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Innovative Solutions to Support & Improve ADA Call Center

March 20, 2015/in Case Study ACF Solutions/by Josue

“Now our backend fulfillment process is easy to learn, easy to use.” -Arlene Erskine, Managing Director, Center for Information and Community Support

About ADA

The American Diabetes Association leads the fight against the deadly consequences of diabetes and the fight for those affected by diabetes by funding research; delivering services; providing objective and credible information; and advocacy.

Challenge

The support agents at the Center for Information and Community Support (“Center”), the call center of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), provide information on diabetes as well as ADA programs, products and events, to people diagnosed with diabetes, their family members and the professionals who treat them.

In 2014, the Center handled more than 150,000 inquiries — via web chat, phone and email. Given this high volume of inquiries, the Center could no longer trust their legacy system to support their activities. That system had not evolved since its initial implementation in 1993 and lacked basic business process automation. The Center’s backend fulfillment process was very labor intensive and required multiple manual tasks to complete the fulfillment of items. Their outdated and overly customized management system required time-consuming manual searches of their knowledge base and for the contact information of their constituents’ regional ADA offices.

When the system unexpectedly went down for a two-week period, leaving the Center without a back-up, the time had arrived for a new solution that, according to Managing Director Arlene Erskine, could be “adapted to our processes and requirements — and have a back-up in place.” The Center could not afford to be without their case and knowledge management system again.

Solution

After a thorough review of major call center players, American Diabetes Association selected Salesforce.com as its CRM and ACF Solutions as its implementation partner. Over the 20-week project, including extensive requirements gathering, ACF implemented Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Knowledge to create an integrated call center solution that would be responsive across all channels and address the specific business needs of the ADA. ACF Solutions implemented the following functionality as part of the new core solution:

Implemented and configured Salesforce Service Cloud to track and manage constituent inquiries via phone, email and web chat through contact and case records.
Implemented and configured Salesforce Knowledge for ADA’s centralized knowledge base on diabetes information, membership, training materials, web links and more, allowing support agents to quickly hone their search through keywords entered in the case subject line, and within the case view.
Setup email-to-case functionality, allowing agents to respond directly from a case and for constituents to reply.
Automated the process of importing kit order requests to the Center for fulfillment by the Center’s team.
Implemented and extended Salesforce Live Agent by creating a pre-chat form with a duplicate checking functionality and a post-chat survey form to capture key constituent information for demographic analysis and improved services.
Configured a custom solution to match constituents to the appropriate Regional ADA Office based on their zip code. This allowed the call center agent to proactively provide the constituent key event and contact information for their regional office.
Implemented Conga Composer and Conductor to streamline the order fulfillment and inventory management processes.

Results

Five months post-implementation, the Center for Information and Community Support reports (1) improved productivity where call center agents now have access to and maintain a comprehensive searchable knowledge-base and local ADA offices directory; (2) faster fulfillment of product orders; (3) simplified processes such that any person could now step into the order fulfillment role easily; (4) reduced call-handling time; and (5) the Center has not experienced any downtime since Salesforce was implemented.

Highlights from the Higher Ed Summit 2015

February 26, 2015/in Higher Education Alanna Steffens/by Josue

What a wonderful time I had in sunny Miami attending Salesforce Foundation’s 2015 Higher Education Summit hosted by the University of Miami. This year’s theme was “Community Reimagined.” The Summit brought together over 700 staff from Higher Ed institutions looking to engage their constituents at every point in the lifecycle. Participants enjoyed two days of great presentations on how peer institutions are using community and communication solutions to engage their constituents. Here are my highlights from the Advancement Track at #HESummit2015:

Get Internal Buy-in for Alumni Engagement Success

As Kim Egan from the University of Colorado and Emily Morris and Mickey Mossaidis from Columbia University shared in their presentation “Alumni Communication and Community”, the idea of reinventing a single enterprise alumni engagement approach did not emerge overnight. Both institutions shared about their efforts from getting buy-in to selecting the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Sales Cloud, to creating the right internal team. Considerable time was spent to get the necessary support from all the affected players to build a unified and engaging solution. The speakers stressed that they needed to remain flexible in their approach and consider the structure of the organization to get results.

