Seven Key Components for Smooth Sponsored Program Closeouts

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The closeout process is an integral part of the sponsored award lifecycle—Institutions and organizations carry obligations to sponsors and funding agencies to close sponsored projects in a timely manner. 

Closeouts are closely monitored as part of OMB Uniform Guidance (2 CFR §200), and without effective practices in place, closeouts can fall behind and start piling up, creating future issues with the organization and sponsored awards.

Why Should Awards Be Closed in a Timely Manner?

The closeout process is a collaborative effort between multiple parties that work together to ensure sponsor obligations are met, project work is completed, required reports are filed, and financials are accurate and complete. Failure to efficiently close sponsored awards may put the organization at risk, affecting future funding opportunities for the organization. Sponsors may take corrective actions, suspend or terminate current awards, or withhold future awards to the organization if obligations are not completed within the sponsor’s timeframe.

Closeout requirements differ between sponsors, making it difficult for an organization to initiate “blanket” procedures to ensure an award is properly closed. When you notice the number of closeouts piling up, consider seeking expert support to get your organization back on track. 

At Attain Partners, we understand the headache of an overwhelming number of expired awards—and we want to help get your organization back on track. Our Interim Staffing services can help place talent into your institution to assist with award closeouts, allowing your team to continue to focus on day-to-day operations while we tackle the backlog. We’ve helped countless organizations and have compiled a list of seven key components to ensure a smooth closeout.

Seven Key Components for Smooth Closeouts

1. On-Time Reporting

The sponsor agreement provides timelines for required reports during the performance period. Sponsors may require final invoices, PI technical reports, invention/patent certifications, financial reports, and other reporting documentation to close an award. Submitting reports and sponsor-required closeout documents on time will prevent sponsors from withholding final payments to the award, delaying payments on other institutional awards, and inhibiting new funding to be potentially awarded to the institution.

2. Financial Reimbursement

Nonpayment of externally sponsored projects can seriously impact an organization’s resources. Invoices for sponsored programs may be unpaid for reasons including sponsor complications (bankruptcy), execution issues (deliverables not met, reports not filed on time), or internal administration problems such as invoicing. When sponsored work is completed but not reimbursed, costs must be covered by the institution using non-sponsored funding or indirect costs. Nonpayment of sponsored programs is a considerable financial risk to academic units and may affect an organization’s funding status.

3. Financial Compliance

Implementing a detailed closeout process can safeguard organizations in financial accuracy and relativity of expenses. Regularly reviewing award expenditures ensures costs are allowable, allocable, reasonable, and consistent within the terms of the sponsor contract/agreement to maintain compliance and avoid auditing headaches. Reconciling expenditures frequently can streamline the closing of a project by avoiding trailing expenses that post after an award ends and preventing cost transfers while finalizing expenses charged to the award, sub-awards, and cost share accounts.

4. Account Balance Resolution

Once expenditures on a sponsored program are finalized organizations need to close the final account balance. Grantees are also required to refund unobligated cash balances during the closeout process if the organization is not authorized to retain the funds for use in other projects. If a sponsored program account is overspent, the organization must clear the deficit by using non-sponsored funds. 

5. Cost Share Requirements

Many sponsors will have cost share/match requirements listed in the Request For Proposals (RFP) and award documents. A sponsor may reduce expenditure reimbursement amounts if proper cost share requirements are not met. If an award is overspent, excess costs may be moved to a cost share account funded by non-sponsored funding to properly record the project expenditures. Timely closeouts ensure cost share requirements are met and the organization’s obligations are fulfilled.

6. Subrecipient Monitoring

Subrecipients often play a critical role in the sponsored project’s objectives. If a sub-recipient is behind on deliverables or final reports this can also delay the final report filing to the prime sponsor. Delayed reports and invoices from sub-awards may also affect payments to the subrecipient and encumbrances, making it difficult for the prime award to finalize expenses and submit final invoices to the sponsor for reimbursement.

7. Effort Reporting

If a sponsored award requires additional time past the end date to complete deliverables, a no-cost extension may be requested. However, if a no-cost extension is denied and the PI requires additional time past the end date to wrap up the project, the PI’s effort may not be recorded properly, and the institution is required to cover the costs associated with the extra work. 

Attain Partners – Sponsored Programs Experts

Are you overwhelmed with your institution’s closeout process? Too many closeouts, too little time? Contact the sponsored program experts at Attain Partners to discuss how we can update and strengthen your closeout procedures, provide interim staffing, and boost your closeout process to peak performance.

Attain Partners has worked with institutions to successfully improve business and sponsored program management, including closeout procedures. Drawing on our deep and talented pool of subject matter experts, Attain Partners helps place interim talent into your institution to ensure operations continue to run smoothly and that you receive optimal funding. We can help you fill workforce gaps with functional and technical experts who understand research administration, financial aid, and Federal compliance.

About the Author

Nicole Hansen is a Senior Associate at Attain Partners with experience in higher education research administration and public administration. She specializes in post-award financial management, fiscal reconciliation, and problem-solving. Prior to joining Attain Partners, Nicole was employed by Utah State University as a Business Manager for Statewide Campuses where she focused on fiscal reconciliation, budget development, and training business services.

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NCURA 65th Annual Meeting Speaker Spotlight: Meet Our Experts

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Attain Partners is excited to be presenting at a number of sessions, workshops, and discussion groups during the NCURA 65th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. With a roster of both new and familiar faces, our team will be out in force! Learn more about our experts, get details on their sessions, and schedule time to connect with them during the conference. They’ll be discussing a range of topics and would love to share their expertise with you.

Are you attending? Meet the team in the exhibit hall at Booth #313 and learn about our industry-leading research enterprise services.

Lindsey Demeritt
Senior Specialist Leader

Having served at both the departmental and then central levels of sponsored projects administration, Lindsey approaches everything from a “how can we make yes happen without putting the institution at risk” perspective. “It depends” is a commonly heard phrase, and her goal is always to facilitate research and reduce administrative burden for the faculty. As Associate Director with the Dell Medical School, she is responsible for standing up a centralized departmental unit that will be prepared to grow as the medical school does, supporting the faculty endeavors under the mission and goals of a school that has been created to “rethink everything” surrounding healthcare and healthcare delivery.

Lindsey began attending NCURA workshops and meetings in 2008 and has been active at both the regional and national levels. She is a regular workshop and session presenter, focusing primarily on pre-award, budgeting, departmental administration, and lifecycle of the sponsored projects courses. She also serves on the professional development committee, is a member of the traveling workshop faculty, and has served on the national electronic research administration committee.

Concurrent Session: NIH Transfers—The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Fairchild West, Terrace Level

Connect with Lindsey
Contact Lindsey

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Georgetta Dennis, MS, CRA, CPRA, CFRA
Senior Associate

Georgetta Dennis has 18 years of research administration experience, which encompasses both pre- and post-award. She is passionate about learning and training/sharing information with others in the profession. She also currently serves on the Research Administrators Certification Council (RACC) Board of Directors as a volunteer committed to advancing the research administration profession. 

Discussion Group: CRA: Mentoring and RACC Certifications. How Do I Study for the CRA?
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Fairchild East, Terrace Level

Concurrent Session: Master’s Degree vs. Certifications: Choose Your Own Adventure
Wednesday, August 9, 10:30a – 12p | Lincoln West, Concourse Level

Connect with Georgetta
Contact Georgetta

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Benjamin Garvin 
Senior Specialist

Benjamin Garvin has more than 20 years of experience in the higher education research administration field. His years of experience in higher education include the lifecycle of grants and contracts from pre-award, including proposal building and reviewing; to post-award, including award administration to award closeout. He can perform these “cradle-to-grave” functions in a departmental or a central role. Prior to consulting for Attain Partners, Ben worked at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Science, Brown University Sponsored Programs Office, and Northeastern University Central Office. Ben also serves as the Chairperson for NCURA Region I (New England)’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee and the NCURA FRA 2023 Program Committee. In his spare time, Ben is also a musician and plays in a gospel group and a rock in soul band.

