and robustness.
To sum up
We appreciate this may have been a little dry to read for some, but that can be the best way to share history. With the cold, hard, honest truth - no embellishments. If you're still awake, I'll just present to you the current picture. It looks a little like this. Our staff are by no means as pretty as our software, but just as Gifted. We're not a large-scale company or part of a great roaring corporate machine; we're specialists. We work flexibly and use technology to meet, discuss and support our clients' needs. We even retain a call-off team of accredited technicians for when things get really busy.
