Page 26 – Attain Partners

Five Unexpected Ways to Use Salesforce on Your Campus to Better Serve Your Faculty and Staff

January 31, 2020/in Best Practices, Higher Education, Salesforce, Thought Leadership Allison Letts, Chris Pifer/by Josue

As Salesforce spreads throughout higher education, its place in advancement, admissions, and advising offices is clear. However, part of the strength of Salesforce is the platform’s ability to support and streamline the business processes that are unique to each school, in particular, the processes for faculty and staff.

Inter-departmental Agreements

Colleges and universities are often complex organizations with no departments or office standing alone. Interdependence and reliance on others are often sources of frustration, grinding bureaucracy and inefficiency with a heavy reliance upon blunt tools like emails, spreadsheets, and shared documents.

Salesforce shines with this kind of process tracking and automation, combining EDA (the Salesforce Education Data Architecture) with Service Cloud to track quality of service, and Sales Cloud for transfers of funds and grants.

With Salesforce as a single source of data, departments can create and maintain informal and formal agreements. A tailored Salesforce solution can help ensure that standard levels of service and support become a seamless part of the faculty and staff experience.

Managing Accessible Education and Adaptive Course Materials

For many schools, the office of accessible education or disability services manages the substantial and complex task of generating, distributing, and tracking courseware adapted for students with specific disabilities. EDA can work with standard Sales Cloud and Service Cloud functionality to help the disability services office understand the full picture of adaptive courseware across campus, and provide ongoing support.

Streamlining Faculty Search, Including Demographics and Hiring Trends

The faculty search process is another potential area to reduce friction on campus. Using EDA and Sales Cloud, institutions can track and report on the composition and progress of search committees.

Adding to the complexity of the search process, faculty diversity is currently a hot-button issue in higher ed, with recent studies from Pew and the National Center for Educational Statistics highlighting the low numbers of professors who do not identify as white. Salesforce can help institutions gain a complete understanding of current faculty demographics and hiring trends.

Course Design

The expanded role of online or blended learning provides a unique opportunity for streamlining. As faculty prepare a course to move online, they follow a defined process to make sure the institution is prepared to support the course. From inquiry through development, Salesforce standardizes the process. Any course in development can move through stages with the Sales Cloud Path, which highlights key fields and provides rich text guidance to help professors understand what to do next.

Faculty Review and Planning

The faculty review process is full of data—review forms, keeping track of who’s up for tenure, events, and more. Salesforce provides a detailed look at faculty involvement on campus, including ratings from peers and students, faculty awards, and strengths and weaknesses in teaching or research. And the Salesforce security model ensures that only the people who need access to this data can get to it.

About the Authors

Allison Letts is a Principal Consultant in the Salesforce Services Group. After four years as a nonprofit fundraiser and Salesforce admin, Allison joined Attain Partners to help nonprofits and educational institutions streamline their data so that they can spend more time on their missions.

Chris Pifer is a Principal Consultant serving higher education and nonprofit clients as a senior leader providing 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.

How Attain Partners is Amplify-ing Underrepresented Voices in Higher Ed

January 30, 2020/in About Attain Partners, DEI, Higher Education, Salesforce, Salesforce Community Marisa Lopez/by Reach Local

Cultivating a Diverse Team

At Attain Partners, we know that our people are our greatest assets and equality in the workplace is non-negotiable. All of our team members are valued for who they are and the unique contributions they bring to our company. Through our core value of Have Absolute Integrity, we act with honesty and respect for one another—no exceptions.

But Attain Partners doesn’t stop there. We do our best to cultivate a diverse team by supporting initiatives such as Women of Attain Partners, a company-funded group to encourage networking, mentoring, and career growth. We are also a proud sponsor for Amplify, to bolster its vision to create a world where underrepresented people have equity and representation in all areas of technology. We have proudly supported Amplify as a sponsor since 2017 and have been their Platinum Partner since 2018.

What is Amplify?

Amplify is a volunteer-run 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering underrepresented voices in technology (e.g.: women, trans, nonbinary, LGBTQIA+, people of color, differently abled, neuro-diverse) and those who support them to become fearless leaders. They do this through education, awareness, and community-building programs. Amplify has more than 5,000 members in the Power of Us Hub. Key programs include Regional Community Groups, virtual Study Groups, Mentor Circles, and the Accomplices Town Hall. Amplify drives awareness and action through dialogue at Salesforce Community Events such as Higher Ed Summit, Norcal Dreamin’, Midwest Dreamin’, and Dreamforce.