Concurrent Session: The Impact of Incorporating Project Management Skills Within the Workplace
Monday, August 7, 1:30p – 2:30p | Columbia 11&12, Terrace Level

Concurrent Session: Leadership Success Planning and Staff Development: Creating an Effective Roadmap
Tuesday, August 8, 10:15a – 11:30a | Lincoln East, Concourse Level

Discussion Group: Surviving the Mass Exodus: A Discussion for Managers
Wednesday, August 9, 8:30a – 10a | Fairchild West, Terrace Level

Connect with Ben
Contact Ben

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Kathleen Halley-Octa, M.A., CRA
Senior Consultant

Kathleen Halley-Octa is a Senior Consultant with Attain Partner’s Research Enterprise Services practice. Kathleen is an experienced research administrator who specializes in pre-award administration, training development, and eRA system implementation.

Prior to joining Attain Partners in November 2022, Kathleen served as the Director of the Office of Research & Sponsored Projects for the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State University. In this role, she led a team of talented research administrators who oversaw both pre- and post-award operations for the college’s portfolio. Kathleen began her research administration career at Kennesaw State University as a proposal administrator and eRA specialist. She then moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked as a departmental administrator in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, before joining the Central Office of Sponsored Programs. In OSP, Kathleen ran Georgia Tech’s Research Administration training program, serving as the product owner for numerous eRA systems, and oversaw the development and implementation of eRouting, Georgia Tech’s homegrown electronic routing system.

Kathleen is a Certified Research Administrator and holds a Master’s Degree in English from The College of Charleston and a Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of Georgia. She has been involved with NCURA since 2013 and has presented at both Regional and National meetings. In the past, she has served as Secretary of Region III and Website Coordinator, and she currently serves as co-editor for NCURA Magazine. 

Concurrent Session: Addressing the Great Recruitment Crisis: Providing Graduate Students Access to Careers in Research Administration
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Lincoln West, Concourse Level

Discussion Group: Addressing the Great Recruitment Crisis: Providing Graduate Students Access to Careers in Research Administration (Follow-Up Discussion Group)
Wednesday, August 9, 10:30a – 12p | Dupont, Terrace Level

Connect with Kathleen
Contact Kathleen

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Laney McLean, MPA, CRA
Senior Consultant

Laney McLean is a Senior Consultant for Attain Partners with over a decade of research administration experience. Prior to joining Attain Partners, Laney was the Director of Research Administration for the College of Engineering at Florida State University where she also served on several advisory panels for the Office of Research. She previously served as Assistant Director of a large sponsor-funded research center at FSU and began her career as a grants analyst in the FSU central pre-award office.

Laney is a Certified Research Administrator and earned her Master of Public Administration from Florida State University. She has been active in NCURA nationally and regionally since 2013 and currently serves as Secretary of NCURA Region III.

Discussion Group: The STTRuggle is Real: SBIR/STTR Pre- and Post-Award Pitfalls
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Gunston East, Terrace Level

Concurrent Session: Let’s Make a Deal—Looking Through the Doors of Sub-award Compliance to Make Everyone a Winner
Wednesday, August 9, 8:30a – 10a | Columbia 3&4, Terrace Level

Connect with Laney
Contact Laney

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Susan Wyatt Sedwick, Ph.D., CRA, CSM
Senior Consulting Specialist 

Dr. Susan Wyatt Sedwick joined Attain Partners when she retired in 2015 as an associate vice president for research and director of the Office of Sponsored Projects at The University of Texas at Austin, where she was responsible for both pre- and post-award financial administration units and export controls compliance. She received her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Texas A&M University and is a Certified Research Administrator (CRA). She is an adjunct professor for the Masters of Research Administration program at Johns Hopkins University and has held previous academic appointments as a clinical professor in the Department of Educational Administration for the Higher Education Administration Program at The University of Texas at Austin and as an adjunct professor for Rush University in Chicago and The University of Oklahoma, Norman. Dr. Sedwick is a frequent speaker on the topic of science and security, export controls as they apply to universities, improper influence, human capital development, and strategic planning. She has authored numerous publications, including the chapter on export controls included in the NCURA/AIS publication, Sponsored Research Administration: A Guide to Effective Strategies and Recommended Practices, and served as the lead author of the SRAI LevelUp micro-credentialing module on Award Acceptance and Negotiation. 

She is a graduate of Leadership Texas, a past trustee for the Texas A&M University-Kingsville Foundation, and founding president of the FDP Foundation. She is co-chair of the National Science Foundation Business and Operations Advisory Committee. She was recognized as the 2012-2013 distinguished alumnae by the Texas A&M University-Kingsville Dick and Mary Lewis Kleberg College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Human Sciences Hall of Honor. 

Concurrent Session: Same, Same, But Different: Departmental Challenges and Successes
Monday, August 7, 1:30p – 2:30p | Monroe, Concourse Level

Discussion Group: Same, Same, But Different: Departmental Challenges and Successes (Follow-up Discussion Group)
Monday, August 7, 4p – 5p | Northwest, Lobby Level

Concurrent Session: At Your Service: Addressing Interim Staffing and Leadership with Professional Services
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Cardozo, Terrace Level

Connect with Susan
Contact Susan

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Courtney Swaney, MPA, CRA
Senior Manager 

Courtney Swaney, MPA, CRA, is a Senior Manager for Attain Partners with almost 20 years of experience in research administration. She specializes in leadership and management of sponsored projects teams, pre-award, and electronic Research Administration (eRA). She has been an NCURA member since 2003 and has served as Region V Treasurer and on the Region V Mustang Mentoring Program Committee. 

Concurrent Session: At Your Service: Addressing Interim Staffing and Leadership with Professional Services
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Cardozo, Terrace Level

Connect with Courtney
Contact Courtney

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Shacey Temperly 
Senior Manager

Ms. Shacey Temperly is a Senior Manager in the Research Enterprise Services practice of Attain Partners. She is an experienced research administrator who specializes in procedural, system, and control analyses to create operational and financial efficiencies. She has provided various organizational redesign and business process improvement services for not-for-profit and higher education clients.

Concurrent Session: At Your Service: Addressing Interim Staffing and Leadership with Professional Services
Tuesday, August 8, 2:45p – 3:45p | Cardozo, Terrace Level

Connect with Shacey
Contact Shacey

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Chassidy Hall Brings Advancement Expertise to Attain Partners

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Attain Partners Welcomes
Chassidy Hall, Advancement Subject Matter Expert

Chassidy Hall joined Attain Partners in August to serve as an Advancement subject matter expert (SME) working with our Salesforce Innovation team. She joins us from a decade and a half in higher education working to help institutions leverage the power of Salesforce to improve the student experience.

Attain Partners is the Salesforce.org 2022 Consulting Partner of the Year – Education and a Salesforce Summit Partner. Our team of experts continually strives to Invent the Future and Be the Best in everything we do.

We sat down with Chassidy to learn about why she chose Attain Partners and hear about the expertise she brings to her role.

Attain Partners (AP): How did you get into Advancement?

Chassidy Hall (CH): I am a self-proclaimed “Salesforce Geek,” and have been using Salesforce for most of my professional career, from an end user in admissions and recruitment to moving into managing the operations for all student-facing roles. I was lucky enough to be a part of a re-implementation of Salesforce connecting to TargetX to redesign the entire student experience, successfully delivering a 360-degree view of the student, improving their educational experience, and improving the efficiency of the staff. 

After fifteen years on the student side of higher education, I started helping my team at The College of William & Mary with Advancement efforts, specifically using Salesforce and Marketing Cloud. It was a whole new world for me, and I was truly amazed at how much goes into designing and implementing a CRM for an Advancement Office. From there I was given the opportunity to work for an Advancement CRM built on the Salesforce platform. While I did not have a lot of advancement experience at the time, I had 15 years of Salesforce experience, and I was eager to help clients use this amazing technology. 

AP: What did you do before joining Attain Partners?

CH: I have spent the last three years working with an Advancement CRM built directly on Salesforce, and I have been lucky enough to wear a few different hats. I was brought on to work with the software engineering and product team, writing the product documentation, supporting clients post “go-live” and helping our implementation team as they partnered with our clients to implement their advancement solution on Salesforce. I loved getting to learn about such a complex product—how it was documented, delivered, and maintained—while helping clients develop a deeper understanding of this amazing tool.