Be Transparent

In “Innovating with Advancement Connect,” Tracey Vranich and Al Checcio from the University of Southern California shared their experience leveraging the Salesforce and Advancement Connect platforms to support their aggressive $6 billion campaign. As part of their onboarding and change management strategy, USC reached out to the advancement offices of its different schools, to communicate vision and secure buy-in for this enterprise advancement solution. This early work helped to create transparency in the process, as well as create trust with the advancement officers and other users in the long-term benefits to them of the solution. The key message here: engage your community openly and often to support effective change!

Make A Plan!

With so many areas to consider when starting a Salesforce project, the session led by Georgetown University on building a roadmap to support your implementation was instrumental. Jennifer Walker described this process as most often starting with a “Coalition of the Willing” to:

identify the pain points
establish objectives
document key processes
prioritize against University objectives
and define success metrics.

The session went on to highlight the three key areas needed to start building a roadmap: (1) creating a governance structure; (2) building the roadmap, and (3) developing a resource plan. The audience was asked to then rate their organization’s preparedness in each of the three categories. This hands-on activity allowed participants to start generating a plan of action for use upon returning to their institutions. There was a lot of energy and participation in the room. It was clear this was an important topic for all.

I’m looking forward to more great moments like these at next year’s Higher Ed Summit, March 30-April 1, 2016 at Tulane University.

7 Best Practices for a Successful Salesforce Implementation

February 12, 2015/in Best Practices, Higher Education, Salesforce, Salesforce Community ACF Solutions/by Olivia Pycha

Having done your due diligence in selecting Salesforce for Higher Ed as your institution’s CRM platform, it is time to prepare for implementation. Your institution’s readiness will be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful deployment. Implementation is not a simple pull of the switch, but rather a process that may start prior to CRM selection and continue after launch. ACF Solutions has completed hundreds of Salesforce implementations and has gathered these best practices that will ensure a productive and successful implementation for you and your school.

1. Plan, plan, and plan some more.

Planning is key to a successful implementation. In this early stage, involve staff members from any affected departments and most importantly key prospective Salesforce users; understand their pain points, business objectives, needs and wants. This analysis will allow you and your team to re-think and improve existing business processes. Know and expect that, while your requirements gathering and planning may be comprehensive, it will never be 100%. So do the analysis, but don’t let it lead to paralysis.

2. Think big, start small.

Given Salesforce’s innovative technology, you may be tempted to implement Salesforce across your institution ALL at once, but do not. Use an iterative or phased approach to implement an enterprise Salesforce solution. To borrow from CTO John Carpenter of Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Start with one or two departments; select a department with staff members identified as early adopters or a revenue-generating department such as student recruitment or executive education. Then build upon your initial success and leverage key learnings such as user adoption strategies as you move forward. Let each phase build upon the successes and lessons learned from the prior phases.

3. Identify an internal project manager early.

This is a no-brainer; identify someone early in the process to keep the proverbial wheels moving. An implementation of this nature necessarily involves a detailed project scope, multiple deadlines, and a defined budget and needs to be effectively managed internally. That person may be someone with project management experience from the IT management office or perhaps a business analyst from a functional team. The project manager keeps their own team on track, helps to coordinate internal resources, and supports project collaboration. This greatly increases the chances of your project being on time and on budget!

4. Engage your stakeholders from the start.

Salesforce is a transformative technology, but only if your users adopt the technology. You cannot assume it will happen organically. Change is hard. Employees may have invested years in the current systems with which they work or have suffered burnout from past technology failures. You need to develop user adoption strategies from the start of your CRM project to gain their trust and buy-in. For example, involve stakeholders in the initial requirements gathering and later in user testing; identify and empower early adopters as technology champions; communicate to all levels; and celebrate the wins. Change management doesn’t end upon launch. Continue to grow adoption with post-implementation check-ins and surveys, new and refresher training, and readily available technical support. In his 2015 Dreamforce session, CTO Carpenter recalled several instances in which “Salesforce could have failed on a micro-level” if the school had not employed an “aggressive helpdesk model.” Show this kind of love to your users, and you’ll get the kind of adoption that leads to success.

