Success Story

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Cleaning for a Reason

Cleaning for a Reason: Automation Leads to Improved Program Outcomes Cleaning for a Reason provides free home cleaning to patients battling cancer. When cancer makes life at home difficult, our trusted network of residential cleaners, cleaning industry volunteers, and community volunteers come together to support cancer patients and their families. ‍ THE CHALLENGE As a growing organization attempting to match patients to maid services on an international level, Cleaning For A Reason was becoming overburdened by paperwork and was looking to improve their response time for their patients. Cleaning For A Reason has recruited over 1,200 maid service organizations over the years and every time a new partner came on board, a huge paper trail was created for all of the forms. Patients would then be entered into a separate system and someone would have to manually match a patient to a cleaning service. Another huge administrative burden was the fact that Cleaning For A Reason was having to process and keep track of monthly donations for each maid service organization – with 1,200 cleaning partners that meant over 14,000 transactions to receive and track each year just from their service partners. Before Salesforce, they were using at least seven different databases, as well as Excel spreadsheets, PayPal and QuickBooks to manage their program. ‍ OUR SOLUTION Streamline Patient Applications and Maid Service Inquiries To achieve this goal, we created a portal that both patients and maid service organizations can access to fill out an online application. All of the information from the online applications comes into Salesforce in real time and is easily viewed and analyzed via customized reports and dashboards. For the first time, the organization can now pull up real time, accurate statistics on number of patients served, number of patients awaiting a match and number of maid services recruited and active. Automate the Patient Matching Process The online applications also set off various triggers that automatically try to match a patient with an available maid service based on their zip code. While this process is happening, email alerts are automatically sent to the patients and to the maid service organizations to let them know where they stand in the process and whether or not a match has been found. Staff is also alerted so they can stay up to date on pending matches. With the automation, patients are now able to be matched and can receive services with a much faster turnaround time, allowing the organization to serve even more women undergoing treatment. Integrate Online Payments & QuickBooks To effectively manage Cleaning For A Reason’s high volume of monthly donations, we also wanted to create an efficient and fully integrated online payment model. First, we implemented Click & Pledge to process all online donations and recurring service partner payments. The next step was to integrate Salesforce with their accounting system, QuickBooks. Now, maid services are automatically charged monthly, those charges are automatically attached to the maid service account in Salesforce and are also automatically brought into their accounting system. All other online donations are also automatically created in Salesforce and QuickBooks, allowing the Cleaning For A Reason team to raise more money so they can match and serve more patients. ‍ RESULTS “Working out of one database is incredible. The beauty of Salesforce for us is that it allows us to record, track and analyze the data in real time. It really created a tremendous amount of efficiency for us in the office. A lot of these processes were completely manual. As a small nonprofit, we don’t have an IT person. I’m it and with that being said, I know that I can contact Urgensee and I’m going to get an answer. I’m going to get a resolution to my problem and I’m going to get it fast and that is incredibly important.”  – Cleaning For A Reason’s Executive Director, Lynn Frankenfield ‍