The aspect of this job I loved the most was working with so many different colleges and universities, each one so unique. I have gotten a front-row seat to their technological growth, learning how to use innovative tools to develop new solutions that help with their overall mission for the betterment of their school, constituents, and community. I have gotten to go from working with a large department, piecing together each story to help develop an overall solution, to working with a single individual who realizes they can now accomplish something in a few hours with advanced reporting capabilities that in the past would have taken weeks and involved several different people/departments. 

AP: What brought you to Attain Partners?

CH: Attain Partners is an organization that believes in its core values and allows those values to drive every aspect of what they do. Getting to work for an organization that focuses its efforts on helping drive innovative technological solutions for education and Advancement organizations is an honor. Working with clients, taking on the challenge of understanding what they need, and painting that picture for them in a way that they understand and can see the possibility of the end result is simply amazing. Working with people to help them understand how technology can help them do something better, or something they have never been able to do before, is what brought me to Attain Partners. 

AP: Which of our seven core values speaks to you the most?

CH: Each core value demonstrates the overall focus and drive Attain Partners dedicates to their clients. Be Bold definitely speaks to me the loudest. What I love most about partnering with organizations and their constituents is helping to turn their hopes and dreams into tangible solutions. Everyone within an organization has amazing ideas and contributions, we get to help them put those pieces together strategically and test them to ensure they deliver results. 

AP: What do you like most about the work you do?

CH: Helping people in an organization put their ideas together, translating their stories into solutions, and delivering real-life improvements to their everyday jobs brings me pure joy. When it comes to implementing new technology people can get scared, nervous, and oftentimes are willing to accept the status quo. I love collecting, constructing, and delivering new business solutions and seeing the excitement it can bring, from re-designing a marketing communication strategy for an annual fund to more efficient ways for gift entry. All of this comes down to being understanding, approachable, empathetic, and a good teacher. 

AP: What are the biggest ways you’ve seen Advancement efforts impact organizations?

CH: Advancement efforts play such a vital role within an organization—over the last twenty years we have seen such a dramatic shift in how institutions are able to secure funding. Universities are getting less money from tuition and governmental resources and Advancement departments had to help fill that gap. Now, in so many colleges and universities they are exceeding that gap, their efforts going beyond the education that is being provided to the students.

The research and community growth that is provided by an educational institution is made possible by its Advancement efforts. In so many ways a university is the core of the community, educating, employing, improving, and growing everyone within the community.  

AP: What is the most challenging aspect of your job?

CH: The most challenging aspect of my job is making sure that everyone’s needs are met. What I love most about this job is seeing the light bulb turn on when a client realizes that we can help them fix a problem, or better a process. The challenge is to make sure everyone has that “light bulb experience,” believes in what we are doing, and is excited about the end result.  

AP: What do you read and watch to keep current?

CH: I live and die by Salesforce Trailhead, and the user community. I subscribe to educational nonprofit groups and ISV partner groups, and I regularly attend local user group meetings. Reading through questions the community has had really helps to fine-tune my skills and find new and innovative ways to deliver solutions.   

I have been fortunate enough to attend CASE and aasp conferences, meeting and networking with Advancement professionals from institutions all over the country. It’s reaffirming to learn what organizations have done with technology to exceed fundraising goals, connect with their constituents, deliver groundbreaking technology, drastically improve their communication plans, and so much more. 

Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts

No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, Attain Partners is here to help you achieve your goals. Contact our team today to learn how we can help you advance your mission by harnessing the power of Salesforce.

To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services, read case studies about our transformative work, and explore blog posts from our Salesforce experts. Read our latest advancement insights here.  

Interested in speaking directly with Chassidy? Fill out this form to be connected!

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Data Lakes, Warehouses, and Archives: Salesforce Data Storage Options for Nonprofits 

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An overview of the new Salesforce Data Cloud, Data Lake for Nonprofits on AWS, and Heroku Connect

The most important question to answer before moving to Salesforce is, “What data are you planning to store in Salesforce?”

It seems like a simple, and maybe obvious question, but it is one of the earliest and most important questions to consider when moving to Salesforce, because “everything” is often not the right answer. In fact, trying to use Salesforce to store all your data, past, current, and future, is one of the few reasons Salesforce implementations fail.  

Every record stored in the core Salesforce CRM comes with some form of cost. It’s a small cost that can be easy to miss among all the critical decisions that come with implementing Salesforce, but it’s a cost that scales with each row you add. There are three ways to understand this cost:

  1. Performance

    Nobody likes to wait for a computer. With too much data, page loads, reports, and record save time can slow to a crawl, taking minutes or timing out entirely. While working with an experienced partner can mitigate these performance issues through strong design and planning, being strategic in the data you choose to load is the best and easiest way to set your team up for efficient processes. 

  2. Organization Complexity

    Often, more data means serving more constituencies, supporting more disparate operations, and ultimately, a more complex Salesforce instance. The tradeoff here is nuanced—Salesforce offers enormous value by providing a 360° view of your constituents, but not all data adds the same value to that view, especially if that data also requires substantial customization and automation to support. 

  3. Money

    Salesforce storage costs money. Each license comes bundled with a certain amount of storage, when you use it up, you need to buy more. Buying more data from Salesforce is more expensive per gigabyte than many of the storage options discussed below. 

Salesforce is a tool to drive and track relationships and streamline organization processes. While Salesforce can be customized to do almost anything, clearly defining and understanding the role it will play within your organization can help your team avoid the performance and complexity-based problems that come from being everything to everyone.  

Designing Your Data Landscape—Questions to Consider

What value does historical data offer to your day-to-day operations and where does that value come from? Does it matter that a donor gave $10 in 2012, or does it matter that their first gift date and lifetime giving totals are accurate? Does it matter that fundraising staff can edit or kick off Salesforce automation based on that data, or can it be accessible in a read-only form? 

Think about all the sources and consumers of data across your organization. Is Salesforce the primary producer and consumer of data, or is there an ecosystem of related systems for marketing, finance, advocacy, or other operations to consider? Do you have tools to identify and prioritize the best quality data across those platforms, or does each system store its own limited sliver of a person’s information? 

You can think about your data like a pyramid, with the data powering day-to-day operations at the top and with historical data that’s rarely accessed at the bottom. Somewhere on that pyramid is a cutoff point where the data no longer provides meaningful value stored in Salesforce. 

For many organizations, this historical data is most efficiently stored in a data warehouse, data lake, or archives. These are terms that often overlap, so it’s worthwhile to define them precisely. 

Definitions – Lakes, Warehouses, and Archives

Selecting an Architecture for Your Nonprofit Organization

For nonprofits with one or two key systems, an archive of Salesforce data can offer efficiency and cost savings. Attain Partners has designed and built archive solutions that preserve giving histories, summaries, and even allow fundraising staff to view historical gifts while storing all data off-platform.

For organizations with multiple data systems functioning as both producers and consumers of data, a data warehouse architecture coupled with a Master Data Management plan can centralize complex integrations, streamline operations, and improve data quality across systems. For organizations with mature or growing business intelligence or analytics teams, a data lake can provide data science teams with the flexibility to seek new insights from existing operational data.

Leveraging External Tools to Create a Custom-built Archival Solution

Data lakes, warehouses, and archives don’t typically offer the same polished, flexible user experience as the core Salesforce CRM offers; but, in exchange, they are able to store large amounts of data efficiently and inexpensively. A big piece of this difference is the underlying database product that’s powering the service. Salesforce core CRM uses a traditional Oracle database under the hood, whereas these tools use database products designed and built to store data for some of the largest websites in the world, like Amazon’s RedShift, Google’s BigQuery, and Apache Hadoop.

Salesforce Offerings for Nonprofit Data Storage

Salesforce Data Cloud

The newest offering from Salesforce, Data Cloud, draws upon Salesforce’s marketing-focused warehousing and data transformation product CDP, along with the connectivity of Mulesoft to deliver a data warehouse and data lake. Data Cloud provides tools in Salesforce to manage integrated source data and schemas, an identity resolution service to build a golden list of constituents to match all data sources against, and robust segmentation capabilities far beyond what is offered natively on the platform. Data Cloud works best for organizations with millions, or tens of millions, of rows to a warehouse.

