Page 29 – Attain Partners

NPSP: Building a Foundation for Success

September 29, 2016/in Scott Mostrom/by Reach Local

The Nonprofit Success Pack is a signal of Salesforce.org’s ongoing commitment to providing the best technology to the nonprofit sector.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack, better known as NPSP, was first released by Salesforce.org in 2008. That also happens to be the same year I started working for ACF Solutions, implementing Salesforce for nonprofit organizations.

Over these past eight years, NPSP has been a mainstay of ACF’s work in the nonprofit sector. We have implemented it, or components of it, for the majority of nonprofits we have worked with, both large and small.

One of the questions we have consistently heard during that time, particularly from larger organizations, is “Why should we adopt something called “starter”? We have big, long-term plans for how we will use Salesforce. Will NPSP limit us?” The short answer is “No.” NPSP provides a flexible foundation upon which to build even large and complex CRM solutions.

That’s why I’m so pleased with the announcement from Salesforce.org that, while its initials will remain the same, the NPSP is now officially the “Nonprofit Success Pack.” More than just a name change, though, the announcement is a signal of Salesforce.org’s ongoing commitment to providing the best technology to the nonprofit sector.

Salesforce.org will continue to provide professional software product management for NPSP, with a team of top-notch product managers and developers, and will also continue to look to the ever-growing community of clients and partners to suggest, develop, and implement new features. Recent enhancements include full Lightning Experience compatibility, as well as increased support for languages and currency locales. Two of my favorite new features are Engagement Plans and Levels which, when used together, can automatically generate a set of tasks for your staff when a constituent reaches a certain milestone, such as having given over $5,000.

We have worked with clients who have used NPSP not only as the foundation for fundraising, but for other areas as well such as membership management, constituent services, program management, and marketing and communications. It provides a data architecture that is scalable across the whole organization.

When developing for Salesforce, there is normally a tension between keeping things open, flexible, and native versus building things that address specific functional needs but are more code-heavy and locked-down. I like that Salesforce.org is working hard to walk the line in between. They are taking a leadership role in addressing the needs of nonprofits on the platform but recognize that doing this right requires an open-source approach that leverages best-of-breed solutions from the AppExchange, and relies on implementation partners and the nonprofit community itself to innovate new solutions and best practices.

Kristin Sharpe, ACF Solutions President shared, “For the past eight years, the Nonprofit Starter Pack has been a foundational component for hundreds of projects ACF Solutions has delivered in the nonprofit sector. Today’s announcement is about more than giving NPSP a new, more fitting name. It is a sign of salesforce.org’s commitment to providing the best technology to nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. With the Nonprofit Success Pack, nonprofits have a solution that scales across the full enterprise and makes it easy to take advantage of best-of-breed applications in the Salesforce ecosystem and work with partners like ACF to tailor a solution to their specific needs.”

NPSP, you are off to a great start, and we look forward to many more years of success.

Plan Before You Leap: 5 Key Factors to Consider Before Implementing A Marketing System

September 20, 2016/in Email Marketing Kristin Sharpe/by Josue

At ACF Solutions, we are privileged to work with clients who are seeking to use technology more strategically to advance their cause, whether the cause is educating our children or one of the amazing causes promoted by our nonprofit clients. Increasingly, we are encountering organizations that want to replace existing email marketing tools with new solutions that will enable data-driven marketing automation. It’s a natural progression. Once you have done the hard work of centralizing your organization’s data inside of Salesforce CRM, the logical next step is to find ways to make better use of that data to help drive constituent engagement.

We are often asked by clients, which marketing tool we recommend; Marketing Cloud, Pardot, or another solution that integrates with Salesforce. And while we’re happy to help answer that question, we often advise our clients to do some planning first to help assure that your strategy drives your technology decisions, and not the other way around. You will also want to be sure you are aligned internally to take on the work (and expense) of a new system, and to use it to its full potential. To guide you in this process, we’ve put together five key factors that you should consider in the lead-up to selecting a new marketing system:

What are desired outcomes of your marketing efforts? What is the purpose of marketing in your organization? Are you fundraising, promoting your mission, recruiting more students or volunteers? Marketing doesn’t work in a silo; its goals need to be tied to the organization’s goals. Be sure all of your stakeholders are represented so that you are clear on all of the purposes and outcomes your marketing (and marketing solution) needs to serve. Get agreement on the the goals you want to achieve.
What is the state of your data? Data is key to targeting communications to the right person at the right time. Where is your data found? There may be numerous sources; be diligent in your search for them. Even if you think you have identified them all, keep pressing. Who “owns” the data? Do you have a plan in place for how the data will be shared and how it may be used? What is the quality of your data? What is your plan to keep your data clean and consistent over time?
How is marketing structured in your organization? Is your marketing centralized or decentralized? Is it in-house or outsourced? What kind of calendar or content control do you require? Making a system change is a good time to revisit your current structure and process, and make any changes needed to better align them with your strategic goals.
What is the timeline? What is the time frame for implementing a new marketing tool? What are the internal and external constraints? For example, when do current system contracts expire? Are there significant events you need to work around, both in the life of your organization and in the life of your key staff? Have you allowed enough time for training and user adoption, to ensure a successful transition?
What are available resources? What is your budget for a marketing tool and program? Are there ways to share costs across departments? Do you have the human resources to manage the program? Do you need to hire additional staff, or provide specialized training for system administrators or HTML specialists?

Once you’ve worked through these questions, you will be better prepared to review new marketing systems against your needs and make a decision that is right for your organization.

Dream to Reality: Achieving Data-Driven Marketing & Automation

June 9, 2016/in Email Marketing ACF Solutions/by Josue

In this webinar, ACF Solutions Architect Watt Hamlett, along with ACF client University of Colorado will discuss key considerations for driving more effective communications using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot in conjunction with Salesforce CRM.

Leveraging Salesforce to Improve Student Services at The College of St Scholastica

May 19, 2016/in Higher Education, Salesforce ACF Solutions/by Josue

In this webinar, learn how The College of St. Scholastica deployed Salesforce Case Management and integrated with external data sources to effectively and efficiently engage with students as well as provide insight into the college’s two advisor programs.

OneStop Student Services at the College of St. Scholastica

May 2, 2016/in Case Study, Higher Education, Salesforce ACF Solutions/by Josue

“Counselors are now able to resolve issues and answer questions much more efficiently when they can see what sort of interactions the student has already had with other counselors or departments.”
-Roberta Oberpriller, Director of Business Technologies

About CSS

The College of St. Scholastica, with eight physical campuses including its main campus in Duluth, Minnesota, provides a community of learning to 4,200 students in both traditional on-campus settings and online programs.

Challenge

The College of St. Scholastica (CSS) has a student population of about 4,200 students including undergraduate, graduate, on-campus, online, and accelerated programs. CSS wanted to increase “student success by maximizing retention…through quality student services and effective student engagement.” The school had already implemented Salesforce with TargetX as its enrollment management CRM solution, but there was no CRM solution for its advisory services. CSS needed a way to determine whether its advisory programs were efficient and effective for their diverse student body.

Solution

After a thorough RFP process, CSS selected ACF to extend their Salesforce instance. The objective of the project was to provide advising staff the tools needed to effectively and efficiently engage with students as well as provide insight into the programs’ effectiveness and identifying areas for improvement. Over the course of the 14-week project, including requirements gathering and detailed roadmapping, ACF created a student engagement solution customized to the needs of the school’s OneStop and Online Advisors. The delivered solution allows for future growth and can easily be expanded to other departments and student service providers. Some components of this solution included:

Implemented Salesforce Case Management on top of the college’s existing TargetX acquisition system, allowing the school to track and respond pro-actively to trending issues and to easily onboard seasonal advisory staff.
Integrated with external data sources, providing a 360-degree view of CSS students.
Customized the student’s Contact page in Salesforce to provide the advisor a quick snapshot of the student, including the student’s photo and a simple chart of his/her enrollment history, with links to more detailed information that answer most academic and account-related questions.
Configured Salesforce’s solution approval functionality to capture resolutions to student cases to a library of answers to commonly-asked student questions.
Created and integrated email messaging from Cases to request information from other student services departments who are not yet Salesforce users, e.g., Financial Aid, Academic Affairs and Housing, and implemented escalation rules to ensure service levels are maintained.
Setup email-to-case functionality allowing advisors to respond to student requests directly from a case.
Created management dashboards to track trends in caseloads, such as length of time to close cases, cycles to resolution, and trending issue areas.