Team Attain Partners had the good fortune of attending “Drive Awareness AND Action for Diversity & Inclusion at Educational Institutions” at the Salesforce Higher Education Summit 2019. The session was led by Amplify Board members, as well as Joanna Iturbe, Director of CRM Strategic Initiatives, and Stephanie Gillin, Associate Dean for Administration for the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. Joanna and Stephanie presented a fantastic case study on how the Leeds School of Business incorporates diversity and inclusion into all aspects of their constituents’ journeys. University of Colorado Boulder has been pursuing diversity, equity, and community engagement initiatives since 1974. Since then, they have continued to evolve and improve their planning models, initiatives, and core values. In 2017, Leeds launched the “End the Gap 2020” initiative to create gender parity across all CU business programs by 2020.

The University of Colorado Boulder is a leader in the effort to foster more diverse and inclusive Institutions—Attain Partners is proud that Leeds School of Business is our client.

“As a key member of the Salesforce team at Leeds, part of what has kept me here is Leeds’ ever-evolving quest to better serve all members of their community and to create a more equitable workplace. I share the same values as my workplace, and decided to join the Amplify Board in 2019, in an effort to empower more diversity in leadership.”
— Kelly Hamilton, Salesforce Business Solutions Architect, Amplify Board Treasurer

You Can Make a Difference

We encourage all Higher Education Institutions to strive to be more inclusive and diverse. Even if you aren’t part of an official diversity and inclusion team, you can make a difference. Below is a list of questions to consider:

Is there an office on your campus that supports diversity from an employment perspective? (This is usually an HR office.) Do you know how to reach the correct point of contact at that office?
If a member of the University (Faculty, Staff, or Student) wanted to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion concerns, where on campus would one start?
Is there a transparent process that helps identify if an experience a member of the University had qualifies as a violation (without knowing about the 12 protected categories: Age, Disability, Equal Pay/Compensation, Genetic Information, Harassment, National Origin, Pregnancy, Race/Color, Religion, Retaliation, Sex, and Sexual Harassment)?

For more information about Amplify, or to make a donation, please visit the Amplify website.

For more information about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Higher Education Institutions and in the workplace, please refer to the following resources:

Recommended Trailhead Modules

About the Author

Marisa Lopez is a Senior Business Development Manager at Attain Partners focused on enabling Higher Education Institutions and Nonprofits through the power of the Salesforce platform. Marisa has been an active member in the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 13 years and is passionate about enabling the social sector through digital transformation. She is also the President of Amplify.

Salesforce Spring ‘20 for Higher Ed

January 24, 2020/in Events, Higher Education, Salesforce, Thought Leadership Emily Cobb/by Reach Local

Happy New Year from Attain Partners! As we welcome in 2020, we are busy reviewing all the great new features in the Salesforce Spring ‘20 release and trying them out in our preview sandboxes. Read on to learn about some of the features we are most excited about for Higher Ed.

Salesforce Data Mask

This is a great new element to keep your student personally identifiable information (PII) safe in sandboxes. You’ll no longer need a third-party tool or manual method to obfuscate or remove sensitive data from a sandbox. Align your institution with data records recommendations from the Department of Ed’s Data Governance Checklist by de-identifying PII whenever possible.

You will need to install a managed package to use this feature. You can find the install link as well as some important prerequisites here. Once installed, there is a good deal of flexibility in how you’d like to configure the data mask which is applied to each field that needs masking. Final note on this topic—you can even run this against sandboxes that were created prior to the installation!

API Limits Increase

Most of our Higher Ed clients have multiple integrations to achieve a 360-degree student view. Spring ‘20 offers one less worry about hitting Application Programing Interface (API) limits with a default increase to 100,000. The maximum daily cap has been removed as well. This limit is just one number in the total calculation, so you can view the new limit for your organization by going to the Company Information page in Setup and viewing the data under “API Requests, Last 24 Hours” in a Spring ‘20 org.

Flow Improvements

If you’re like many of our Higher Ed clients relying on flows for automation, Spring ‘20 brings flow features that make performance improvements easy for admins. The “before-save” update is being marketed as performing 10 times faster than a process builder update. “Before-save” means we can consolidate all changes made to a record into one transaction to reduce overhead. If you have been experiencing slowness saving or errors with your process builders/flows, try out this new option.

Two other flow building time-savers are (1) on a Get Record element there is now an option to automatically save all fields, and (2) Action and Create Records elements no longer require you to manually create the variables. Less manual work is always a win.