Data Lake for Nonprofits on AWS

Announced at Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce has partnered with Amazon to offer a Data Lake for Nonprofits, which streamlines the 25+ steps necessary to connect and mirror Salesforce data in AWS. A quick start offering, for organizations prepared to own and maintain their own data lake in AWS using RedShift or RDS, this may be the fastest way to get a data lake started in AWS. Like Salesforce Data Cloud, the AWS Data Lake can run with tens of millions of rows of data without issue.

Heroku Connect

Salesforce also offers Heroku Connect, which mirrors the data from entire Salesforce objects in a Heroku Postgres database.

Both Heroku Connect and the AWS Data Lake Connector offer the benefit of streamlined setup and configuration and, given the flexibility of Heroku and AWS, either can be a starting point for a custom-built warehouse or an archive solution. From a pricing and performance perspective, Heroku is best in smaller and mid-market organizations, while AWS offers products like RedShift that handle large data tens of millions of rows without performance degradation. That said, the future for Salesforce seems to be with Data Cloud. At the May 2023 New York World Tour, Data Cloud had at least four booths in various areas of the show floor.

Non-Salesforce Offerings for Nonprofit Data Storage

Snowflake Cloud Database

The Cloud database, Snowflake should also be considered with Heroku and the new AWS Data Lake for Nonprofits, as it offers a cost-effective and performant back-end database, with native Salesforce connectors for specific clouds and some quick start tools to begin setup of your data lake or warehouse. If more flexibility is needed, it can also be connected to Salesforce with a data transformation tool like Mulesoft, Talend, or Informatica.

Civis Analytics

Like Data Cloud, Civis Analytics offers a packaged solution that includes a data warehouse, data quality tools, and lightweight master data management capabilities. Civis Analytics also offers a suite of native connectors to bring in data from Salesforce, EveryAction, and Tableau, along with the flexibility of powerful scripting tools and low-level database access.

Archive Solutions

The Salesforce ecosystem also provides a wide variety of point solutions that focus on a specific use case. OwnBackup, CopyStorm, and DBAmp all offer packaged data archiving solutions. These options are less work to configure and maintain, but may not offer all the functionality nonprofits require, like the ability to maintain giving summaries for key donors.

The Salesforce Data Cloud, AWS Data Lake, Heroku, Civis Analytics, and Point Solutions all provide accelerators to speed their implementation, but each offering is a powerful and flexible tool that can handle great complexity in the hands of an experienced developer, like Attain Partners.

Attain Partners Brings Extensive Nonprofit Data Expertise

Data migration and strategy are part of every Attain Partners project. Our experts conduct enterprise-wide architecture and storage solutions integrated with off-platform storage for higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations throughout North America.

We have successfully helped many colleges and universities integrate Salesforce into their existing enterprise-wide Master Data Management design, often with just the client-provided inbound data feed from existing data warehouses and data lakes.

Most recently, we had the opportunity to work with The ALS Association to help manage their data storage costs and improve system performance by offloading over 10 million records into an off-platform archive. The system was designed to provide fundraising staff a seamless, detailed view of donor giving history across data in Salesforce and in their archive. This new system has empowered the ALS Association to track lifetime giving, average gift amount, and other key giving totals to better communicate with donors and expand their fundraising efforts.

The Attain Partners team values our role in helping our nonprofit clients improve efficiencies and reallocate more of their hard-earned dollars to advancing their missions. Almost every Attain Partners project includes detailed work with data, from designing a system architecture that properly accounts for data volumes and growth, to selecting tools and storage solutions that handle those volumes in a performant and cost-effective way. Attain Partners regularly works with tens of millions of rows of data including larger projects like the data migration we did recently for the San Francisco Public Radio station KQED, reaching the 100 million record mark. 

Successful data migration to off-platform data warehouses, data lakes, and archives improves overall system performance for staff and Experience Cloud visitors, while also enabling nonprofit business intelligence and analytics teams to generate a performant picture of organization-wide activity quickly.

If you are considering implementing Salesforce or are already live on the platform and suffering from performance or data-related problems, developing a thoughtful data architecture and strategy based on a strong decision-making framework can be the difference between success and failure for your project and can positively impact your organization’s ability to support donors, fundraise, save money, and spend more time and energy focused on achieving your mission goals. Ultimately, offloading data from Salesforce is an important activity and requires thoughtful energy and a framework for decision-making—Attain Partners is here to walk you through this every step of the way.

Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts

Regardless of whether your organization is just beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, Attain Partners is here to help you achieve your goals. Contact our team today to learn how we can help you advance your mission by harnessing the power of Salesforce.

To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services, read case studies about our transformative work, and explore blog posts from our Salesforce experts.

About the Authors

Timothy Fives is the Senior Director of Technology for Attain Partners. In this role, Tim is responsible for providing implementation roadmaps, and technical strategies, and has a passion for emerging technologies that benefit our clients. Tim joined Attain Partners in 2022 and has been implementing enterprise solutions for 20+ years, most recently implementing Salesforce at CRS. Further, Tim is responsible for Attain Partners’ strategic technology team including Attain Partners’ World Team.

Chris Pifer is a Senior Solution Architect serving higher education and nonprofit clients. As a senior leader, Chris provides architecture, design, and subject matter expertise on the technical implementation of Salesforce and relevant third-party tools. His specialties include solution analysis and design, data analysis and migration, and test and quality assurance. Chris has been working in nonprofit tech since 2003 and in the Salesforce ecosystem since 2009. He is one of approximately 200 people who have been recognized globally by Salesforce as an MVP for his expertise, leadership, generosity, and for the positive impact he has had on the Salesforce ecosystem.

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Francis Quinn Brings Project Management Expertise to Attain Partners

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Attain Partners welcomes Francis Quinn to serve as PMO Director for the University System of Maryland (USM) Maryland Connect program

Francis Quinn joined us in June to serve as the Project Management Office (PMO) Director for the USM Maryland Connect (MD Connect) program, managing the complex enterprise transformation for the consortium of five schools—Bowie State University, Frostburg State University, Salisbury University, University of Baltimore, and Coppin State University.

In his role, Francis leads the Attain Partners team to deliver program management, organizational change management, and staff augmentation support as the consortium implements a single instance of Workday Financial Management and Human Capital Management systems.

We sat down with Francis to learn about why he chose Attain Partners and hear about the expertise he brings to his role.

Attain Partners (AP): How did you become interested in project management?

Francis Quinn (FQ): I became captivated by the opportunity to assist organizations in their pursuit of workplace modernization through the adoption of cutting-edge technology and streamlined business processes. Project management became an ideal avenue for me to support these endeavors.

AP: What did you do before joining Attain Partners?

FQ: Before joining Attain Partners, I held the position of leading the professional services team at Unit4 Thesis.

AP: What excites you about joining Attain Partners?

FQ: The vision, the people, and the culture at Attain Partners were all sources of great excitement for me.

AP: Which of our seven core values speaks to you the most?

FQ: This is a challenging question, but if I had to choose, I would say Have Absolute Integrity speaks to me the most. Without integrity, any achievements or endeavors we undertake will not withstand the test of time.

AP: What do you like most about the work you do?

FQ: I am passionate about the pivotal role education plays in shaping a brighter future for everyone. Assisting universities in harnessing the power of modern technology to accomplish their missions is what motivates me every day.

AP: What are the biggest ways you’ve seen projects that you’ve managed impact organizations?

FQ: Once successfully implemented, the projects I’ve managed have had substantial impacts on organizations. They have helped to manage costs, enhance operational efficiency, and enable employees to achieve an improved work-life balance.

AP: What is the most challenging aspect of your job?

FQ: Managing large-scale projects requires considerable time and effort from the entire team.

Learn more – Program and Project Management

Our program management team holds decades of expertise in helping organizations across the social and public sectors deliver services on time and within budget. By leveraging today’s program management best practices—inclusive of Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and the Project Management Institute (PMI) standards—we see the full picture of your program to better align your projects and processes to your strategic objectives, improving your day-to-day practices, ensuring compliance, and achieving your desired goals.

Learn more about our end-to-end program management support services for large-scale systems integration and development programs here.