5. Good data is everything.

The goal of Salesforce is to bring your various data sources (e.g., Banner, ApplyYourself, Excel sheets, PeopleSoft, etc.) into one central location to make the right data available to the right people at the right time in a way that they can use. However, getting the right data into Salesforce is critical and can be a key challenge. Effective data integration requires an up-front and thoughtful analysis of your current data sources, specific data needs, frequency of data exchanges, unique record keys and more. Salesforce is a system of engagement. Effective engagement requires data that tells you who to engage with, when and how. Once your data sources are identified, make a plan as to how that data gets into your system. (Do not expect users to type in the data!) Having the clean and complete data in the system when you go live will increase user adoption, create efficiencies and improve future data collection. The cleanliness of your data will be an ongoing challenge. Your data must continue to be visible and open to your users. If not, user adoption is threatened. Most higher education institutions already have data governance plans in place, including data cleansing and data security. If yours does not, you will need to establish data entry and stewardship rules and processes.

6. Knowledge is power.

The more your users and technical team know about Salesforce, the better your results. Develop opportunities internally and externally to grow your team’s knowledge base.

Take advantage of the trainings and certifications offered by Salesforce.
Build internal expertise by offering supplemental training sessions.
Share knowledge through Chatter, Salesforce’s built-in community.
Introduce your users to Higher Ed communities on Salesforce’s ‘Power of Us’ Hub.
Encourage attendance at Salesforce and Salesforce Foundation conferences and webinars for the opportunity to ask questions, network, and learn how other higher education institutions have solved problems using Salesforce.
Take advantage of your implementation partner’s expertise to transfer knowledge to you and your users.

7. Don’t go it alone.

Salesforce offers an amazing CRM platform to the higher ed sector. But it does not offer implementation services. Finding the right partner to help implement Salesforce is up to you. Give careful consideration to the partner you choose. The road to enterprise CRM success is long, and it will invariably be bumpy. Even with the most careful planning and preparation, unforeseen challenges can arise. You will want a trusted advisor beside you who has traveled this road before and has a proven track record of success in higher ed.

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 digital transformation goals.

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

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Innovation is Business-Critical for WPI Advancement Team

January 27, 2015/in Case Study, Fundraising, Higher Education ACF Solutions/by Josue

“Collaboration isn’t just nice, it’s necessary.”
-Cheryl Ann Cerny, Senior Director of Advancement Information Management & Research

About WPI

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a technological university dedicated to the technical arts and applied sciences, located in Worcester, Massachusetts, with approximately 6,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students.

Challenge

The Division of University Advancement at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was facing challenges with their legacy advancement database. Communication within the team was a “huge issue,” as Cheryl Ann Cerny, Senior Director of Advancement Information Management & Research at WPI, described in her presentation at Dreamforce 2014. Information needed to be more accessible.

According to Cerny, “We needed to make sure that we had an environment for our fundraisers to quickly communicate with each other so that we could keep everything moving at a fast pace and not lose any opportunity.” They needed a system that would enable them to work smarter and collaborate in order to successfully vie for limited fundraising dollars in New England’s competitive higher-education rich environment. Innovation was business-critical for the WPI advancement team.

Solution

After considerable research and requirements gathering by Cerny and others, WPI selected Salesforce.com as its enterprise-wide CRM and ACF Solutions as its implementation partner. The advancement team would be the first division on campus to move to Salesforce and was joined by the Academic and Corporate Development Division. Over the course of a 12 week project, ACF implemented Salesforce to support donor, prospect, and proposal management for WPI’s gift officers, and trained the team to use the new system. ACF also helped WPI extend Salesforce to meet several of WPI’s key challenges around effective data sharing and governance, without compromising native software. By taking this approach, ACF was able to build a solution customized to WPI’s specific business needs that could still be easily upgraded and maintained by the University. Some components of this solution included:

Implemented and configured Salesforce’s Advancement Connect product to provide Advancement specific functionality.
Configured a custom sharing solution that allowed for complex opportunity ownership, greater transparency with fundraising goals and metrics and automated communication rules across current staff, former staff, and faculty.
Automated key processes throughout the major donor life cycle to increase collaboration and reduce staff processing time.
Extended the native Salesforce security model to allow for granular access to confidential information across the team.

Results

Only 3 months post-implementation, the WPI advancement team reports greater staff efficiency, collaboration and visibility into their opportunities, with all of the relevant and necessary data pulled into one record through native Salesforce tools and customized objects. This initial implementation also set the foundation for implementing CRM institution-wide. WPI and ACF are presently working on Phase Two of the implementation.

Business at the Speed of Lightning

November 3, 2014/in Doug Sharpe/by Josue

Many new capabilities were announced under the “Lightning” umbrella at Dreamforce 2014. From my perspective, the most exciting of these is the Lightning User Interface (UI) framework. It is the way that we will all be building custom user interfaces for Salesforce a year from now. It was nice knowing you, Visualforce.