Custom Metadata Types

If you’ve started to rely on Custom Metadata Types over the last couple years like we have, there is a critical update with the Spring release of which you need to be aware. Metadata types now require explicit access granted to a profile or permission set. Do a quick assessment on where your metadata types are being used and who needs access. If access is not granted they will lose it with this critical update.

EDA (Education Data Architecture) News

At the end of January, sandboxes are expected to see the long overdue additions of Application, Test, and Test Score objects in EDA. If you’re already using objects with the same names, don’t worry, when they are released to your EDA Salesforce instance, they will be included in the HED namespace. Keep your eye on the Power of Us hub for details.

What else is on the 2020 EDA roadmap? This year does seem to have a heavy K-12 focus as they look to branch out from Higher Ed. They will also be adding more translation support for our international friends. Finally, we are looking forward to getting more details on the “Integration Best Practice Model” that is in the works.

Registration is now open for Higher Ed Summit in Indianapolis from April 29-May 1. We love this annual opportunity to come together as a group to share digital transformation best practices and lessons learned. Stay tuned for Attain Partners’ list of presentations—We hope to see you there!

Resources:

Power of Us Hub

Spring ‘20 Release Notes

Salesforce Data Mask

Flow Builder Updates

About the Author

Emily Cobb is a Principal Consultant at Attain Partners focused on helping Higher Ed clients implement and improve how they use Salesforce. Emily holds nine Salesforce Certifications, most recently earning Salesforce Application Architect. She has worked in various roles in Higher Ed Information Technology over the past 18 years with the past seven focusing on Salesforce.

Happy Anniversary Attain—Celebrating 10 Wonderful Years! 

August 28, 2019/in About Attain Partners/by Reach Local

August 28, 2019 marks 10 years since we became fully operational through the purchase of public sector assets from the BearingPoint estate—and what a wonderful decade it has been.

To mark this momentous occasion, Attain Partners CEO Greg Baroni and President and COO Manish Agarwal made a short video, reflecting on the past 10 years, and sharing their vision for Attain Partners’ future. You can watch that video here.

You also can find information about our history, awards, culture, and client work on our 10-Year Anniversary page.

On our actual anniversary, we are celebrating with Team Attain Partners at our various office and client-site locations. We know that our people are at the center of our growth—and we can’t thank them enough!

To keep the celebration going, we are also planning an Attain Partners Gives Back week in September culminating in family-friendly events near our McLean, Raleigh, and Morgantown locations. What better way to ring in 10 years of our success than to work together in the Attain Partners Way to Obsess Externally.

Follow Attain Partners on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to learn more about these events and see how Attain Partners Gives Back to our communities.

Looking ahead at the next 10 years, our path forward is full of promise. We are excited to continue our work disrupting the status quo, as we take our built-to-last, values-driven consultancy to the next level by focusing on next-generation solutions and impact.

Founding Attain Partners to Create Sustained Impact

August 21, 2019/in About Attain Partners, Thought Leadership/by Josue

As we approach our 10-Year anniversary, we sat down with Attain Partners’ leaders to hear how they feel about this momentous occasion in their own words. Read on to hear about Attain Partners’ accomplishments and plans for continued growth directly from CEO, Greg Baroni.

Attain Partners: This year we celebrate Attain Partners’ 10-Year Anniversary. What thoughts and emotions come to mind when you think about this milestone?

Greg: When I think about our 10-year anniversary, I experience a flood of different emotions. Largely, I feel a deep sense of joy and gratitude reflecting back on how much impact we’ve had, from growth to accomplishments, over the past decade.

Just look at the immense growth that we have experienced in our first 10 years—in 2009, we started with seven employees in a temporary office. Today, we have grown to over 750 employees in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. To say that I am grateful to those who believed and made this possible is an understatement.

Attain Partners: What made you start Attain Partners? Where did you draw inspiration in order to start and build this elite consulting firm?

Greg: When I founded Attain Partners, I was at a unique crossroads in my professional career. I was looking for a new start, trying to figure out if I should pursue an opportunity to lead an existing organization or take a chance and start a new company. My friend and colleague, John O’Neill, and I decided to start a consultancy that we expected would serve as a transition landing pad. What started out as a bridge opportunity became so much more than that—through the hard work and dedication of our leadership and team members, this “transition company” turned into the tremendously impactful consultancy that we know as Attain Partners today.

Attain truly came to life as a company following a long process in which we were awarded key assets from the BearingPoint estate after they had filed for bankruptcy in early 2009. It was quite a journey in and of itself with many ups and downs, but thanks to the herculean efforts of our initial group of seven and many sleepless nights, we officially purchased the assets on August 28, 2009, the same date of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech. I still remember the small celebration we had that day with the seven of us, champagne, and sparkling cider—it was the beginning of an impactful legacy for Attain.