Results

The Salesforce-based solution implemented by ACF now enables counselors and advisors to service the student population with timely resolution of registrar, financial aid, student account, and other related issues throughout program completion. In addition, the delivered solution provides the ability to facilitate the many hand-offs and touch points between the online advisors and OneStop Counselors, while the SIS integration allows access to student data required to deliver timely information.

Director of Business Technologies at The College of St. Scholastica Roberta Oberpriller reports “OneStop is particularly appreciative of the ability to see activity history for students who contact them. They are now able to resolve issues and answer questions much more efficiently when they can see what sort of interactions the student has already had with other counselors or departments.”

The implementation project also provides the necessary foundation for Communities, Self-Service, and Knowledge solutions envisioned in future phases. CSS has made a strategic investment in its Salesforce-based case management solution, one that it expects will continue to pay dividends in improved services for students, more efficient processes for staff, and overall increases in student satisfaction and retention.

8 Best Practices in Creating Custom Email Marketing Templates

April 21, 2016/in Email Marketing ACF Solutions/by Reach Local

Using email templates makes sense in so many ways. They help your organization to maintain brand consistency, control the look and feel of outgoing emails and reduce production time, especially for non-technical users. Many email platforms, including Marketing Cloud and Pardot, have ready-made templates, and some that are mobile-responsive. However, there are times when out-of-the-box templates won’t suffice. In that case, creating a custom email template is the way to go.

When developing a custom email template, you must take into consideration the idiosyncrasies of HTML email and the quirks of the various email clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc.). The challenge is to design and develop that email template so it looks good in most of the email clients used by your recipients. To help you in that effort, we’ve put together 8 best practices for email template custom design. These best practices are platform-agnostic so whether you use Marketing Cloud, Pardot, MailChimp or another email marketing platform, these practices still apply.

Know your email audience You could spend hours in designing and testing your email to account for every email client out there. That’s neither practical nor scaleable. Instead, determine the top 3 to 5 email clients used by members of your email list and mind those quirks!
Build in tables Use the HTML table structure to layout your email. Do not use CSS (cascading style sheets) to place images or text (or more!) as most email clients will not recognize it and/or strip it out.
Make it mobile-friendly If you’re a code-slinger, you can use media queries to adjust the sizes of images, buttons and fonts for greater readability on a mobile device (but not all email clients support this). For everyone else, you can achieve some degree of mobile readiness by using a single column no greater than 600 pixels wide or by using side-by-side nested tables in larger container table for a 2-column format. In either instance, limit the number of links and use buttons instead (buttons are easier to click than links on tiny screens). Also, consider defining space for teaser text above your header graphic as it shows up in some mobile email clients and provides you another opportunity with which to draw in a reader.
Use inline CSS to control elements While external and internal CSS is not supported by many email clients, you can use inline CSS in your template’s table structure to define font family, size, colors, styles, line-height and more. Example: <td valign=”top” align=”left” style=”color:#626568;”><table><tr><td style=”font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:16px; color:#0033cc; font-weight:bold; line-height: 22px;”>Speaking of fonts, use web safe fonts for design consistency. While typekit fonts provide greater choice, they are not yet reliable in HTML email.
Avoid background colors Outlook will strip background colors and images from your design. If you still want to use a background color, keep that color light and use a darker font color. In that way, if the email client does remove the background color, your text is still legible.
Use graphics optimallyLots of do’s and don’ts related to graphics use and coding:

DO save your images as GIFs or JPGs. PNGs are not widely supported yet.
DO declare your images’ height & width within the code. DON’T rely on the email client to know your intention.
DO include “alt” tags in your tags for disabled recipients.
DO use HTML attributes like “hspace” or “vspace” or the table structure itself to add padding around your images.
DON’T embed videos or Flash. Most email clients cannot support them. Use a still image and then link to a landing page with the video or Flash.
DON’T use image mapping; some email clients do not support. Instead, slice your image and link each slice respectively.
DO add the in-line CSS “display: block” to each image to counter some email clients, notably Gmail, adding spaces between sliced images.