Learn more – Attain Partners and Workday

Workday is a modern, cloud-based ERP solution for all major industries that provides numerous tools and features to streamline and optimize business processes, increase efficiency, improve decision-making, and enhance transparency.

Learn more about Attain Partners and Workday here.

Learn more – Enterprise Resource Planning

As your organization begins the journey of selecting a new ERP like Workday, Attain Partners understands the importance of delivering the new ERP that will revolutionize and modernize your business processes in a timely manner and within budget. We have the knowledge, experience, and technical expertise to guide you and your team members through the Workday implementation process.

Discover how Attain Partners can help make the most out of your ERP system. Learn more about our services here.

Interested in speaking directly with Francis? Fill out this form to be connected!

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Six Best Practices to Leverage Salesforce Managed Services Effectively

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Engage with Managed Services for CRM (previously AttainPlus) for Ongoing, Cost-effective CRM Optimization

So, your Salesforce implementation is going live in six weeks, but you don’t have a solution for managing the environment once you go live. What do you do? Well, that’s where Managed Services for CRM (previously AttainPlus) comes to the rescue.

Here are just some of the compelling reasons to consider engaging a Salesforce Managed Services team for comprehensive support:

  • Absence of an In-house System Administrator: In the event that your organization lacks a dedicated System Administrator or staff to assume responsibilities post-implementation, a Salesforce Managed Services team can fill this crucial role, ensuring smooth operations and ongoing maintenance.
  • Limited Internal Support Resources: Whether due to budgetary constraints or other factors, you may not have plans to employ an internal System Administrator or additional staff to provide ongoing Salesforce support. Engaging a Salesforce Managed Services team can effectively bridge this gap and provide the necessary expertise to ensure optimal performance.
  • Enhanced Expertise and Resources: Partnering with a consulting firm specializing in Salesforce Managed Services, like Attain Partners, grants you access to a pool of highly experienced and knowledgeable professionals. These experts possess deep expertise in managing Salesforce environments, enabling them to handle complex challenges and provide strategic guidance.
  • Dissatisfaction with Existing Implementation Partner: If your current implementation partner has failed to deliver satisfactory results or meet your organization’s expectations, engaging a Salesforce Managed Services team can help you shift to a new resource.
  • Diverse Perspectives and Resources: Collaborating with a different implementation partner offers the advantage of gaining new perspectives on your Salesforce implementation. This alternative partner can bring unique insights and resources to the table, enabling them to address both new and existing challenges from implementation in a new way.

Regardless of your reason(s) to engage with a Managed Services team, there are important things to know before signing that contract.

Six Key Considerations Before Signing a Salesforce Managed Services Contract

1. Know Your Service-level Agreements (SLAs)

Setting clear expectations and understanding what you will be receiving from your Managed Services team is key. SLAs are the mechanism by which these expectations are communicated. Definitions for contractual responsibilities like response times, availability, and performance metrics, among other things, are included in the SLAs.

One of the most important SLAs to understand is the response time ranges promised to you by the Managed Services team when you raise an issue. Typically, these are categorized by priority or severity of the issue and may look something like this:

Urgent: Issues classified as “Urgent” are critical and require immediate attention. The response time for urgent items is usually the shortest, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. Quick response and resolution are necessary to minimize the impact on your team’s operations. For example, if your system is down and you are unable to process transactions, this would typically be classified as an urgent issue.

High: High-priority issues are important but may not have the same level of immediacy as urgent items. The response time for high-priority items is generally within a few hours to a business day. Timely action is required to address the issue and prevent it from being escalated.  For example, a ‘high’ priority item might be a performance degradation in your system during a busy season and it is impacting the user experience or the ability of your agent(s) to service your client in a timely manner. While the system is still functioning, it is causing significant issues for you and your customers.

Medium: Medium-priority issues are significant but do not require immediate attention. The response time for medium-priority items can range from a few hours to a couple of business days. Although important, these issues may not have an immediate impact on critical business operations. For example, there is a functionality loss for a certain subset of users but it does not disrupt the larger system or stop critical business operations.

Low: Low-priority items are non-critical issues or requests that have a minimal impact on business operations. The response time for low-priority items can range from a couple of business days to a week or more, depending on the agreed-upon SLA. These items are usually addressed after higher-priority tasks have been resolved. For example, a report that is generated for monthly financial closing is formatted in an odd way—this does not impact the accuracy of the report or prevent your team from performing the appropriate financial analysis.

It’s important to note that the specific response times and priority levels may vary depending on the organization, industry, and the nature of the services being provided. SLAs should clearly define the response time targets for each priority level, ensuring that both the managed services team and your team have a shared understanding of expectations.

In addition to response times, SLAs may also include Resolution Time Objectives (RTOs) or Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), which outline the expected time frames for resolving or recovering from an issue once it has been acknowledged. RTOs specify the acceptable timeframe for restoring normal operations after the incident has occurred, while the RPOs refer to the acceptable amount of data loss or the point in time to which data can be recovered after an incident.

2. Know the Scope and Boundaries

By gaining a thorough understanding of the scope of the Managed Services team’s responsibilities, your team will be able to easily identify the services and/or systems that they will support and maintain. Additionally, look to clarify the boundaries of support between your team and the Managed Services team so that there are no gaps in coverage and no conflicts between who is responsible for a particular area.

Specifications should be provided for activities such as system monitoring, incident management, performance optimization, problem resolution, and security management. Clear guidelines should be set forth to ensure your team and the Managed Services team know who is accountable for each service.

3. Know the Documentation and Knowledge Transfer Process

Get familiar with the documentation that the implementation team has created and is leaving behind after go-live. This will be the basis of your team’s understanding, as well as the starting point for the Managed Services team. The documentation is vitally important for your team, especially if your team has not been intimately involved in the implementation. From my implementation experience and now working in Managed Services, I’ve seen firsthand where this becomes a huge stumbling block for the Managed Services team causing additional hours of review and research to understand the gaps in the functionality.

Also, we would recommend that your team be a part of the knowledge transfer from the implementation team to the Managed Services team. Set aside two to four hours of time for your key stakeholders to be involved in the process and ensure your team has a full understanding of the functionality delivered. This may be your last chance to ask questions of the implementation team, especially if you are switching consulting firms. If there are items that were not delivered in the implementation, now is the time to ask why they weren’t delivered and what, if any, progress was made on the functionality. Note, this is where the implementation team’s RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Decisions) log should have noted where roadblocks were found, and any decisions made to stop or defer the effort to another phase.

4. Know the Communication Plan

While it is important that the Managed Services team understands who your team’s key stakeholders are, it is also important that your team know the players involved in the Managed Services effort and how communications will be handled when there is an issue that needs to be escalated. Typically, a Project Manager (PM) or Account Executive (AE) is assigned to your team from the Managed Services side. The PM or AE usually handles regular reporting and updates to your team and may run a weekly or monthly check-in call to ensure issues are being handled in a timely and effective manner. It’s likely that this PM or AE is the point of escalation for any issues, too.

We recommend having a clear understanding of the Managed Services chain of command and knowing the “when” and “to whom” to escalate issues. When a Project Manager is not available (or not needed), the Managed Services Executive Director typically serves as the liaison.

5. Know the Incident Management Process

Familiarize yourself with the Managed Services team’s incident process that they follow. If your team would prefer to have the Managed Services team use your ticketing system (e.g., Jira, Zendesk, etc.) and use your guidelines for ticket resolution, be sure to include this in the SLAs. But, if not, be sure to understand the tool or application being used and how they manage the issues that arise (i.e., how are the issues logged, followed, status updated, resolved, etc.)

6. Know the Change Management Process

While the process of issue resolution also includes some aspects of change management, a broader or system-wide change may require the involvement of a data governance team or other sets of key stakeholders from your company. The Managed Services team will need to have clear guidelines as to how they are to present changes, get a full understanding of the ramifications, then get approval to make the appropriate changes.

Salesforce management typically handles the safe movement of work from an idea to proof-of-concept, to testing, and then to production. We recommend at least three Salesforce environments to handle this—a Partial Sandbox for development, a Full Sandbox (if available) for user acceptance testing, and your Production org. Note: Full sandboxes do typically require additional licensing and costs.