It was during this earliest phase of our development that I realized we weren’t building a bridge, but rather a strong, enduring consultancy. I remember thinking, “If I’m going to make this my last chapter, what are the pillars that would make this important?” It was then that I developed our three, core principles. The successes we’ve achieved over the past decade truly reflect these core principles upon which Attain Partners was founded—built-to-last, next-generation, and values-driven.

Once our foundational principles were in place, I went to work on creating our seven core values that today define Attain Partners’ culture—The Attain Partners Way. These were based on core values I had written and practiced in previous roles and fine-tuned for what I believed was most important to a company’s culture for enduring success and impact.

I knew I wanted to create a values-driven company that would last, so that is exactly what I formed with Attain.

Attain Partners: How do you see the progress of Attain Partners so far? Is this where you expected Attain Partners would be at its 10-year anniversary?

Greg: When I think about our milestones, I look for impact, which has exceeded my expectations. While I candidly expected that, at this point, our company would be bigger than we are today, driving innovation and outcomes for our clients, I am confident that we are on the right track. Our culture of intention—The Attain Partners Way—has life and emboldens our work. I am so proud of our people and their commitment to Attain Partners and our clients. Looking at the number of new partners, the team members who have grown the company over the past decade, and the hundreds of new employees working to disrupt the status quo and improve the lives of those we touch, our momentum is extraordinary.

Attain Partners: What is your favorite part about your job leading Attain Partners?

Greg: I love inspiring people, touching their lives in a meaningful way. I strive for a balance of practical leadership tied to vision and values that drive outcomes. Great leaders are trustworthy and compassionate! For me, I always wanted to serve the underserved which is why our company is dedicated to organizations and people serving in the public sector. I view it as such a privilege to be able to improve public service organizations.

Ask any member of the Attain Partners leadership team what makes our company special and they will all give you the same answer: our people. We are intentional about our legacy and its impact on our clients, our employees, and our community. This drives our decision making every day. We’re building something that we hope a hundred years from now people will highly regard as the gold standard for consultancies.

As for me, I’ve grown tremendously as a leader by founding Attain Partners and working to expand our impact over the past decade. There’s a sense of emotional maturity that you have to have as a leader to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say honestly, “These are things we need to work on.” You have to be vigilant, and in this connection, I am still vibrantly committed to my own personal journey of growth as a leader. I know that my colleagues on our company’s executive committee are even more vigilant and I am a better leader because of them.

Attain Partners: What’s in store for Attain Partners in the next 12-months, five years, and beyond?

Greg: We will turn our attention to work force-multiplying our impact on the world by growing our firm, nurturing our culture, differentiating ourselves and expanding our capabilities. Guided by our core principles and the Attain Partners Way, we will continue to lead change in the world in which we live and work, inspiring our clients to invent the future by thinking outside the box and imagining the impossible. In the next decade, consultancies as we know them today will fundamentally change. Every dimension of the business will undergo radical disruption, followed by renewal. It is a pretty big opportunity and Attain Partners is poised to take advantage of it. Our focus over the next 12 months will be to double-down on delivering on our vision of the future, continuing to invest in disruptive business models focused on outcomes, differentiating ourselves and ‘asset-izing’ our business by changing our operational infrastructure to embrace more rapid market penetration, delivery solutions, and the client experience.

Attain Partners: What will be the biggest challenges in achieving your vision for growth? Biggest opportunities?

Greg: It’s a journey to build a company, so you have to have an unrelenting commitment to your vision, overcoming the challenges and obstacles along the way—that is exactly what we have done over the past decade and what we will continue to do. Built-to-last has meaning when you look around this company. We’re building a culture that transcends the people of the day and the trends of the time, and instead continually matures and endures. We’re building a body of work that impacts this world in which we live, work, and play. I cannot wait to see the impact we create over the next 10 years!

Obsess Externally—Attain Partners Gives Back

August 14, 2019/in About Attain Partners/by Reach Local

We believe that service to others is not just a responsibility, but a privilege. That’s why The Attain Partners Way—our seven core values—includes the value to Obsess Externally. Our employees share their time, talents, and treasures through the organizations that touch our lives each day in the communities where we live and work. Whether through volunteerism, mentoring a colleague, or providing  groundbreaking results to our clients, our culture of intention fosters a steadfast pledge to service.

As we grow, we continue to demonstrate a passion for service through active support of fundraising events and activities hosted by our three flagship philanthropies: the National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area, the American Red Cross in the National Capital Region, and The Women’s Center, located in Vienna, VA.

