For the Boston-based non-profit One Family Inc., technology really is about keeping the family together. Its customers are single mothers whom One Family supports as they earn degrees, become financially - stable, and assume leadership roles in their communities. The non-profit, in turn, depends on an extended family to support such success stories: a network of partner organizations and One Family’s own outreach team. Its mission depends on a smooth and efficient flow of information sharing among all these family members.
Until its recent implementation of Salesforce, One Family was struggling with this information challenge. With an increasing number of women interested in receiving scholarships from One Family, the organization had a critical need to manage several sets of key data that mirror its business processes. First came the recruitment of women into its Scholar’s Program, then the tracking of their academic, financial, career and finally their leadership success.
Because of the many elements of a Scholar’s life that One Family supports, its staff must keep track of a very diverse range of information objects, from the initial personal and financial data of a candidate for scholarship, to her course attendance and G.P.A.s during school, to personal budgeting, career prospects and employment history, to leadership development, just to name a few.
Not long ago, One Family took a look at how it might solve several problems. “There was a very limited amount of reporting that was being created, and we had issues with connectivity,” explains David Levenson, One Family’s former Director of Finance & Operations. The legacy solution that was in place, built on an MS Access/SQL server database, was not meeting the organization’s needs. At the time, One Family’s scholar advisors, who worked on-site at partner organizations, frequently had difficulty connecting to One Family’s network. There was no audit trail for One Family managers to be able to monitor data changes about their scholars. And One Family needed a solution that presented the increasing range of data it handled in a way that was easy to manipulate for people not trained in advanced computer applications.
“At one point I started trying to change things [in the legacy application] and it became clear that the cure was going to be worse than the disease,” Levenson recounts. “Afterwards we would still have had training and learning curve problems.” Fortunately, Levenson says, he had used Salesforce in a previous private-sector position “and I knew what it could do. It was clear that because Salesforce was web-based, and its training so universal, that this would be much easier than development [of a new solution].”
One Family brought in Harvest Solutions, a leading CRM consultancy and salesforce.com Select Consulting Partner based in Waltham, Mass. “We did extensive customization in this implementation,” recalls Jay Rivard, director of Harvest’s Non-Profit Practice. But after the few months required for analysis, production and data migration, Rivard points out, “One Family had a solution that exactly matched its business needs. Some of the custom objects created for the project included student expenses (One Family goes considerably beyond tuition in supporting its scholars), grades, and advisors’ contacts.”
Because of the economic benefit – salesforce.com donates the first ten licenses to its clients who qualify as 503.c non-profits – and its flexibility, One Family is moving towards using Salesforce as its key application across its organization. From its initial use as a program management tool, Salesforce has been adopted to manage fundraising, replacing The Raiser’s Edge, a commonly used application among nonprofits.
This summer, One Family further extended its usability of Salesforce, linking it to its online student application forms, so that scholars -- who must re-apply to continue receiving support -- can simply see their Salesforce data populated in their application and make changes as necessary. “This is a window into Salesforce without having to navigate into Salesforce,” Levenson explains.
One Family, which was established by The Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation, is also taking advantage of the AppExchange, salesforce.com’s program of third-party applications, using Activa RSVP to integrate and manage data from scholar events, such as New Scholar Orientation, training seminars and social gatherings.
“Once Salesforce was created, all the customizable reports and dashboards provided a huge difference,” Levenson says. The project has been so successful that Levenson delivered a presentation on its impact to a Boston-area Salesforce non-profit user group.
“Looking forward, Salesforce is really going to become the central hub of how we manage and make contact with all the One Family constituencies, whether funders or scholars or partners,” Levenson says.