By keeping these things in mind as you plan or start an engagement with a Managed Services team, you can establish a strong partnership and ensure effective support, proactive maintenance, and reliable performance from your Salesforce system.

Why choose Managed Services for CRM to manage your Salesforce instance?

Managed Services for CRM is a flexible, cost-effective, and efficient way to manage your complete Salesforce environment—from CRM to Experience Cloud to Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud, or AppExchange tools. If your organization lacks Salesforce expertise, has challenges managing it, or needs expert assistance in optimizing its use of Salesforce, then Managed Services for CRM is the right solution for you.

Learn more about Managed Services for CRM and meet our team of experts in our on-demand webinar.

What Clients Say

Attain Partners’ Managed Services is enabling the University of Virginia, Darden School Foundation Executive Education and Lifelong Learning to increase our sales velocity with a unified seller experience, preparing for growth while helping us remain flexible for future change with one, integrated platform.
Allison Forrest
University of Virginia, Darden School Foundation
We don’t have an in-house Salesforce Administrator, so it’s comforting to know that when something goes wrong, or there are new updates that might interfere with our environment, I can call my Managed Services team and trust that they are on top of things!
Andrea Sáenz
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts

No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, we are here to help you achieve your goals. Contact Attain Partners today to learn how we can help you achieve your goals by harnessing the power of Salesforce.

To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services, read case studies about our work, and explore blog posts from Attain Partners’ Salesforce team.

About the Author

Maury Davis is a Senior Salesforce Specialist at Attain Partners. Maury has worked in higher education and nonprofit organizations for over 15 years, focusing his last 10 years on demonstrating the value of the Salesforce Platform to his employers and clients.

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Migrating to the ERP Cloud: Four Important Considerations for Education Institutions

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Higher education organizations encounter distinct challenges when migrating to cloud-based ERP systems. Unlike the commercial sector, which has rapidly adopted cloud ERP, higher education institutions face unique hurdles, such as the presence of legacy applications that rely on client-server network architecture and are usually housed in on-premises data centers.

When determining which components of the ERP stack should be migrated to the cloud or substituted with cloud-based alternatives, there are four critical factors higher education institutions should take into consideration—cost, timing, security, and software innovation.

Cost: Determine the Cost and ROI of the ERP Cloud Solution for Your Institution

What are the existing license and lease obligations associated with the institution’s current on-premise or non-cloud applications? What new costs are associated with cloud-based applications? Conducting a thorough cost analysis will be instrumental in determining whether a new budget will be required to support the decision to migrate to an ERP cloud or if there may be an opportunity to reallocate funds elsewhere within the institution.

It is also essential to identify the qualitative benefits of remaining with the status quo as well as migrating to the ERP cloud. For example, migrating applications to the ERP cloud typically enable the technical staff currently managing manual processes to focus on more strategic tasks such as employee retention. Not only do ERP cloud solutions help new employees onboard and get up-to-speed quickly compared to legacy labor-intensive systems, but they also can improve employee retention rates by supplying key metrics and predictive analytics that can identify employees at risk of leaving the organization.

Timing: Plan Your ERP Cloud Migration Appropriately for Your Institution’s Needs

Which applications need to be migrated to the new ERP cloud first? Which applications cannot be migrated at all and must remain either on the legacy system or be replaced? And what is the ideal order for the application needing to be migrated? Professionals experienced in ERP cloud migration projects, like Attain Partners, can help your institution address these questions to ensure a smooth and timely migration.

Security: Maintain Your Institution’s Data Security

Security is of utmost importance when migrating data to a new system. It is imperative you perform a complete security analysis in conjunction with your ERP cloud migration to ensure that the same level of access should be assigned to the new cloud applications. If your staff isn’t equipped to conduct this level of security analysis accurately, hire an expert—you won’t regret it.

Software Innovation: Choose an ERP Cloud that Matches Your Institution’s Desire for Innovation and Change Management

When hundreds or thousands of organizations all share the same software code line (as is common in multi-tenant cloud solutions), it allows the software providers to innovate much more rapidly. Large cloud providers such as Workday, Amazon, and Salesforce are designed this way to serve the masses from a single code line while dedicating considerable resources to providing innovation in features and functionality.

This, in turn, places a demand on the customers to digest and adopt the new features. Your higher education staff should be prepared to align with this regular update cadence, which may necessitate more frequent training and change management activities.

Successful ERP Cloud Migration Relies Heavily on Your Institution’s Preparation and Expert Resources

Higher education institutions can benefit from a thorough analysis of their solution costs, timing and order of data migration, data security needs, and the organization’s readiness to move to an ERP cloud. Attain Partners specializes in this type of consulting, assisting our clients with Cloud Readiness Assessments, roadmaps, PMO and Change Management support, and ERP deployment process analysis.

Learn More – Enterprise Resource Planning

As your institution begins the journey of selecting a new ERP, Attain Partners understands the importance of delivering the new system on time and within budget. We have the knowledge, experience, and technical expertise to guide you and your team through the implementation process for lasting success.

Discover how Attain Partners can help make the most out of your ERP system. Learn more about our services here.

About the Author

Wesley Bertch has an extensive background in both legacy on-premise and cloud ERP. He was an early cloud ERP adopter and has worked with most ERP vendors’ systems as a customer, alliance partner, and employee. Mr. Bertch is a Principal at Attain Partners, where he provides consulting services to the higher education, state and local, and nonprofit sectors.

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Attain Partners' Alliance Partnerships

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Aligning for Sustained Impact

Attain Partners is proud to form meaningful, strategic partnerships with like-minded organizations that share our passion for creating people-driven solutions. Read on to discover how Attain Partners collaborates with the market’s leading product and solutions providers—including Salesforce, Blackthorn.io, Cayuse, Formstack, UC Innovation, and Vera Solutions—to empower clients across the social and public sectors.

Cayuse

Attain Partners and Cayuse are the driving force behind how research is managed and administered. Cayuse’s integrated, cloud-based research platform powers a suite of applications that maximizes researcher success, improves collaboration, and streamlines work across the entire research lifecycle, including the commercialization of research outcomes. As a Cayuse preferred partner, Attain Partners’ subject matter expertise—including pre-award and post-award grants management, regulatory compliance, classified research administration, and more—combined with Cayuse’s leading-edge software creates a power-driven partner dynamic that improves both business processes’ technology and research administration.

Our passionate team of experts, paired with the Cayuse integrated, cloud-based platform, enables us to efficiently improve research administration business processes and increase efficiency and compliance.
Mark Davis Headshot
mark davis
Managing Partner and Practice Lead, Attain Partners

Attain Partners teams with Cayuse to offer guidance to clients during implementations, ensuring that institutions are able to fully utilize the system functionality and incorporate industry best practices while streamlining their business processes. We also offer change management support during the implementation process, leading the client through the process of engaging stakeholders and communicating change to prepare institutions for a successful product rollout. 

Learn More

Case Study: eRA Implementation Success at the University of Wyoming

On-demand Webinar: Better Together—How Wyoming Accelerated Its Path to Success with Cayuse and Attain Partners

Press Release: The University of Wyoming enhances its culture of collaboration with Cayuse and Attain Partners

On-demand Webinar: eRA Implementation Insights with Tulane University, Attain Partners, and Cayuse

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud platform and the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of enterprise customer relationship management, enterprise collaboration, and cloud application development. As the Salesforce 2022 Consulting Partner of the Year – Education and a Salesforce Summit Partner, our consultants leverage proven expertise—gained in part from delivering 1,000+ Salesforce projects and counting—to provide education institutions and nonprofit organizations with extensive implementation, strategy development, and managed services support.

With a deep understanding of the education, nonprofit, and public sectors, Attain Partners can implement and optimize the agile, multi-channel cloud platform that Salesforce provides to support enterprise constituent relationship management, marketing automation, fundraising and advancement, program management, application development, enterprise collaboration, integration with legacy applications, and mobile application development initiatives.

