The current handling of Progress Reports in the new BBGM portal presents a significant operational and governance issue for our Foundation.

Under the previous system, multiple progress reports could be issued over the life of a grant, with each report delivered to the grantee as a new, blank form. This ensured that each reporting cycle captured fresh, accurate information and attachments.

In the new portal, however, each progress report is prepopulated with the data and file uploads from the previously submitted report. Unless the grantee manually removes or updates every field and attachment (which they have no practical way of tracking) the report is submitted with a mixture of old and new information. There is no indication within the form of which data has been updated and which has been carried over. As a result, data validation rules intended to ensure completeness and accuracy no longer function effectively.

This creates an unacceptable level of risk. The likelihood of data error is extremely high, and the resulting data integrity issues constitute a direct breach of our governance and compliance obligations.

Blackbaud is aware of this issue and has previously suggested a workaround involving the creation of separate progress report forms, each with its own set of custom fields. For grant programs requiring multiple reports across the grant lifecycle, this approach is not viable. It leads to excessively complex Requirement Blueprint forms and imposes an unreasonable administrative burden. This is not an adequate or sustainable solution.

We are aware that several Australian BBGM clients have not been able to migrate from iGAM to the new platform specifically because of this progress-reporting limitation. As a new BBGM implementation, we do not have the option to remain on iGAM. We are now entering our first reporting cycles, and an urgent resolution is required.

If Blackbaud cannot address this issue promptly, we and many other organisations will have no choice but to consider alternative solutions.