The National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area

The National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area is a local chapter of the national foundation located in Washington, DC. The chapter is dedicated to preventing kidney disease, improving the health and well-being of individuals and families affected by kidney disease, and promoting organ donation in the region.

The National Kidney Foundation conducts extensive public and professional education, provides early detection screenings, advocates organ donation, and supports kidney research to identify new treatments.

 Attain Partners’ involvement:

President and COO Manish Agarwal is a Member of the Board of the National Kidney Foundation, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area.
CMO Ellen Walsh serves as a Member of the Board of the National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area.
Attain Partners participates in and assists with fundraising for the annual NKF Kidney Ball.

Attain Partners employees participate in the annual Capital Area Kidney Walk and Organ Donation Basketball Tournament. For the past several years, Team Attain Partners has been proud to be recognized as the top Capital Area Kidney Walk Corporate Fundraiser.

The American Red Cross in the National Capital Region

The American Red Cross in the National Capital Region supports the national relief organization’s mission to prevent and relieve suffering—at home and around the world—through five key service areas: disaster relief, supporting America’s military families, collecting and providing lifesaving blood donations, health and safety services, and international humanitarian services.

Attain Partners’ involvement:

CEO Greg Baroni serves as a member of the Chairman’s Advisory Council.
Managing Director Susan Jones serves as a Member of the American Red Cross National Capital Region Board.
Attain Partners supports the Annual Golf Invitational Tournament and the organization’s annual gala.

The Women’s Center

Based in Fairfax, Va., the mission of The Women’s Center is to significantly improve the psychological, career, financial, and legal well-being of women, men, and their families, regardless of their ability to pay.

As a counseling and resource center, the clinical staff at The Women’s Center includes therapists and career counselors who provide indispensable counseling to benefit local women, men, and families. 

Attain Partners’ involvement:

CEO Greg Baroni is Chairman of the Board of The Women’s Center.
Each year, Attain Partners sponsors a group of professionals to attend The Center’s Leadership Conference.
Attain Partners supports The Women’s Center Annual Gala and is an annual Patron Sponsor of the organization.

Attain Partners provides pro-bono services to The Women’s Center in support of their Salesforce implementation.

In addition to our flagship causes, we embrace a “what matters most to our employees matters to us” philosophy and support a roster of more than 20 charitable organizations important to Attain Partners’ people and the firm’s philanthropic initiatives. We have enjoyed actively engaging in the communities where we live, the industries we serve, and the organizations that share our goal of improving people’s lives over the past ten years and look forward to continued service as Attain Partners continues to grow in the decades to come.

Learn more about Attain Partners’ philanthropic efforts and community involvement here (and see pictures of our team members in action!): https://attainpartners.com/about/

Nonprofit Case Study

August 7, 2019/in Case Study, Email Marketing, Fundraising, Nonprofit, Salesforce Aimee Cubbage/by Olivia Pycha

Attain Partners’ Holistic Approach to Digital Transformation for a Large, Mission-Driven Nonprofit

As a firm comprised of innovative problem solvers who disrupt the status quo to change the world and improve the lives of those they serve, Attain Partners was thrilled to work with a large nonprofit ($100M+) when it’s leadership selected us as a partner to transform their long-standing organization and streamline key operations including Fundraising, Marketing, and Incident Response/Case Management. This important organization has a history of service spanning over a hundred years and a mission that is of particular importance in the current climate of the country, focused on fighting hate and helping advance education to prevent hate-driven incidents and discrimination.

The client came to Attain Partners with a unique and challenging set of objectives, including retirement of several key legacy systems housing many years of constituent, fundraising, marketing, advocacy, and other data types across a national headquarters office and more than 20 remote offices. Powered by extreme automation, Attain Partners leveraged our holistic, agile, secure, and customer-centered approach to digital transformation to architect a comprehensive and cohesive solution to address these objectives and subsequently build, test, and implement across four major releases, each building upon the prior, to enhance and expand our client’s capabilities as well as create a robust foundation for future growth and transformation.

Incident Response & Case Management

As a key part of its mission, our client needed to shift from a purely manual process for capturing information around potential activities and cases of hate across the U.S., to an automated one that supported real-time data reporting and modeling. To accomplish this, the Attain Partners team outlined a solution leveraging the Salesforce Nonprofit Service Pack (NPSP) and Service Cloud.