I’m extremely proud of our Summit Partner achievement and our strong relationship with Salesforce. Together, we are changing the world, creating impactful results that propel our clients forward to realize their missions.
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Greg Baroni
Founder and CEO, Attain Partners

Through our managed services offering, Managed Services for CRM (previously AttainPlus), we enable our customers to grow in their use of Salesforce. Managed Services for CRM is a support and maintenance program that provides the right resources so you can evolve and maximize the benefits of your Salesforce solution. Our plans provide you access to a dedicated team of experts, supplementing or avoiding the need for a full-time resource that may not have the wide range of expertise or time needed to provide the support you need. We partner with and extend your team by leveraging system administration services, including Salesforce CRM, Marketing Cloud, and more. We help build your skills, manage your systems, and extend your team when you need it.

Learn More

Blog Posts: Salesforce

Award: 2022 Salesforce.org Consulting Partner of the Year – Education

Service: Salesforce Innovation

Client Spotlight: CU Leeds

Our robust and enduring partnership with Salesforce has not only fortified our position as a leading consulting and implementation partner in the ecosystem—it has also been instrumental in facilitating a network of symbiotic relationships with the platform’s leading product providers, including Blackthorn.io, Formstack, Vera Solutions, and UC Innovation.

Through our partnership with Salesforce, we have cultivated a broad network of strategic product partners—Vera Solutions’ Amp Impact, UC Innovation’s ascend, Blackthorn.io’s Blackthorn Events, and Formstack’s Formstack Forms, to name a few—who share our commitment to innovation and excellence. These alliances have further enhanced our ability to deliver unparalleled value to our clients by harnessing the full power of Salesforce.
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alanna Steffens
Managing Director and Salesforce Capability Lead, Attain Partners

Blackthorn.io: Blackthorn Events

When it comes to event management, Blackthorn and Salesforce have the technology you need to make it happen—and Attain Partners can design and implement a tailored solution. Leveraging Blackthorn allows organizations to do more events and spend less time on management.

As the 2022 Salesforce Consulting Partner of the Year – Education, Attain Partners proudly collaborates with 2022 Salesforce Product Partner of the Year – Education, Blackthorn, to provide event management support through Blackthorn Events. Whether you are looking for advanced analytics and reporting available with a Tableau integration or a full 360-degree view of your attendees and their interactions with your organization/institution, Attain Partners has experience helping clients make Blackthorn Events work for all types of events, and we can do the same for you.

With Attain Partners’ solution design and implementation expertise and Blackthorn’s superior product capabilities, your organization can easily establish a system to plan and run events with efficiency and ease.
Jason Cook
Jason Cook
Principal Consultant, Attain Partners

From growing donor relationships to predicting student success, Attain Partners and Blackthorn have what it takes to empower end-to-end event and communication management to ensure your organization delivers innovation and impact.

Learn More

Blog Post: No matter your event needs, Attain Partners and Blackthorn have you covered

On-demand Webinar: Double Down on Your CRM Investment – End-to-End Events and Communications on Salesforce by Attain Partners and Blackthorn

Formstack: Formstack Forms

For university recruiting and admissions teams, it’s important to have an optimized, mobile-ready, and easy-to-use application. But why does delivering the best possible application experience have to be so difficult? The answer—it doesn’t!

Attain Partners and Formstack collaborated to create an optimized, mobile-ready, and easy-to-use application process for higher education institutions. Our Admissions Application Template is designed to accelerate your Salesforce Admissions Connect implementation—reducing time and expense to go-live with Education Cloud Admissions Connect.

Your application is your first impression with your students. Formstack is an intuitive and powerful tool that allows your team to create quality forms that integrate well with Salesforce. Attain Partners’ Admission Application Template is a way to not only impress future students—but also a quick and simple way for your staff to customize forms to engage with those students and send them through a seamless admissions process.
Catherine Sylvester
Specialist Leader, Attain Partners

Formstack for Salesforce is an all-in-one forms, documents, and digital e-signature solution that empowers anyone to automate processes and streamline the customer experience—all without leaving Salesforce. Used by more than 800 colleges and universities worldwide, Formstack’s solutions work natively within Salesforce to allow schools to transform outdated paper processes into powerful digital workflows that span across several departments.

Learn More

Blog Post: Formstack-Based Application Template

Video: Attain Partners Salesforce Admissions Connect Application Template

On-demand Webinar: How to Create an Optimized, Mobile-ready Application Experience

Article: Formstack and Attain Partners Collaborate on Salesforce Admissions Connect Initiative

UC Innovation: ascend

Through its ascend product, UC Innovation provides one of the most comprehensive advancement and constituent engagement solutions in the market. Attain Partners is an official ascend Certified Implementation Partner with 19 ascend certifications (and counting!) across our team, recognizing our certified proficiency in implementing and leveraging the solution. This recognition, combined with our Salesforce Summit Partner status and Expert status in Education Cloud, allows us to transform the way advancement teams work.

Attain Partners’ collaborative efforts with UC Innovation exemplify how a great partnership leads to great results. We are proud to partner with UC Innovation to lead digital transformation with ascend and support the missions of institutions across North America.
Matt Roush
Senior Architect, Attain Partners

Using ascend and Salesforce together allows institutions to select solutions that do exactly what they need to provide a better user experience, work together with greater efficiency, and drive advancement goals forward.

Learn More

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Blog Post: Advancement Transformation and Centralized Solutions: Top Trends Among ascend Users

Video: Attain Partners and UC Innovation – Using ascend for Advancement

Vera Solutions: Amp Impact

Attain Partners is proud to be a formal partner and implementer of Vera Solutions’ Amp Impact. Built directly on the Salesforce platform, Amp Impact brings data and teams together across the program lifecycle to revolutionize the way organizations track and measure their impact.

Our communities depend on the social sector—especially during challenging times like we’ve experienced over the last few years. However, nonprofit organizations are constantly pushed to do more with less and simultaneously demonstrate success with data. We believe Amp Impact closes the ‘input to impact’ gap challenging many nonprofits.
Kristi Phillips
Managing Director and Nonprofit Market Lead, Attain Partners

Attain Partners is proud to be among an exclusive group of partners around the world enabled to implement this tool. The massive growth and accelerated pace of delivering success to our shared clients is thrilling. Leveraging Vera Solutions’ innovative product, we empower nonprofit organizations to generate holistic insights that will inform decisions and ultimately transform programs—and our communities—for the better.

Learn More

On-demand Webinar: Supercharging Your Impact Measurement with Attain Partners and Amp Impact

Video: Attain Partners and Amp Impact

Blog Post: Partnership Announcement: Attain Partners and Amp Impact

Attain Partners’ Alliance Partners

We founded Attain Partners to make an impact—to help organizations achieve their missions faster and more efficiently so they can operate at their highest levels. We are grateful to work alongside the market’s leading product and solution providers, forging alliances that combine our consultative expertise with cutting-edge technology to transform the way organizations drive impact and deliver excellence.

Learn more about our partner ecosystem here.

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Top Seven Reasons Salesforce Higher Education Director Doug Barrow Chose to Join Attain Partners, US

Four Reasons to Use Interim Staffing to Meet Your Institution’s Financial Aid Needs

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In the wake of the post-pandemic era, numerous challenges confront higher education institutions—enrollment growth, meeting student and staff needs, and achieving these objectives with limited staffing resources.

Financial aid offices across the country are facing significant impact in each of these areas. They are tasked with assisting students through the financial aid process to lead them to the next step of enrolling. They must also meet students where they are (i.e., in-person and/or virtual)—all while facing a high turnover rate.

Hiring brand-new staff takes time and money. Human resources offices must market a job posting, filter out underqualified candidates, interview, and then onboard a chosen candidate. This process can take weeks to months and often comes at the expense of existing staff members who are burdened with the extra work.

Interim staffing can benefit colleges and universities by providing support during high-volume periods, when staff and students need it the most. Attain Partners experts guide financial aid offices through peak periods to enable the institution to dedicate their time and energy towards hiring and training permanent staff.

Here are a few ways interim staffing can benefit your financial aid office:

1. Highly experienced staff can immediately enter and assist your team.

Attain Partners’ expert financial aid consultants bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to fill gaps in service, such as award processing, verification, and student loan management. Serving as a valuable extension of your team, Attain Partners can quickly integrate to support current staff and help resolve any backlog issues.