Socialize Your Email Incorporate paths to your preferred social channels as part of your template design. Best practice is to place them on the bottom of the template, below the footer. Putting them up top may divert your recipient away from your email before they’ve even had a chance to read it. If they are part of your graphical footer, don’t use image mapping (see above) to link your social networks.
Test, Test & Test Some More Make sure your email template works, particularly in those email clients you identified as one of the top email clients (see #1 above)! Create test email accounts across those clients if your email software doesn’t provide in-box reviews.

As a final note, while these best practices are platform-agnostic, email marketing platforms will differ on the template set-up process and will make use of certain proprietary coding, for example, to define content areas within your template. Once you’ve mastered the first template, you’ll are well on your way to becoming a template guru!

Higher Ed Summit 2016

April 1, 2016/in Higher Education ACF Solutions/by Josue

At the 2016 Higher Ed Summit, held this year in New Orleans, colleges and universities joined together for a 3-day conference to learn from each other as well as industry experts and partners on how to transform constituent engagement and solve real problems in Higher Ed. Several of our clients were featured speakers at the Summit and ACF led two sessions, on Enterprise CRM and Marketing Automation. View some of the sessions below:

The Hard Work (and Rewards) of Campus-wide CRM

March 28, 2016/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

Building out a campus-wide CRM is hard work! There are technical considerations for sure ― establishing data governance, adding and retiring systems, consolidating data, etc. But most important are the people considerations. The introduction of a CRM may represent a major shift in how teams and departments work with each other; from a traditionally insular model to a highly collaborative and transparent one. The whole process is disrupting to the status quo.

So why do it?

Consider the alternative. Today, higher education institutions face challenges on numerous fronts, including: (1) declining enrollment, (2) the need for greater accountability for student outcomes, (3) unsatisfactory student experiences, (4) lackluster alumni engagement and support, and (5) the need for new revenue sources. These are challenges that are difficult to fully comprehend, let alone solve, especially in silos.

With an enterprise-wide CRM, there is the opportunity to unify and automate business processes, improve constituent experience across the lifecycle, and better monitor and measure outcomes. A single system of constituent engagement creates the ability to interact holistically, fostering the right touch points with the right person at the right time, while increasing satisfaction, loyalty, and support.

And for your staff, the hard work of building consensus and implementing enterprise-wide CRM will pay off in your team’s ability to drill down and solve issues more efficiently, faster, and with greater transparency.

In short, the rewards of achieving campus-wide CRM are more than worth the effort required to get there, and may very well transform institutions.

So how do you get there?

The keys to a successful enterprise CRM implementation include strong governance, a clear roadmap, and well planned change management.

Governance: includes shared decision-making, promotes collaboration, and most importantly, standardizes data and the solution.
Roadmap: establishes objectives, documents key business processes and requirements, prioritizes against organizational objectives and identifies which systems you will integrate with or replace.
Change Management: identify champions, develop training assets and user adoption plans, and plan for organizational impact and dependencies.

Learn more about strategies and tactics to prepare your institution for campus-wide CRM at Salesforce.org’s Higher Ed Summit 2016 during ACF Solutions session “Boldly Go: Preparing for a Successful Voyage with Salesforce in the Enterprise,” Wednesday March 30th at 2:00pm CT.

HEDA: The Evolution of Salesforce in Higher Education

March 1, 2016/in Valenda Seaford/by Josue

Today, Salesforce.org announced the launch of Salesforce HEDA (“Higher Ed Data Architecture”), which standardizes the Salesforce data model specifically for higher education. With HEDA, higher education institutions now have a core data architecture laying a more consistent foundation for Salesforce both within and across schools. As ACF Delivery Manager Jeff Cowgill comments in Salesforce’s HEDA launch video: “HEDA offers this incredible opportunity for schools to jump start their world into Salesforce.”

“Schools today are looking for solutions that scale, support their unique business processes, and are delivered quickly at reasonable costs,” Cowgill adds. HEDA helps address those needs by providing a constituent data model, designed to support data requirements across the student lifecycle, as well as an application framework, making it easier for multiple third-party apps to work together.

