Case Study: Girls First Fund achieves scalable, accessible international grantmaking and eliminates manual work with SmartSimple Cloud

How Girls First Fund scaled its international grantmaking with a more flexible, intuitive, and all-in-one grants management system

Girls First Fund (GFF) is a donor collaborative managed by Geneva Global focused on expanding opportunities for girls and tackling child marriage. As a new international grantmaker working across six countries and five languages, GFF faced cumbersome, non-centralized processes, underused survey-and-spreadsheet systems, and accessibility barriers for remote applicants with unreliable internet. To scale and streamline its work, GFF implemented SmartSimple Cloud for Grants Management.

SmartSimple Cloud was configured iteratively to centralize due diligence, auto-populate grant agreements, verify financial details, support multi‑language users, and enable auto-save for applicants in low‑connectivity areas, allowing rapid amendments during COVID‑19. The new system eliminated much manual data entry, gave the small GFF team greater visibility and agility, and helped GFF grant $5.8 million to 150 organizations across six countries while conducting 165 focus groups with 69 local stakeholders—outcomes enabled by SmartSimple Cloud.

Girls First Fund

Beth Zimmerman

Program Officer