Attain Partners worked closely with our client to identify key data elements and processes necessary to intake, as well as properly route, assign, prioritize, and determine actions necessary as cases came into the system. The automations that Attain Partners implemented led to an easier information capture and reporting capability that resulted in an increase in excess of 60% of reported cases. The automations allow the client’s team to take timely and appropriate action for each case as well as provide critical statistical data. In addition, the data captured through the process is a critical input and allows the organization to continue to inform policies and support its mission to educate and advocate based on emerging trends within the data. The client also used the data from the system we implemented to build other information visualizations of their data including dashboards and mapping displays that show similar cases across the entire country. This interactive, customizable map is the first of its kind and provides valuable information regarding existing hate cases, as well as areas that may become future threats.

Fundraising and Marketing

In partnership with our client and Salesforce.org, we implemented a holistic solution to manage the full lifecycle of fundraising and development operations, empower the client’s ability to engage constituents through a broad set of channels, and manage and leverage its constituent data via a unified platform for the first time in its history. We accomplished all of this with a focus on donor experience becoming increasingly more personalized and tailored to specific interests.

In total, the Attain Partners team migrated tens of millions of records across close to 500 individual sources, onto a common platform that leverages a combination of the Salesforce NPSP, Marketing Cloud, and Classy (an AppExchange solution) for its event management, campaigns, and online donations. We then worked collaboratively to onboard and train 25 individual offices on the Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and Classy platforms. We also worked closely with the client’s Brand and Digital Marketing leadership team to build email templates that have strengthened brand consistency, timeliness of communications, and ease of audience engagement. Along with the aggregation of data and the use of a common platform, our client also saw their overall email deliverability rate increase from 48% to 94%, has sent over five million emails on the platform since it launched and realized other significant operational improvements through this initiative.

Holistic Digital Transformation: Results that Make an Impact

By conceptualizing and implementing a holistic digital transformation solution, Attain Partners helped our client achieve impactful results with the foundation to continually improve and transform the organization and operations going forward. After working with Attain Partners to transform, streamline, and automate its organizational processes (data collection, managed cases, fundraising campaigns, etc.), our client is positioned to continue to support its mission in a way not previously possible. Additionally, as a direct result of their digital transformation in partnership with Attain Partners, our client raised in excess of $5M via online giving in the first year after implementation and ranked in the top 10 organizations for fundraising on Giving Tuesday in 2018. We are extremely proud that Attain Partners’ digital transformation work created such a positive impact for our client as they strive to accomplish such an important and influential mission.

Click here to learn more about the exciting digital transformation work that Attain Partners delivers to our clients.

The Attain Way

July 24, 2019/in About Attain Partners/by Reach Local

At Attain Partners, we provide the culture and collaborative work environment that fosters creativity, encourages bold, new ways of thinking, and values a commitment to excellence—producing the best results for our clients and a rewarding work environment for our team members.

How do we do this? We live out The Attain Way every day in our work and philanthropic efforts.

The Attain Way is comprised of seven core values that align with our bold and entrepreneurial approach to business. These core values guide every decision we make and every interaction we have with our clients and those in the communities in which we live and work.

“Our values embody our character that we, as members of an elite professional services company, believe a trusted partner and a client advisor should possess. Our values are not only the foundation of Attain Partners’ culture, but they also provide an inspiring, motivational framework for driving excellence, achieving the best results for our clients, and attaining insanely great results. That’s the Attain Way,” said Greg Baroni, CEO.

The Attain Way: Seven Core Values that Drive Success

Invent the Future – We believe that hope is a critical ignition to creating a better world. Our clients are striving toward great things. We work with you to create a breakthrough vision of the future and execute with purpose and diligence to secure results.
Be Bold – Our clients face tough challenges, but we believe that the glass is half full. We will confront the current reality, whatever it may be, but maintain an unwavering faith in achieving and delivering a purposeful end result.
Obsess Externally – Our entire focus is on serving our constituent public, including the society at large and the communities in which we live.
Be the Best – We strive to be the best in everything we do, while meeting deadline and budget commitments. We don’t just sell it – we live it!
Team for Speed – True teamwork creates agility. We collaborate with our colleagues and clients, bringing passion, focus and perseverance to our work.
Execute with Discipline – Great ideas are nothing without discipline and deliberate execution. With stunning intensity, we lead by example and create an empowering environment for great work.
Have Absolute Integrity – Our word is our bond. We act with honesty, respect each other and honor all commitments. No exceptions!

In addition to our core values, we pride ourselves on fostering a culture of growth that rewards healthy risk-taking and encourages Team Attain Partners members to advance in their careers.

