Case Study: California Arts Council achieves scalable, flexible grants management with SmartSimple Cloud

How SmartSimple's Platform Enabled the California Arts Council to Grow and Scale Beyond Boundaries

The California Arts Council, a state agency that awards arts funding across California, faced a sudden six‑month deadline when their previous grants management provider sunset its software. Their former system only handled incoming applications, leaving contracting, accounting and payments manual and fragmented across 12 programs, ~1,700 registered organizations and roughly 1,500 annual applications. After reviewing seven solutions, the Council chose SmartSimple Cloud (SmartSimple Cloud for Grants Management) to meet their need for a flexible, configurable, and easy‑to‑adopt system.

SmartSimple Cloud implemented SmartSimple Cloud for Grants Management within the required timeframe, centralizing the entire grant lifecycle, enabling role‑based access and self‑service configuration by staff, and streamlining administrative workflows. The new platform let the Council scale to add more organizations, efficiently manage roughly 1,000 funded organizations annually and support $24,451,331 in grants, and it also powered a second system (a CMS) for the Arts in Corrections program while enabling ad‑hoc reporting to federal funders.

California Arts Council

Kala Kowtha

IT Specialist