ACF President Kristin Sharpe is “thrilled about HEDA” and describes it as a “big leap forward in Salesforce.org’s commitment to the higher ed sector.” As a result, Sharpe has pledged ACF’s commitment to make its services compatible with HEDA. This commitment doesn’t represent any great change for ACF. “The HEDA design is very consistent with the best practices we have developed in our work with more than 55 schools,” explains ACF Delivery Director for Higher Ed Virginia Berkenkotter. ACF Solutions has been involved with planning for HEDA since the outset, providing feedback to Salesforce.org during its development.

HEDA is focused on the core constituent relationship model which is common to the majority of higher ed use cases. “It does not dictate or define specific business processes, such as advancement and admissions” explains CTO Doug Sharpe. “Instead HEDA provides a framework for implementation partners such as ACF Solutions, as well as for AppExchange product developers, to more quickly develop solutions and ensure greater interoperability across the enterprise.”

“Bottom line,” adds VP of Business Development Susan Tobes, “With HEDA, schools can be confident that they can start their Salesforce deployment anywhere – recruiting, student services, fundraising, corporate engagement – and have a foundation that will enable them to expand everywhere.”

Aggressive Goals Drive Enterprise-Wide CRM Solution at Leeds

January 21, 2016/in Case Study, Higher Education ACF Solutions/by Josue

“We have implemented Salesforce with 100% clicks, not code, and it has become the technological backbone of our school.”
-Joanna Iturbe, Senior Software Applications and Project Manager, CU Leeds School of Business

About Leeds

The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder is the eighth oldest business school in the United States and is the top-ranked Colorado business school with renowned programs in entrepreneurship, real estate and social responsibility. It is nationally recognized as a “Hot Spot” for entrepreneurial education. The school serves over 3,300 undergraduate and graduate students and over 200 faculty and staff.

Challenge

The Leeds School of Business is the premier business school in Colorado and ranked 71st for MBA programs and 97th for undergraduate business programs by Bloomberg Businessweek, the pre-eminent ranking publication. To remain competitive and improve the school’s efficiencies, Leeds wanted to improve a variety of factors such as recruitment, retention, satisfaction, and placement numbers. The challenges were numerous:

Measurement

New aggressive recruitment, retention and placement goals highlighted lack of a central repository of supplemental academic and engagement data for Leeds students. Student data was a collection of Excel sheets, Access files, emails and people’s memories, none of which was easily or widely accessible. This made it a challenge to assess progress toward those goals across silos of data.

Recruitment

Centralized recruitment efforts proved to be inefficient and time-consuming, on occasion taking weeks to produce a segmented recruitment list for an email campaign. With aggressive goals to improve admissions numbers of both high-achieving and under-represented students, the Leeds recruitment office needed to have some autonomy, but it did not have the tools to manage an independent student admissions and recruitment process.

Advising

Career and academic services appeared impersonal. Students were meeting with the wrong advisors, or not meeting with advisors at all and there was no way to readily identify students being missed in the process. These gaps in customer service negatively impacted student perception and therefore rankings. Scheduling and advising notes were paper-based and inefficient. Advisor access to student data was limited or non-existent.

Placement

Career placement data collection and reporting were scattered and inefficient. Leeds, like other business schools, has 90 days from the date of graduation to collect student data in order to report to Businessweek for ranking purposes. The process to collect that information was time-intensive and incomplete with no holistic way to capture information or identify those students for whom information was not available.

Corporate Relations

There were silos of activities in the school involving shared corporate partners and prospects, which negatively impacted the school’s reputation among external partners and resulted in missed opportunities.

Faculty Management

There was no way to accurately predict staffing needs for academic courses. It was anyone’s guess and, more often than not, courses were either under- or over-staffed, which could negatively affect student satisfaction and funding. Historical data on course enrollment was not easily accessible. In addition, the calculation for a faculty member’s summer pay was complicated and confusing. Leeds needed a system to better manage faculty pay and be alerted to any compliance issues in advance, as opposed to in arrears.