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BrenConnect

BrenConnect: Driving Student & Alumni Engagement Through Salesforce Communities The Premise The Bren School used YourMembership to engage 1000+ active alumni via an online community. The existing platform delivered some basic capabilities of allowing alumni members to create profiles, enter basic information, form groups and browse career resources offered by the Bren Career Team. However, the platform database was not extensible and not capable of capturing the depth of information desired by the Bren team. Additionally, the user interface was not modern or mobile friendly. The Career and Alumni Team at Bren also used HighRise as their CRM to track the services they delivered to current students. Although most needs were met with this system it did not have reporting or dashboard capabilities and summarizing student data had to be done manually. ‍ The Opportunity The online alumni community needed significant modernization. A more modern user experience (UI) and mobile experience were key objectives. Due to the lack of a robust database system, the Bren team maintained most alumni information in spreadsheets. Information was channeled into spreadsheets via surveys or direct communication between students and alumni in person or in email. Bren staff manually input captured data into spreadsheets, searched spreadsheets for information and provided that information to external parties. Capturing data and proving requested information to students, alumni, staff, faculty, and other outside parties was labor intensive. In addition, given that data was stored in spreadsheets in free text format, trends and statistics were not easily generated into reports or for insights.   ‍ The Solution Urgensee began by exploring and understanding the value which the dedicated Career and Alumni Team at Bren endeavored to deliver alumni and students through an array of support services. Career services are still provided to Alumni free of charge resulting in high alumni engagement and dedication. Urgensee helped Bren re-imaging the user experience and design an online community that would optimized the Alumni expertise and help Alumni grow their professional networks. ‍ A Connected Community Urgensee created BrenConnect to serve as the platform for the alumni experience. Powered by the Salesforce Community Cloud using the Napili Template, BrenConnect is a confluence where alumni and students gather to learn, search and collaborate together. My Profile: Taking full advantage of Salesforce extensibility, Urgensee created BrenConnect to empower alumni and students to view, manage, create and share data in the Bren Salesforce database. Additionally, Urgensee eliminated the onus on Bren Staff to personally manage information such as work history, education history, school projects etc. LinkedIn Integration: Urgensee removed the redundancy of managing multiple online profiles by leveraging available API capabilities of LinkedIn. Such integration enabled users to sync key information from LinkedIn profiles to BrenConnect profiles and effortlessly populate data such as profile summary, photograph, most recent employer and position. Alumni Finder: Urgensee fulfilled one of the major needs of alumni and students by developing the Alumni Finder which transitions queries previously handled manually by the Bren Career Team to self-accessible answers. Alumni Finder empowers BrenConnect users to search through the Bren Salesforce database and filter results by various categories including geographic location, academic program/class year, specializations, skills and industries. Additionally, improved functionality created by Urgensee enables users to discover fellow alumni working at specific organizations and to facilitate strategic and meaningful networking. Single Sign-On: To encourage frequent login and eliminate the hurdles of multiple online profiles and forgotten passwords, Urgensee introduced Single Sign-On with Google and LinkedIn. Single Sign-On enables BrenConnect users to register and login with their personal, university or professional social media accounts. ‍ A Wealth of Resources Bren excels at career resource development for alumni and students whom leverage such resources while navigating careers in the ever-growing field of environmental sciences and management. Urgensee incorporated Salesforce Lightning Knowledge to create a Knowledge Base that would empower the Bren Career Team to develop distinct, well-categorized resources and target such resources to the right audiences via BrenConnect. Urgensee designed this new resource with internal capabilities such as version history tracking, metrics and insights that include view counts, search history and voting. The Bren Team gained a feedback loop on specific resources to determine what resources users most often search and consume. ‍ Networking & Collaboration Urgensee delivered expansive capability for alumni to collaborate and discuss by means of Chatter Groups, Topic Discussions and Feeds. Offering a contemporary substitute to listservs, BrenConnect offers alumni the ability to create and join interest-based groups and select desired level of engagement on a group by group basis. ‍ Powerful Reporting Finally, by having their alumni community and internal CRM on the same platform, the Bren Team could leverage powerful Salesforce reporting capabilities to track community adoption and engagement, login activity, record creation and more at a very granular level. For example, “How many alumni from the Class of 2014 registered on BrenConnect?” In addition, the Salesforce powered system allows the Bren team to track: student and alumni advising through the use of Cases; initial career placement through the use of Campaigns; and prospective students through Leads. Having one system that houses both students and alumni has allows the Bren Team to be more data driven and has streamlined data gathering and reporting.

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Nature Discovery Center

Nature Discovery Center: A mobile-ready public site for Membership Management & Class Registration Nature Discovery Center is a nonprofit organization with a mission to ignite lifelong curiosity, understanding, and respect for nature through education. Founded in 1979 and located in Bellaire, TX, the NDC has under 10 full-time and part-time employees who work directly with children, parents, families and educators, offering engaging hands-on programs. Year-round programming includes classes and camps, traveling outreach presentations and field-trips to an audience of 40,000+ each year. ‍ THE PREMISE Nature Discovery Center was using 3 systems to manage their key processes, namely fundraising, payment processing and membership management which operated independent of each other. Nature Discovery Center had also deployed a membership management tool using a platform called Memberclicks. The purpose of the tool was to enable its patrons to create member profiles to: ‍ THE OPPORTUNITY The systems used by NDC didn’t communicate with one another, which led to data redundancy, inconsistencies and an incomplete view of their supporters. Additionally, recording donation and program revenue into their accounting system was a very manual process. Several months after deploying their new membership management system, NDC discovered that member profiles creation and management did not work as intended, which left certain goals of deploying the system unmet. A confusing registration system interface required members to enter information for each family member every time they registered, hampering their experience. It also required that members process separate transactions for each individual class registration. NDC staff would frequently receive phone calls and emails from guests and members trying to register for classes and stumbling through the multi-step process that required significant data entry. The lack of mobile responsive design caused even further frustration for users. ‍ THE SOLUTION We began by immersing ourselves in the organization, their history and their program offerings to understand how they leveraged their resources to advance their mission. We learned about the NDC’s constituents and the numerous ways in which they interacted with the organization. We then delivered a solution that better represented the dynamic program structure of the organization. ‍ A Unified, Dynamic Platform Built on the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud and Community Cloud, we implemented a unified solution for NDC to manage donations, volunteer management and program management coupled with an integrated payment processor from Click and Pledge. The unification of these key processes enabled NDC to streamline operations, remove data inconsistencies and develop a complete picture of their customer. NDC could eliminate a manual data reconciliation process that required them to enter each revenue item into their accounting system by replacing it with a simple export-import process. Most importantly, NDC significantly improved the user experience for their members and guests. ‍ Segmented Communication In the NDC’s old CMS, supporter information was not classified or connected to a CRM. Thus, both written and email communication could not easily be personalized and segmented.  Instead several mass emails were sent to the entire email list or sent to groups that were recorded on in-house spreadsheets. In the new Salesforce solution, we integrated MailChimp and the NDC staff can now easily create groups in Salesforce via the group feature, campaigns or they can identify a drilled-down segment through reports. ‍ Program Management/Class Registration We then drafted, tested and prototyped the process for registering for NDC’s program offerings. This enabled us to re-imagine the registration process for both new and frequenting members and guests. Through an iterative process in collaboration with the NDC team, we developed an adaptive, intuitive and mobile-responsive solution built on the Salesforce.com Customer Community Cloud with the following features: ‍ ‍ Member Management