What is the Lightning UI Framework?

The Lightning UI framework is composed of three main capabilities:

Lightning Components – pieces of user interface (tiny to huge) that include both the look-and-feel and the logic
Lightning Extensions – the ability to replace pieces of the standard Salesforce1 user interface with another built or purchased Component
Lightning App Builder – visual tool to assemble Component-based apps

For us techies, there are a lot of cool technical innovations to be excited about in the Lightning framework. At Dreamforce, listening to Doug Chasman, the principal architect of the framework, talk about some of the really impressive software engineering they have accomplished almost brought tears to my eyes. Seriously.

However, there is much more to the Lightning UI framework than a state of the art programming architecture. This is a monumental shift in the approach Salesforce customers and partners will employ to create and tailor their Salesforce CRM experience and build custom apps.

Mobile First

You have undoubtedly heard the term “mobile first” in app development circles. It means that we should think about and build for a mobile use case first – because that is increasingly how people are primarily or exclusively interacting with apps. Unfortunately, much of the business systems world is still desktop first; mobile responsiveness is a second thought. Well, Salesforce has definitely gone mobile first with Lightning. First of all, they built the Salesforce1 mobile app itself using Lightning. And the Lightning Extensions and App Builder capabilities are initially focused on phone/tablet apps — and only later will they be extended to desktop! Under the covers many of the technical attributes of the framework are designed to optimize the mobile experience, including minimizing data transfer (for faster page loads and reduced usage of our mobile data plans) and taking advantage of the mobile device’s computing power.

Lighting Components – More Assembling, Less Coding

Sure, we will be able to custom program our own Lightning components, but the real vision is that we will for the most part assemble apps using the Lightning App Builder from a palette of 1,000+ Salesforce-provided components as well as free and paid components that will be available from ISVs on the AppExchange.

And that is what has me excited about Lightning. Increasingly, what used to require a developer skill set will be achievable by lesser mortals. That means it will be faster and more cost-effective for companies like ACF Solutions, and our clients alike, to create solutions on Salesforce that are highly tailored, yet also easy to maintain and evolve. Lightning is one giant leap forward for the Salesforce mantra of “clicks, not code.”

At first glance this sounds too good to be true. The reason it is likely to become reality is that Salesforce Engineering is now using Lightning to build Salesforce itself. Not only is Salesforce1 mobile built on Lightning, but so are all of the newer UI elements in the desktop app including Opportunity Splits and Process Builder. And Salesforce is planning to rebuild the entire desktop experience using Lightning over time. A reusable component architecture is key to their engineering strategy – and we customers and partners will benefit from that.

Lightning Extensions – Make Salesforce CRM Your Own

Today, some Salesforce customers use the platform to create complex custom apps. However, most are traditional sales or service organizations who just want to tailor the standard CRM functionality to their desires. Lightning Extensions are going to make a big impact for those folks.

The Salesforce platform is famous for easy declarative configuration, including a simple page layout editor to arrange fields via drag-and-drop. Sometimes though, admins run up to “the Visualforce cliff” — meaning that to meet a small customization requirement, they must start from scratch and replace the whole page with custom Visualforce.

With Lightning Extensions, you will be able to target just a piece of the standard UI for replacement – down to an individual field. So for example, if you want to show a small graphic such as a pie chart or thermometer in place of a numeric field, you will be able to just swap out that field. Today, you would need to recreate the entire page and all of its unmodified fields in Visualforce. This evolution will make tailoring CRM much easier.

Check it Out

Lightning Components are currently available in beta in developer orgs. So if you are a developer, you can start getting up to speed on them now. Lightning App Builder and Extensions are in pilot, so declarative admins will need to wait until the next release to kick the tires on those. You can learn more about the framework at:https://developer.salesforce.com/lightning

Higher Ed Clients Speaking at Dreamforce 2014

October 11, 2014/in Higher Education Doug Sharpe/by jmdean@attainpartners.com

Three of our Higher Education clients will be speaking at Dreamforce 2014. If you are attending, please consider adding these sessions to your agenda.

