"As Seven Hills has grown, there has been a need for a more robust tool that allows me to track grant deliverables across multiple divisions, programs, grant writers, and program leaders. Grant Frog has been a wonderful tool that's user friendly and provides great features, including a deadlines calendar, grant research capabilities, reporting, and more."

Elizabeth Vittum, MPA
AVP of Development
Seven Hills

About

Seven Hills Foundation is a health and human services nonprofit headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a premier provider of comprehensive support for people with significant life challenges. It’s a $500 million a year organization with over 235 locations across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and eight countries abroad, supporting more than 60,000 people each year.

Elizabeth Vittum, MPA, Assistant Vice President of Development, leads a team of development and grant professionals, raising more than $8 million annually from federal grants, state grants, and private foundations. This funding supports a wide range of programs, including clinical, educational, residential, and community-based services for children, adults, and seniors with disabilities, behavioral health needs, and other life challenges.

She has more than three decades of nonprofit experience, including roles as AVP of Development, Development Director, and Grants Manager. Liz has built and scaled Seven Hills' grants program through years of significant organizational growth and acquisitions. Her depth of experience brings both strategic oversight and practical insight to managing a complex and high-volume grants portfolio. The infrastructure she's put in place reflects the important mission of Seven Hills.

Overview

Liz leads a team of development and grant professionals that raise more than $8 million annually and manage a complex grants process. Her dedicated grants team submitted almost 170 grants in 2025 alone.

Liz and the Seven Hills team needed a platform purpose-built for the scale she was already running. She partnered with Grant Frog to bring everything into one place.

What Liz and Seven Hills needed most:

• A dedicated grants management platform for their high-volume grants program
• One deadline calendar for every grant request, grant report, and task across 15 divisions
• Team coordination and visibility into each grant writer's workload at a glance
• Funder research connected directly to the grants pipeline
• A system leadership could easily access without pulling the grants team away from their work

What Grant Frog delivered:

• Centralized platform to manage their grants, grant reports, funders, and tasks, along with automated deadline reminders, funder research all in one place
• Full team collaboration and deadline management for grants, grant reports, and tasks
• White-glove migration of 15 years of historical grant, funder, grant report and task records in just a few days
• Funder Intelligence, a database of 200,000+ foundations connected directly to the team's pipeline
• Enhance Reporting Report Access so leadership always has the picture they need

Challenge

Seven Hills has experienced significant growth over the years, expanding into a $500M organization. Alongside that growth came an increasing level of complexity in managing grants across multiple divisions, programs, and stakeholders. When their grants complexity began to grow and their previous grants system was retired, it created an urgent problem to solve: 

• Rising volume and complexity of grant, grant report, and task deadlines: With multiple grant writers, program leaders, and funding streams in play, tracking deadlines for grants, reports, and deliverables - who, what, and when - became a daily management challenge. There was no single place to see the whole picture and it was increasingly difficult to manage efficiently.

• Limited coordination across team members: Liz needed to be able to check a grant writer's workload in a moment, not piece it together from separate files or track people down. Assigning and monitoring tasks by grant writer and ensuring accountability across multiple divisions required more structure, visibility, and real-time tracking than existing tools could provide.

• Migrating all grant data from their previous system - When their previous system shut down, they needed to get 15 years of grant records into Grant Frog without losing years of grant and funder history. And to do it while keeping high-velocity grants program running without a gap.

Results

By adopting Grant Frog, Seven Hills has strengthened its ability to manage a complex and growing grants portfolio while maintaining focus on its mission.

The Development team now spends less time managing spreadsheets and disconnected systems, and more time securing funding and supporting programs that improve the lives of individuals and families across the region.

• Centralized management of grants, grant reports, funders, and tasks - Grant Frog provides a single system where Liz and her team can track proposals, reporting deadlines, and assignments by grant writer, ensuring clear accountability across the organization.

• 15 years migrated in days, with nothing lost — Every grant, funder, and grant report made it into Grant Frog. Grant Frog's white-glove team moved multiple years of grants, funders, and reports into the platform in less than a week. The Grant Frog team made the process seamless and did all the difficult work internally - converting record types, mapping all grant fields to the new platform, creating tags for custom data, and ensuring all data matched Seven Hills’ grant data exactly as needed.

• One place for all deadlines on the calendar - Grants, grant reports, and tasks now live in a single calendar. With everything in one place, the deadline calendar became the center of daily operations. It gives the team a clear, real-time view of upcoming deadlines, helping them stay ahead of deliverables and reduce risk. Liz can pull up any writer's upcoming deadlines in seconds, and automated reminders go out to the right person well ahead of each due date. 

• New funder leads on grants and grant pipeline development - Integrated grant research capabilities allow the team to identify and pursue new funding opportunities without relying on disconnected tools. With Grant Frog’s Funder Intelligence, they’ve discovered funders that lead directly to awarded grants. 

• Streamlined reporting and oversight - With enhanced reporting features, Liz can more easily monitor grant and task progress, track post-award reporting and outcomes, and provide leadership with accurate, up-to-date insights.

For Seven Hills Foundation, Grant Frog matched the scale of a grants program raising $8 million a year to support services for more than 60,000 people across three states — and gave the team a system as durable as the work it funds.

Real Connection and Support

A key element of the experience for Seven Hills is the ease of use and ongoing evolution of the platform. It’s a user-friendly solution built for real-world grant work. Grant Frog’s intuitive design allows her team to quickly adopt the system, while its expanding features continue to meet the needs of organizations operating at scale.

When asked what she would say to other organizations about Grant Frog and why she loves it so much, Liz stated what truly matters.