2. Decrease your workload and boost team morale.

For colleges and universities experiencing high turnover rates, the strain on current staff is undeniable. The longer it takes to hire replacements, the more the burden falls on your existing talent to manage additional duties—oftentimes leading to burnout and decreased employee satisfaction. Hiring interim staff members to take on tasks remotely can relieve your student-facing staff members to deliver high-quality service where it is needed. It can also help foster a positive working environment by allowing employees to focus on tasks they specialize in, rather than spreading themselves thin.

3. Fix problem areas.

Not all staffing issues require a full-time solution. If you ever have an audit finding that requires critical attention, need a revamp of your document review process, or would like assistance with year-end reconciliation reports, our financial aid consultants have experienced it all. By leveraging short-term assistance in problem areas, your institution can be sure that a solution will be provided by subject matter experts who have extensive experience in these areas. We can also create and enact policies and standard operating procedures for current and future staff to follow so small problems don’t become large problems.

4. Train new permanent staff when hired.

Once your institution finds and hires permanent staff, Attain Partners remains committed to ensuring a seamless transition. Our team gladly assists in training new hires to get them up to speed quickly. By entrusting this responsibility to experienced interim staff, your institution can maintain operational continuity without compromising the quality of service provided to students and staff.

Attain Partners is Your Team for Excellence and Speed

As you head into a new academic year, remember Attain Partners strives to be a resource that will help your staff maintain compliance without disrupting customer service.

Want to learn more? Contact us now to learn about our interim staffing service for financial aid offices.

About Attain Partners – Interim Staffing for Financial Aid

Drawing on our deep and talented pool of financial aid experts, Attain Partners helps place interim talent into higher education institution financial aid offices to ensure operations continue to run smoothly. We will provide you with several qualified candidates and work with you to select those that best fit your operational needs as well as your style of work and culture. With over 20 years of industry experience, Attain Partners has the expertise to help your institution stay competitive throughout the application process, ensure timely funding for students, and maintain compliance.

About the Author

Meghan Sutton is a Leader in the Attain Digital practice of Attain Partners. Meghan has extensive experience in higher education, specifically working in financial aid for the past 5 years. She has experience in onsite management of financial aid offices as well as knowledge of regulatory requirements of financial aid programs. Meghan holds a Master’s Degree in Management from The Catholic University of America.

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Seven Reasons Why Expert Librarian Hilary Craiglow Joined Attain Partners

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Attain Partners Welcomes Hilary Craiglow to Lead the Growth of our Library Planning and Strategy Services Practice

Hilary Craiglow joined Attain Partners on July 3, 2023, to lead our team of library strategists as they strengthen library systems using proven evaluation and assessment methods.

I am thrilled to welcome Hilary to the team. She is a titan in the library industry bringing experience from academic, public, and research libraries. Her passion for the work of librarians and her insight into the operations of libraries is unmatched. I can think of no one better to lead our Library Planning and Strategy Services Practice.
Mark Davis
Managing Partner and Practice Lead, Attain Partners

With a 30+ year career in libraries, Hilary brings a deep understanding of college and university systems, extensive experience leading academic libraries, and most recently led an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) library at Vanderbilt University. When looking to take on a new challenge in her career, Hilary was heavily recruited by many top universities but ultimately chose to consult with Attain Partners.

Consulting with a firm like Attain Partners is a powerful way to make a positive difference in the higher education ecosystem. I’m excited to help libraries make a deeper impact on research, student success, and broad access to education by bringing together library expertise and experience with trusted and leading-edge managerial best practices.
Hilary craiglow
Senior Manager, Attain Partners

We recently sat down with Hilary to learn more about her background and her plans for creating impact as she leads Attain Partners’ Library Planning and Strategy Services group.

Attain Partners (AP): How did you first become passionate about libraries?

Hilary Craiglow (HC): Growing up, I loved school, but I wasn’t always doing what the other kids did as a young student. Everyone may have been working on one thing and I was more interested in a different activity. When this happened, one of my teachers used to send me to the library. I instantly felt at home there—everyone was welcome, and I could move at my own pace.

I learned that the library is a place where curiosity is encouraged, and everyone is welcomed back any time—you can always be yourself and find something of interest to you. From that young age, I knew I wanted to be a librarian and never wavered!

AP: What kind of work were you doing before you came to Attain Partners?

HC: I’m lucky that I’ve been able to work in a variety of different types of libraries. I’ve held positions at a community college library, a public library, corporate libraries, and for the past eighteen years held a variety of roles at Vanderbilt University. I was fortunate enough to be the acting university librarian at Vanderbilt, getting to oversee the entire library system which included comprehensive research and education programs.

AP: What do you see on the horizon regarding the continued impact of technology on libraries?

HC: Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will significantly change libraries, potentially in similar positive ways we saw with the introduction of the internet thirty years ago. I don’t think for a second that AI will ever replace the essential functions of libraries or librarians—instead, we can use it to help our libraries function more efficiently, increase discovery of quality information, share more unique and primary sources with the world, and allow library staff and faculty more time to connect with users.

Libraries are needed now more than ever. They not only play a role in but lead the information enterprise, and AI is all about information. AI will impact libraries in almost every way. From streamlining how library back-end data is gathered to how our resource catalogs are searched, and just about everything in between. There are endless possibilities for libraries to use AI to their advantage.

But I want to be clear, librarians aren’t going anywhere—AI cannot replace our valuable relationships with the community. Understanding community needs takes human interaction. Further, as AI becomes more prevalent, new questions will arise for librarians to help answer.

How can we help people use AI effectively to build knowledge while being ethical about how we consume, create, and share information? How can you tell when you’re seeing synthetic material or data created by AI versus non-synthetic material?

I’m excited to support librarians as they play a key role in helping researchers, educators, and students navigate these challenges.

AP: What are some of the hot topics you see for libraries right now?

HC: In my opinion, AI isn’t at the top of the list of issues libraries need to address. I believe one of the hottest topics for libraries right now is assessment—having data-driven narratives for the impact that libraries make in their communities.

Libraries have often struggled to articulate the benefits of their cost and the value they create and are asking, “How do we assess, what do we assess, and how do we report?” People generally have very positive perceptions of libraries, but we need to be able to quantify our impact as well.

Further, libraries within the context of universities need to continually align their operations with the strategic goals of their institution. Attain Partners can assist librarians by providing strategic thinking and operational excellence expertise.

AP: Why did you choose to join Attain Partners and lead our library consulting services?

HC: I have so many reasons why I’m excited about working at Attain Partners, but here are my top seven:

  1. Attain Partners has a culture of collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and innovation. I believe these values can propel the missions of libraries forward and support the success of library leaders.
  2. Attain Partners’ consultants recognize libraries as integral and imperative to the success of the academic enterprise.
  3. Leaders like Attain Partners’ Founder and CEO Greg Baroni are willing to take bold, calculated risks to transform higher education.
  4. Attain Partners has the only library cost study methodology to increase university F&A rates that is approved by the federal government, demonstrating tangible value libraries provide to research universities.
  5. The firm has a track record of implementing effective assessment tools that tell the story of universities and colleges, including a DEI efficacy measurement. Our library consultants can help libraries think differently about diversity, equity, and inclusion as policies and communities continue to evolve by leveraging Attain Partners’ Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Allyship (IDEA) Performance Maturity Framework.
  6. Our consultants have the ability to optimize library organizational performance by leveraging Attain Partners’ deep bench strength of technological solutions, operation modernization, and talent development.
  7. With the firm’s expertise in strategic planning, change and project management, benchmarking, and gap analysis, Attain Partners works with libraries to align their organizations with their institutions’ goals and objectives.

Attain Partners is Your Team for Excellence and Speed

The entire Attain Partners team is excited to welcome Hilary to our growing team of experts where she’ll help us drive innovation with our library clients. Together, we’re committed to boldly being the best in providing strategic planning and assessment services to libraries of all structures and sizes.

Attain Partners – Library Experts

At Attain Partners, we fuse our deep understanding of library structures and programs with our consultative expertise to strengthen library systems using proven evaluation and assessment methods. We have extensive experience assisting colleges and universities with the optimization of overhead cost recovery related to library expenses that support sponsored grants and contracts. Our consultants collaborate across our strategic planning, grants management, and F&A teams to provide a uniquely thorough approach to library consulting.

Contact us today to set up a meeting to discuss your library’s specific needs!

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