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Design Connect Create

Design Connect Create: A Small Organization Makes a Big Impact Design Connect Create is a two-week summer day camp that was created to prepare girls for their first high school physics course. The camp reinforces basic math skills, offers hands-on labs, provides close interaction with instructors, fosters an atmosphere of collaboration and teamwork, and exposes girls to STEM careers through female role models. ‍ THE CHALLENGE The leaders at DCC first offered their physics summer camp in 2003 in collaboration with the nonprofit High-Tech High Heels and with support from the Texas Instrument Foundation. They continued collaborating with various nonprofits until 2014 when Design Connect Create was formed to expand the delivery of the camp to other school districts. Having run the camp for 11 years before forming their own nonprofit, the leaders of DCC understood that in order to expand, they would need an integrated system to manage and enroll their summer camp attendees. In addition to managing summer camp registrations, they also feature several guest speakers at every camp and needed a way to manage volunteer sign-ups and opportunities. Lastly, they knew they would not be able to grow their organization without a system to manage donors, grants and sponsorships. Through strong recommendations from their board, DCC engaged Urgensee to build an integrated system that would fit their growing needs. ‍ OUR SOLUTION Create Mobile Friendly Online Camp Registration Forms Knowing that it would be mostly high school students accessing the registration forms, we knew we needed to create a mobile friendly easy to use registration system. We leveraged the use of the Click & Pledge Event Management system to create individual registration forms for each camp session. Their Event Management package is fully mobile responsive, offers an advanced Salesforce integration and a ton of flexibility in terms of how to display the forms. Now a student can view all camp sessions directly on the DCC website, register for their preferred session and receive an automatic response informing them of their registration status. DCC staff are automatically notified and can view each camp and student record in Salesforce along with registrations, scholarship requests and wait lists for camps that have already filled up. DCC staff can also now leverage the Vertical Response Mass Email integration to communicate with their students and supporters and have access to customized reports and dashboards allowing them to gauge the success of their recruitment and outreach efforts in real time. Engage Potential Speakers via an Interactive Volunteer Sign-Up System Now that their student data is being captured in Salesforce, we needed to come up with a solution for how DCC can manage booking speakers for their camps. With their goal of having four speakers at each camp session, they needed a self-service system where volunteers can view available opportunities and register all without ever leaving the DCC website. To streamline this process, we implemented Volunteers for Salesforce and integrated it with DCC’s website. Anyone accessing their site can now navigate to the volunteers tab to view all available speaking opportunities and sign-up online. Volunteer applications show up in Salesforce in real time and DCC staff can manage all opportunities directly inside of Salesforce without ever having to open their website editor. DCC now has a manageable volunteer recruitment and registration system fully integrated with Salesforce, freeing up the staff’s time to focus on bringing more quality programming to their students. Donor Management As with any nonprofit organization, to continue to make an impact you must have a healthy fundraising base. With customization of the Nonprofit Starter Pack and implementation of the Click & Pledge Payment System, DCC is now able to manage all donations, grants and sponsorships through Salesforce. As they continue to expand, they will be able to leverage the platform to increase individual giving, build relationships with donors and to stay on top of grant deadlines and proposals. ‍ RESULTS In just two years, DCC has grown from offering 3 sessions in the Dallas area to now offering 7 sessions including an expansion into Houston. They’re able to use one system to manage and build relationships with students, teachers, school districts, volunteers and donors. The efficiency created and the flexibility of the system means that their staff can now focus on growing their program so that more girls are being empowered to pursue math and science careers. “We were fortunate enough to have the finances and knowledge to be able to invest at the very beginning of the nonprofit and it’s the only way that we could have grown. Dan at Urgensee lets us know what’s possible and works with any questions we throw at him. He gives us recommendations on everything related to our organization, he’s very well connected to other people in the nonprofit sector and has been a great resource.”

