As a Director of Support Services in a nonprofit that helps people get the support they need to recover from a health issue, Charlotte looks after almost every program the organisation is running and tracks the efficiency of their business processes.
Charlotte and the staff members under her management get used to using Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to work with cases. They have the proficiency of a Salesforce Associate: using Salesforce daily to take notes of cases, book service appointments for their clients when required and search through progress notes to see how cases progress and how the interactions with a specific client go. A good Salesforce practice that Healthy4All adopted at the early stage is emailing clients from Salesforce and also logging calls in Salesforce, thus maintaining some level of consistency in communication and business processes.
“As most of our funding comes from the state governement, I am always in a race to prove that we hit the target to secure a little more funding in the next financial year.”
“Try as we may, we have yet to achieve the single view of our health clients that we expected when we started implementing Salesforce. Our biggest challenges are data duplicates and the lack of correlation and narrative in our reports and dashboards.”
“At the same time, Healthy4All wants to become a well-trusted advocacy source. It is really very challenging to achieve that goal with the limited resources that we have”
Digitalisation
To align with the services they provide: education, events, health services, the NFP implemented Salesforce with Salesforce Functions, Case, Campaign and Event Management with the help of a Salesforce Partner.
Charlotte is excited that her Salesforce is up and running. She hopes to see her organisation resume in BAU soon, unaware of all the challenges lying ahead.
BAU activities with Salesforce after the Salesforce Implementation.
The NFP decided to hire a part-time Salesforce Admin who works 2 days per week to manage BAU activities.
Charlotte feels slightly unsettled following the departure of the Salesforce Certified Consultant as a lot of knowledge transfer will be required to ensure a smooth transition for the whole team.
The decision to hire a part-time Salesforce Admin
Their Salesforce org needed to accommodate the increasing number of services.
The Salesforce Admin added more features to accommodate her business processes.
Charlotte is slightly relieved to see her staff resumes BAU activities with the support of the latest hire. However, she feels a bit stuck after realising the inflexibility of hiring a part-time Salesforce Admin: they are not always available to provide timely support when the organisation needs them to. At the same time, the organisation’s budget does not allow them to hire a full-time Admin.
They needed third-party solutions to support the business processes.
The Salesforce Admin started using third-party solutions and introduced functions, appointment scheduling, video meetings.
It is quite challenging for her small team to make quick decisions about third-party tools that are most suitable for their business needs, while still being reasonably priced and easily integrated with their Salesforce platform. There is a lot of doubt involved in the process of considering the right tools and integration solutions.
The decision to use third-party tools without carefully considering Salesforce’s solutions.
The volume of the customers increased.
Many more customers were added to their business processes.
As the organisation starts to scale and reach more people to provide help, Charlotte begins to feel that they let a lot of precious data fall through the cracks due to their improper Salesforce setup and processes. For example, the lack of mandatory fields in the form at the start results in lots of duplicate data or lack of some correlation in the dashboards, and the dashboards do not show the correlation between different factors or reveal how many customers are in which stage of their help-seeking journey.
The reason for the improper setup and processes:
The limited number of Salesforce experts available in their organisation results in limited knowledge shared and exchanged. There are not many training sessions in the organisation, and everyone’s Salesforce learning experience is quite fragmented. Staff members are trained as separate teams at different times even though their org has progressed over time.
Their Salesforce org continued needing to accommodate the increasing number of services.
However, the Salesforce Admin who knew the business processes, the Salesforce and third-party systems’ setup left the organisation.
Charlotte is once again left overwhelmed with the task of making sure different departments run smoothly while she is trying to find a replacement.
The red flag is still the decision to hire and rely on a part-time Salesforce Admins as many of them often leave the organisation once they gain enough experience.
They needed not only a replacement employee but also a review of their Salesforce architecture and business processes.
She finally reaches out to the Salesforce ecosystem for support.
This time, she is determined that something has to change in the way that her organisation sources Salesforce support.
They needed a Salesforce Partner who can provide them with consultations about Salesforce Best Practices in terms of architectures and business process and give them ongoing support when needed.
Charlotte was introduced to Girikon as the Salesforce Partner has the reputation of helping various red-account organisations, especially not-for-profits starting with P10. Girikon presented Charlotte with a set of recommendations and a scope of work. Well aware of NFPs’ funding cycle and the fact that they have to get the board’s approval for a year-long budget, Girikon suggests that Charlotte discusses with the board what they want to prioritise before the year ends so that they can spend that budget on fixing the urgent thing. Then in the upcoming months, Girikon can support them with the minimum hours that they offer in their Salesforce Support for not-for-profits packages. When the new financial year begins, Girikon can again help them pick up the next urgent thing to fix and later provide ad-hoc support for their BAU activities for the rest of the year.
Charlotte is very impressed with Girikon’s expertise in the non-profit space and their flexible packages tailored for NFPs.
She is very happy to find out about Girikon’s flexible support model for her organisation, as her organisation sometimes needs very intense support and sometimes doesn’t. Girikon’s packages offer the flexibility to draw down on a number of support hours over a certain period.
Girikon’s team is diverse and has different skill sets to help her organisation with big implementation, integration and BAU activities.
Charlotte also wants to seize this opportunity to have representatives from each program work with Girikon and learn from the team’s expertise to become more knowledgeable and responsible about Salesforce activities, avoiding any knowledge-loss crisis in the future.