We continuously invest in our greatest assets—our people. In addition to providing industry-leading employee benefits, in 2018, we took an innovative approach to redefining our career tracks to better align with our rapidly expanding workforce.

Attain Partners’ new career tracks allow our team members to differentiate among unique skill sets—Consulting, Specialist, Client Services, Sales, and Business Services. Utilizing these career tracks allows us to create more opportunities and promotion paths for our people, focus on different strengths and priorities across Team Attain Partners, and better align accountabilities and rewards to support our team members. With an unparalleled career path, Attain Partners is a place for great ideas and the people who have them.

Learn more about The Attain Way and Team Attain Partners community here.

10 Years on Team Attain Partners

July 3, 2019/in About Attain Partners/by Jesse Dean

Ask any member of the Attain Partners leadership team what makes our company special and they will all give you the same answer: our people. When Attain Partners was founded in 2009, it started with a core group of individuals who were all committed to doing business better by focusing on making lasting impacts for those we serve.

In last week’s post about The History of Attain, we shared our three founding principles: built-to-last, next-generation, and values-driven. We are proud to say that ten years later, we still run our organization in accordance with these three, driving factors.

One of the key elements in our success of staying true to our founding vision once again comes back to our people. Here is what some of our 10-year employees have to say about what makes Attain Partners a great place to work:

“The people! We hire the best people in the market, and we rally around each other to grow this firm—we’re a team.” – Phil Agee, Partner, Federal Services

“The teamwork and comradery make Attain Partners a great place to work. Add to that the flexibility to balance my work and home life and amazing mentoring I’ve received over the years, and Attain Partners has been a wonderful fit for me!” – Angela Burton, People Operations Senior Manager

“There are so many reasons to love Attain Partners.For me, it’s the entrepreneurial spirit, friendly atmosphere, and seven Core Values that drive our everyday working life.” – Wally Davis, Partner, Education, Nonprofit and Commercial Services

“I get to work with and learn from the true experts and thought leaders in my industry. Not many people can say that!” – David Moore, Manager, Education, Nonprofit and Commercial Services

“I appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit that is fostered within the organization. It really motivates people to strive for better service and outcomes for our clients.” – Michael Torbert, Partner, Federal Services

“Attain Partners is about more than the bottom line. Here, giving back to the team and our community is a priority—and that’s meaningful to me.” – Ellen Walsh, Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer

Interested in learning more about Team Attain Partners? See how we make it a priority to invest in our people.

History of Attain, LLC

June 26, 2019/in About Attain Partners/by Josue

History of Attain, LLC

A lot has changed since the paperwork was filed to create Attain, LLC. on January 14, 2009, and we became fully operational on August 28, 2009. From seven employees with a temporary office location to over 700 employees in 40 states plus the District of Columbia, we have grown from a start-up into an elite consulting firm, improving the lives of over 100 clients to date.

Though the company has evolved as its grown, one important constant remains the same—Attain is a built-to-last, next-generation, values-driven company. We were founded on these three, core principles that drive our mission and vision—and today, 10 years later, they remain the cornerstone of our business.

Read on to learn how Attain has lived out these core principles over the last decade as we’ve grown into a top-tier digital transformation firm.

Founding Attain, LLC

Attain, LLC founding partners first came together at Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in the early 1980’s. Peat Marwick’s name changed several times over the years, first to KPMG (after its merger), then to KPMG Consulting and later to BearingPoint, Inc., but the practice our partners built and the quality services they continue to deliver have never changed.

In 2009, Greg Baroni and John O’Neill co-founded Attain, LLC, and through the purchase of a platform of business, catapulted the operation from ground zero to a company with more than 100 contracts and 150 employees focused on securing strategic contract vehicles, growing the team, and reinforcing strong relationships with clients.

Highlights: Key Contract Wins and Milestones

CIO-SP3: In 2012, Attain, LLC secured a prime contractor position on National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC)’s $20B CIO-SP3 Small Business contract vehicle. This single contract vehicle enabled us to establish initial relationships with future clients including Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), exponentially expanding our footprint in the federal market.

Eagle II: In 2013, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified Attain, LLC that it was named an awardee in the unrestricted category on the $22 billion Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions II (EAGLE II) multiple-award indefinite-delivery / indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract. A milestone achievement for Attain, the large IDIQ contract provided Attain, LLC entry into the National Security/Homeland Security market as a prime contractor.

SEC: In 2013, Attain, LLC was awarded our first work with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) Center of Excellence (COE) and Application Management Support (AMS) contracts, including oversight of 55+ Enterprise applications, systems, and websites, including EDGAR and SEC.gov. These projects proved strategic in expanding our service to the SEC.