Solution

It was clear that Leeds needed a multi-functional and flexible constituent relationship management tool to address the several challenges confronting the school. After considerable research, Leeds chose Salesforce as its CRM over Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle CRM, and partnered with ACF Solutions for implementation. After a thorough discovery process and over three phases, ACF designed and executed a Salesforce-based solution that used both standard and custom objects, took advantage of Nonprofit Starter Pack packages like Affiliations and Relationships, and leveraged other integrated apps to tailor Leeds’ Salesforce instance to fit its specific needs and challenges. Leeds also took full advantage of Process Builder once it was released in Spring 2015. Most significantly, this highly customized solution was delivered without the need for costly and time-consuming custom development. Joanna Iturbe, Sr. Software Applications and Project Manager at Leeds adds, “We have implemented Salesforce with 100% clicks, not code, and it has become the technological backbone of our school.” ACF implemented the following functionality as part of the solution:

Salesforce Sales Cloud to provide a single system of engagement for prospects, applicants, students, faculty, alumni and corporate partners populated through a massive data migration of about half a million records; integration of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions SIS and subsequent occasional batch uploads from other data sources.
TimeTrade for appointment scheduling and Salesforce Cases, augmented with workflow rules for more accessible and personalized counseling.
Integrating Qualtrics Survey for easier and faster access for placement data.
Leveraging Soapbox Mailer for targeted recruitment communication.
Standard objects, Nonprofit Starter Pack, Chatter and Salesforce1 Mobile for greater cross-departmental collaboration and transparency.
Custom objects and Chatter for faculty summer pay calculations and compliance monitoring.

Results

The implemented Salesforce solution has had a profoundly positive impact on Leeds’ insight, and business processes as follows:

Measurement

Because Salesforce compiles all of its student data in one place, Leeds is now able to correlate student retention, job placement and student satisfaction to key touch points including visits to career advisors, attendance at job fairs and program involvement.

Recruitment

The time it takes Recruitment staff to send targeted recruitment messaging dropped from between 1 to 3 weeks down to a 30 second report, a 99.995% reduction in effort. The results of such messaging can be seen in its improved profile of incoming students. High school GPA, SAT scores and ACT scores have all improved.

Advising

Salesforce has enabled an improved advising experience for students and staff alike by centralizing all student data and interactions in one location easily accessible by career and academic advisors. This allows advisors across all Leeds departments to view relevant data and notes, which provides a more customized, personable experience for the students.

Placement

Leeds has 84% participation in student placement surveys as compared to 67% for the prior year’s graduating class and 99% knowledge rate of all student’s placement status due to collaborative efforts between advisors, faculty and social media. The school uses Salesforce to determine who has not responded to surveys and is able to target their reminder emails to those individuals. With this greater participation, Leeds was reporting a 94% student placement rate to Businessweek, compared with 84% in 2014. Better student reporting mechanisms and easier and more accessible reporting, through Salesforce, has (and will continue to) save 100 hours annually in staff hours.

Corporate Relations

Departments are now better able to have insight into all interactions with corporate partners, and better coordinate their activities.

Faculty Management

Salesforce has made faculty management more efficient by hosting all faculty information in one place. The compilation of information for purposes of faculty annual evaluations went from 3 staff members and 1 to 3 weeks to 1 staff member and 1 day, a 95% reduction in effort. With the aid of Salesforce, the school intends to use predictive analytics to properly staff courses. Leeds will harness the historical course enrollment and incoming student data within Salesforce to forecast 3 years of staffing needs. Also, Salesforce now allows real time tracking of faculty summer pay providing early detection of potential policy violations and therefore immediate corrective action, resulting in 100% compliance.

Bonus

Joanna Iturbe has used Lightning Process Builder extensively to create automated workflows and provide great efficiencies in otherwise time consuming tasks. She reports, “In the course of six months, we have built 15 active processes that are running over 67 million times per month — all automatically — without us lifting a finger.” Using Process Builder, Iturbe estimates that they have saved an estimated 200 internal personnel hours, at least $75,000 in implementation fees, and improved data quality. In the coming year, Leeds will add more functionality and users to their Salesforce implementation and believe the results from the upcoming projects will continue to improve the school’s recruitment, reputation, retention, student satisfaction, placement and rankings.