DRIVING FOUNDATIONS FORWARD

Delivering the advisory and technical expertise you need to bring your foundation into the future

FLUXX SERVICES

Team Meeting

FLUXX GRANTMAKER AUDIT

An independent system health check for lasting performance.

Duende provides a comprehensive review of your current Fluxx platform. The Grantmaker Audit identifies risks, inefficiencies, and untapped opportunities—then delivers a clear, prioritized roadmap to strengthen your system.

A Duende Fluxx Grantmaker Audit will help your organization:

  • Troubleshoot and resolve recurring technical issues

  • Assess the overall health of your grants management platform

  • Establish ongoing practices for site maintenance and enhancements

Sprouts

Fluxx experience upgrade

Make Fluxx simpler, faster, and more user-friendly—for everyone who touches it.

An ongoing engagement to streamline and enhance your Fluxx environment. The Experience Upgrade focuses on usability, accessibility, and efficiency—ensuring the system works smoothly for staff, grantees, and leadership alike.

A Duende Fluxx Form Optimization Package will:

  • Bring your Fluxx site into compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 

  • Simplify and elevate user interactions with all Fluxx forms

  • Streamline form management in the admin panel

UNIVERSAL SERVICES

Strategy meeting

TRUSTED ADVISOR PROGRAM

Strategic guidance to align your organization’s technologies with your mission and priorities.

A high-level advisory partnership that brings an experienced foundation technology specialist into your leadership conversations. The Trusted Advisor Program provides strategic coaching, technical advising, and decision support to ensure your technologies evolve in step with your organization’s vision.

Duende will collaborate with your organization to:

  • Thought partner on any and all decisions your grants or technology teams may be facing

  • Define a data maturity model most appropriate to your work as well as the path to adopt it

  • Identify best-in-class grant making processes and / or technologies, tailored to your organization’s staff capacity

Leading Foundations Rely on Us

  • “If you are considering working with Sheila, don’t wait! She has a special capacity to skillfully work with organizations large and small, at the beginning or fully blooming in their technology plans. If you start a partnership with her, she will be there for you no matter where you are in your project lifecycle.

    -Suki O’Kane, Director of Administration

    Walter and Elise Haas Fund

  • “Sheila is great to work with. She is efficient, reliable and accessible. What I liked most about working with Sheila was feeling like I had a true partner. She worked alongside me in thinking about our grants management process, how we were using our system and how we could do it better."

    -Margaret Buckley, Grants Manager

    The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation

  • “Sheila quickly learned how I work and we easily established a mutual language and work rhythm to get the job done. She is accessible and I have fun working with her. She also encourages me to create clarity in what I need from our database system. I am somewhat tech savvy, but my job entails much more than the technical component of tracking the many points of our grant process."

    -Robert A Wilson, Executive Director

    Select Equity Group Foundation

  • “It’s challenging to summarize what it’s like to work with Sheila because she is such a dynamic force. We hired her for technical support on our grant management software when I joined a new foundation. Our contract was for Sheila to help us prepare our system and to provide training for three competitive RFP cycles. Sheila used her broad base of technical knowledge to ensure our grant management software was ready."

    -Jaime F. Dixon, Program Officer

    Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg

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MEET THE FOUNDER

Sheila Kappeler-Finn, CEO and Founder of Duende Consultants

Hi. I’m Sheila Kappeler-Finn, a force for calm in a hectic world. You are here because you need relief from unpredictable technologies and disconnected processes now, or you have reached a stable technology plateau and finally have the wherewithal to contemplate what to focus on next, or you want to get a technology foothold for your organization’s future, but you feel stuck on how that might look…

Whether you are stabilizing, planning or engaging your inner-visionary, having an experienced partner at your side in the ensuing phases of your technology journey will smooth out those next steps. My superpower is saying No to the ideas that your organization will not be able to implement or maintain. Solutions should be manageable by and right-sized to their users. My other superpower is collaborating with you to figure out how to get the most of your organization’s capacity without inducing burnout.

MY EXPERIENCE IN NUMBERS

14

16

Years consulting for government agencies, educational institutions, private and corporate foundations

Years' experience with the Fluxx platform

Fluxx client sites built, audited, optimized or maintained

Years owning small businesses

70+

24

Miles biked between San Diego, CA and Sanderson, TX in 22 days

Non-English languages spoken (Swedish and French)

31

75+

Years of meditation and Non-Violent Communication (NVC) practice

Retreats in solitude taken

2

1,300

SCHEDULE A FREE CONSULTATION

Thank you for your interest in Duende. We've helped more than 100 organizations like yours bring their foundations into the future. Please complete the brief form and we'll get back to you with next steps.