John Carpenter, Taira Crockett & Jesse Avila, Georgetown McDonough School of Business

Cutting Through Chaos: How Georgetown MSB Connects Processes on the Platform

When: Monday, October 13, 1:30PMWhere: Century Theaters, Theater 7

Gerald Bridwell, Smith College

Leveraging Next-Gen Marketing Automation Toolsin Higher Ed

When: Wednesday, October 15, 1PMWhere: Palace Hotel, Twin Peaks

Cheryl Cerny, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Salesforce Higher Ed Advancement: Fundraising for the 21st Century

When: Thursday, October 16, 9AMWhere: Marriott Marquis, Nob Hill

Non-Profit Clients Speaking at Dreamforce 2014

October 10, 2014/in Nonprofit ACF Solutions/by Josue

Three of our Non-Profit clients are speaking at Dreamforce 2014. If you are attending, we encourage you to add these sessions to your agenda.

Lyrae Myxter, UN Foundation

Driving Organizational Change: Stories from the Front Lines

When: Monday, October 13, 9:30AM Where: Marriott Marquis, Foothill G1, G2

Greg Kieser, Robin Hood Foundation

Building and Sustaining Impact: The Funder Perspective

When: Monday, October 13, 4:30PM Where: Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena, Salons 13, 14, 15

Lily Ladd, National Public Radio

Engagement Strategies in a Sea of Content

hen: Monday, October 13, 4:30PM Where: Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena, Salons 4, 5, 6

6 Things to Do While In San Francisco (from a Local)

October 8, 2014/in ACF Solutions/by Reach Local

Dreamforce is next week and, yes, there will be keynotes, sessions, parties, volunteer opportunities and networking to do. But, hey, you’re in San Francisco. Take some time, even just to clear your head from the hubbub of Dreamforce, and have some fun in the City by the Bay. Here are six things to do, all within a short distance of Dreamforce – now there’s no excuse.

Stroll the Marketplace at the historic Ferry Building (One Ferry Building), offering “everything from artisan cheeses to the freshest of local fish.” Lots of dining and shopping as well.
Enjoy the BEST cup of coffee at the Blue Bottle Coffee in the Ferry Building or at Mint Plaza (66 Mint Plaza).
Dine at the Zuni Café (1658 Market St), one of the BEST fine-dining restaurants in San Francisco, and an institution at 35 years old!
Sip a GREAT martini at Bix Supper Club (56 Gold Street) in the Financial District.
Take a walk. The city is SO walkable. Walk through the gates of Chinatown along Grant Avenue (at Bush Street) all the way to North Beach. Along the way, poke into the stores and do some shopping. When you get to North Beach, visit the old Beat Poets’ haunts such as Café Trieste or City Lights Books. Finish your walk at Coit Tower and take in a beautiful view of the Bay and see the 1930s murals inside the newly renovated Tower.
Visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum or the Asian Art Museum, both of which are hosting some exhibits of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, during its renovation, as well as their own. These museums are all just a few short blocks from the Moscone Center.

8 Tips to Increase Salesforce User Adoption

September 26, 2014/in Kathy Brown/by Josue

User adoption is critical to the success of any CRM project. Bill Band of Forrester Research reported in 2012 that of all CRM project problems, 22% relate to “people issues,” the “most significant threats” being “slow user adoption, inadequate attention paid to change management and training, and difficulties in aligning the organization culture with new ways of working.”

ACF Solutions recently finished a Salesforce implementation at the United Nations Foundation (UNF) where User Adoption was a key concern going into the project. Lyrae Myxter, UNF’s project leader, her colleague Jordan Berger, and the ACF team (collectively the UNF “Core Salesforce Team”) worked from the very beginning to include user adoption strategies throughout the project. Here are the eight tactics that worked to support positive end user adoption at UNF:

Listen actively. UNF stakeholders were numerous and diverse, including executives and 18 departments. The Core Salesforce Team spent considerable time asking questions to understand their pain points and identify opportunities to create efficiencies. These early conversations helped to build trusting relationships, which were important in encouraging higher adoption down the road.
Remain positive. Because of the existence of a legacy CRM system, the team needed to be sensitive to user burnout and wariness that any new system would be a panacea. The team maintained a “positive approach;” and acknowledged users’ pain points, understanding that any negativity was coming from a place of need.
Set a baseline measurement. As part of the listening tour, Lyrae and Jordan sought to quantify the existing levels of effort required for the various functions slated for CRM. This would establish a baseline against which UNF would measure the success of the new system and, therefore, further encourage user adoption.
Empower enthusiasts. The team identified prospective users who were enthusiastic about the Salesforce initiative. Twenty-five of them – representing each affected department – formed the “Champions” group which served as a communication conduit to and from the frontlines, relaying messages, sharing success stories and reporting back questions or issues.
Name Salesforce Administrators early. Because a new CRM system would require staff members to learn new software, it was important to identify Salesforce admins early in the process who had both technical know-how and people skills. Early identification also allowed UN Foundation’s four admins to receive advanced training and provide visible frontline support.
Communicate frequently and clearly. Communication – up and down the organization’s ladder — was a critical piece of the implementation strategy. Lyrae actively managed a communication plan that varied by the audience. Some of the most effective communications included: Company-wide meetings, Salesforce e-Bulletins, use of Champions to distribute information, and Salesforce Open House meetings.
Celebrate success. Throughout the process Lyrae and her team shared Salesforce successes big and small, and communicated each time a milestone was reached. At launch, early adopters and champions were celebrated, thanked and rewarded with Salesforce-branded swag. Rick Parnell, UNF’s Chief Operating Officer, in his “launch day” email encouraged “shout outs” for continued success. Signs of celebration were everywhere – Power Points looped on monitors throughout UNF and quotes dotted white boards and glass walls throughout the building. The success of UNF’s launch was shared with the entire organization.
Review, refine, repeat. At 6 months post-launch, Lyrae reports that there is “active engagement” of Salesforce and a “pretty good adoption rate.” Launch, however, is just the beginning of her work. ACF is working with Lyrae to increase Salesforce adoption by identifying new business processes that would benefit from being added to Salesforce. As UNF begins the process for Phase 2 of their Salesforce implementation, the team is reviewing Phase 1 feedback. Those results as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics, will influence our way forward in Phase 2. Because, as Lyrae is oft to quote, “change is the only constant.”

Salesforce1 for Higher Ed and Advancement Connect - Yes!

September 26, 2014/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

The Salesforce Foundation just introduced Salesforce1 for Higher Ed and Advancement Connect today. This is big news and I”ll tell you why.

Salesforce1 for Higher Ed sets out the Salesforce Foundation’s strategy to create a 21st century connected campus. It clearly identifies the areas where Salesforce can support increased engagement of key constituencies — all through a mobile-enabled cloud platform. Fabulous!

Advancement Connect is equally if not more exciting to me. With the introduction of Advancement Connect, the Salesforce Foundation is truly providing an enterprise solution that will serve Higher Ed institutions. Advancement Connect is a higher education-enhanced version of the currently released NGO Connect. Both are based on roundCause, a product designed and delivered by roundCorner.

What do I mean by that? Advancement Connect combines the right software in Salesforce to support your constituents and the many ways they interact with your institution (e.g., students, alumni, staff, corporate contacts, faculty). No longer are you locked into one way of looking at a single contact. Instead, you can build a relationship model that tells you the many stories of a particular constituent — as an alumni, a prospective student, a staff member — all in one place. It’s brilliant! And it doesn’t prevent other units, e.g., Admissions, from using Salesforce to meet their specific needs, leveraging a single instance of Salesforce.

And, Advancement Connect will truly transform the way you manage your advancement activities. Instead of thinking of an Advancement solution as simply a place to record advancement data, Advancement Connect allows you to unlock the power of your data, enable staff efficiencies, and, ultimately, increase your donations.

How does it do this? Because Advancement Connect is built natively on the Salesforce platform, you get a gift processing solution, innovative communication and marketing tools with the Salesforce Exact Target Marketing Cloud and AppExchange applications — all in a securely managed cloud solution which is, mobile accessible. And the best part, upgrades just happen. Say goodbye to the agony and expense of upgrades. Plus if we customize or configure your Advancement Connect solution, future Salesforce upgrades will not break it. Can you imagine? Awesome.

As you can tell, I’m very excited about both Salesforce1 for Higher Ed and Advancement Connect. Come talk to me about it at Educause. I’ll be in the Salesforce Booth #149 demo-ing an early version of Salesforce1 for Higher Ed and Advancement Connect on Tuesday, September 30 and Wednesday, October 1, from 1 – 3 EDT. Or come by our booth (#8) at Dreamforce (October 13-16) and I’ll bend your ear a bit then (and you know I can!)