NARA: In 2015, Attain, LLC won the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Information Technology (IT) and Telecommunications Services contract. Attain, LLC’s largest win to date, our work with NARA delivered a new paradigm of IT infrastructure operations and services to elevate performance and cost-effectiveness across the agency, including our country’s Presidential libraries.

Ranked a Top Workplace: As a result of direct feedback from Team Attain members, Attain, LLC earned the prestigious recognition of being named one of the Washington Post’s Top Workplaces for 2016. We were thrilled that our team members also ranked Attain, LLC #8 on Consulting Magazine’s Best Firms to Work For list in 2017.

Strategic Acquisition: To further our growth, in 2016, Attain, LLC acquired ACF Solutions, a cloud-based technology provider that specialized in Salesforce Technology implementations for higher education and non-profit organizations. With this strategic acquisition, we expanded our digital transformation and cloud-based solution offerings.

CMMI-DEV Level Maturity: In 2018, Attain, LLC was named one of 40 companies in the U.S. to be appraised at Level 5 of the CMMI Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration for software development processes, setting us apart from industry peers and further demonstrating the enhanced value we bring to our clients to achieve mission success.

SEC ONE IT: In 2018, Attain, LLC was one of three companies awarded an unrestricted contract in the SEC’s One OIT project. The 10-year, $2.5 billion contract covers enterprise IT services for the SEC in areas including platform and applications development; operations and maintenance; business solutions delivery; information security; data management and analytics; IT governance; and technology business management.

NCAA: In 2018, Attain, LLC won a large contract supporting the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) facilitating the development of the Association’s strategic plan. Through this influential project, we are making a transformational impact not only on a globally recognized brand, but on how collegiate athletics will continue to evolve across the country.

USCIS VDOS: In 2018, Attain, LLC won work with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) called Verification DevOpsSec (VDOS). VDOS represents Attain, LLC’s first comprehensive DevSecOps engagement, its first engagement with USCIS, and, most notably, the first win that required us to solve a technical challenge rather than write and submit a proposal.

Consulting Magazine’s Fastest Growing Firms: Attain, LLC realized double-digit revenue growth for the sixth straight year in 2018, winning strategic contracts and delivering on our commitment to serve our clients’ missions through more than 300 client projects. As a direct result of this sustained growth, we were listed as one of Consulting’s Fastest Growing Firms for the third consecutive year (2016, 2017, and 2018).

Obsessing Externally

In addition to our client work, we strive to Obsess Externally (one of our seven core values), serving the needs of our constituent public, including society at large and the communities in which we live and work. As we grow, we continue to demonstrate a passion for service through active support of fundraising events and activities hosted by our three flagship philanthropies: The National Kidney Foundation Serving the National Capital Area, the American Red Cross in the National Capital Region, and The Women’s Center, located in Vienna, VA.  In addition to our flagship causes, we embrace a “what matters most to our employees matters to us” philosophy and support a roster of more than 20 charitable organizations important to Attain Partners’ people and the firm’s philanthropic initiatives. (Stay tuned for a future post on August 14th taking a deep dive into Attain’s philanthropic endeavors.)

Attain, LLC Today

As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we are a leading management, technology, and strategy consulting firm comprised of innovative problem solvers who disrupt the status quo to change the world and improve the lives of those we serve. We are powered by extreme automation, leveraging a holistic, agile, secure, and customer-centered approach to digital transformation, to advance our clients’ missions across the government, education, healthcare, and nonprofit landscapes.

Driven by our three core principles and seven core values, we are more than just consultants—we’re trusted advisors and partners dedicated to helping our clients execute their visions and missions with purpose to achieve remarkable results.

Putting our people first, we have a diverse workforce of more than 700 full-time employees and a 96% employee satisfaction rate. Team Attain currently spans 40 states (plus DC) and we have five office locations up and down the East coast. In addition to serving over 500 clients, we have donated nearly $2.0m to charities for which our team members are passionate advocates. In recognition of our dedicated service to our clients and philanthropy partners, we have received over 25 awards in our 10 years of business.

As we celebrate 10 Years of Attain, we continue to focus on bold, innovative areas such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning, blockchain, and robotic process automation (RPA), and will extend our capabilities through Attain’s ecosystem of strategic alliance partners, including Salesforce and Red Hat.

Guided by our core principles, we continue to lead change and help our clients invent the future, by thinking outside the box and imagining the impossible. In 2019 and beyond, we look forward to continuing to change the world by boldly disrupting the status quo and improving the lives we touch.