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GallantFew

GallantFew: Case Management for Veterans in Need GallantFew’s mission is to prevent veteran isolation by connecting new veterans with hometown veteran mentors, thereby facilitating a peaceful, successful transition from military service to a civilian life filled with hope and purpose. ‍ ‍ The Challenge Karl Monger, Founder and Director of GallantFew implemented the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack in 2012 after learning about it through Techsoup. At that point, he says they entered some data into it and were basically using it like a “big Excel spreadsheet.” Karl knew that there was much more capability within Salesforce but he had to figure out how to make it fit his organization’s needs. GallantFew’s core program is based on a strong one-to-one mentoring model and they wanted to use the power of Salesforce to match veterans in need of services with mentors willing to help. ‍ ‍Our Solution ‍Integrate Veteran & Mentor Applications into Salesforce By leveraging the power of the Volunteers for Salesforce app, we were able to create a sign up form that both veterans in need of services and veterans looking to mentor can complete. Once they submit their form, their information is populated in Salesforce and GallantFew staff receive notifications to follow up. Build a Veteran Case Management System in Salesforce Once veterans and mentors are in the system, the GallantFew staff needed to be able to see what kind of services are available and which services have been provided to that veteran. To give them a case management tool, we built a few custom objects in Salesforce that allows them to track each service that a veteran has received and any mentoring that veterans have provided to those in need. They are also able to categorize those services into the five core areas that they work with: spiritual wellness, emotional wellness, physical wellness, professional wellness and social wellness. We also built custom dashboards that lets them easily see the number of veterans they have assisted and better understand the demographics of their population. Integrate Online Donations System & Online Store To completely integrate GallantFew’s systems, we installed Click & Pledge to process online donations, manage events and run an online store. The integration allows them to better connect with their donors and to build brand awareness by providing GallantFew products through their online store. ‍ Results GallantFew has been able to grow from one volunteer staff member to seven in just a few years. Karl says “Salesforce has allowed us to continue expanding. It helps with fundraising so we can pay our staff to carry out our mission but now we also have well over 7,000 volunteers in the system. The volunteers sign-up form is secure and has all the features that allow us to automate some responses and communication. It’s a huge time saver which allows us to expand our capacity that much more. We’ve also been able to pull out data to share with other groups that are working with the veteran population and it’s started some great conversations.” ‍

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Dallas Afterschool

‍ ‍ Dallas Afterschool: An Innovative Approach to Community Engagement. Dallas Afterschool informs, trains, supports and evaluates afterschool sites that serve low-income youth in the Dallas area. Their goal is to help local afterschool sites achieve national quality standards for the benefit of the children they serve. The Challenge Dallas Afterschool was working hard to ensure and improve the quality of all after school programs being delivered in the Dallas area. Programs were improving all around but they realized they needed a way to deliver quality after school program information to parents in their community. The community lacked a resource that was both user friendly and would enable parents to find accessible after school programming that met their needs. ‍ They wanted to leverage their existing investment in Salesforce.com where they had critical information that could be made useful to a parent in their quest to find child care. In addition, they desired a way to capture additional community related information on afterschool and summer programs for hundreds of providers that weren’t a part of their programs. Our SolutionBuild an Interactive Site Based on After-School Program Data Already Existing in Salesforce Dallas Afterschool evaluated a number of web based solutions, but chose the Force.com cloud platform for its flexibility and extensibility. We built a mobile ready Force.com site using VisualForce that is able to pull data from Dallas Afterschool’s Salesforce instance in real time. Parents can now access a public website (After-School Program Finder) where they can search by program type, zip code, grade level and time. Search results contain basic information that is maintained by Dallas Afterschool and help parents make more informed decisions to enrich their students’ lives. Integrate a Geolocation Component for the Application During the discovery phase, it was made clear that location was a critical factor for parents when evaluating different afterschool programs. ‍ To address this issue, we wanted to provide a clear visual of where afterschool programs are located in the Dallas area. We integrated a third-party app with Salesforce and Google Maps to embed a map showing each program location that is also available on the program finder website. Now, not only can parents conduct a search using zip codes, but they can also move and click around on the map to find different offerings. Results Parents in the Dallas area now have an easy-to-use, mobile ready site that provides up to date, searchable information on quality afterschool programs in their area. As Dallas Afterschool’s CEO says, “The terrific thing about it is that it’s easy to use and we can track experiences via google analytics.” In addition to being a useful resources for parents, the locator tool also provided an important visual for Dallas Afterschool’s CEO: “The locator tool has allowed us to identify gaps in childcare resources in our community quickly and effectively. ‍ We can link it to a geocode system and graphically show people where there are program desserts for after school and where there is capacity. This gives us a way to communicate with programs throughout the county and it opens up an ability to talk about what kind of assets our community has. Armed with this information, we are equipped to increase quality afterschool seats in areas where families and children need them the most.” ‍

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