Unlocking Effective Processes & System Adoption for TNP
Unlocking Effective Processes & System Adoption for TNP
CLIENT
The Nonprofit Partnership (TNP), a nonprofit based in Long Beach, California, believes in the power of nonprofits to transform communities. TNP’s work strengthens the sector through nonprofit capacity building along three branches: professional development, custom support, and initiatives.
Its professional development wing focuses on educational programming for current nonprofit professionals, from grant writing certification to budgeting.
Its custom support branch brings in consultant partners for nonprofits to complete projects both small and large, such as recruitment, strategic planning, writing a handbook, or setting up software.
Finally, its initiatives encompass a variety of work. As the regional network grantee for California Best Start funds for children and families, TNP mobilizes nonprofit partners to organize and invest in communities. The organization also runs a program called Technical Assistance and Mentorship Infrastructure (TAMI) to help emerging nonprofits with needs like website development, program development, and evaluation.
TNP wanted to update its existing Salesforce solution to make it a central place to track and summarize high-quality data on its work, understand its consulting pipeline, and increase system adoption by staff.
CHALLENGES
Before partnering with Terranox, TNP had a Salesforce system that housed the organization’s event management and had also been intended to report on and track its professional development, initiatives, and consulting work. However, the system had some persistent issues like source reports for dashboards not filtering properly, member emails coming into the system as donations, key attributes not being tracked on records, and more.
In all, these issues resulted in the team not trusting the system to be a source of truth for their organization and not fully adopting it. TNP also used a series of complex spreadsheets to keep track of much of the work and this resulted in time-consuming cross-checking and many manual calculations. Lead inquiries from nonprofits through their website were submitted via a Google Form. Overall, TNP’s team wanted their system to support their work better, and they needed to improve it with a modest budget. With greater capacity themselves, they would be able to support the capacity of the sector even more.
THEIR SPECIFIC SYSTEM VISION INCLUDED:
- High-level views from reports and dashboards to understand and showcase organizational trends and impact
- A connected website lead form that would be captured automatically in their system with inquiries from potential nonprofit clients
- Real-time data about their custom support pipeline to understand elements like client interest, percentage of prospects who sign a contract, how many convert to a consulting project across a given timeframe, and revenue
- Consolidation of data from numerous spreadsheets about education, initiatives, and consulting work, such as client touchpoints, contracts, and staff time spent
- Correction to issues like reporting filters and erroneous automations from their website flowing into Salesforce
Greater system usage by staff
“We never had 100% of our team using Salesforce before,” said Ariana Safford, Director of Operations and Administration at The Nonprofit Partnership. “And we hadn’t ever had 100% of our team putting all of the information in so that when we did run dashboards, they were correct. We had a spreadsheet that had each of our steps, I think six to eight different spreadsheets. We were pulling from over here and over here and over here, instead of just running the report for a particular time period.”
TNP’s system had the potential to support them in tracking and showcasing their work more effectively across several areas, if they could find a partner to address issues in a targeted way.
OUR SOLUTION
Terranox first worked to understand the current state of TNP’s system and staff needs. Then our team proposed and implemented updates that would both optimize their work processes and stay comfortably within the scope of TNP’s budget. They now have nine users across their education, custom support, and initiatives teams, and two admins. Feature highlights include:
- Real-time executive dashboard: Previously non-functional dashboard now displays visually impactful charts for numerous reports, like consulting pipeline tracking, program-related activities, and expenses
- Reporting: New reports track headcount for education programs, revenue on client projects, and custom support revenue
- Initiatives Tracking: Captures grant fund allocation and secured payment
- Custom Support Pipeline: Tracks lead conversion (ie. whether a nonprofit went on to have a consulting project) and activity time totals for a project
- Lead Capture on Website: Automatically creates a lead in Salesforce to replace Google Form when a nonprofit sends a website inquiry
- Activity and Time Logging: Puts consulting time tracking front and center, uses Lightning record pages to feature email and call logging prominently
- Member Signup Fix: New member signups from website are no longer automatically logged as donations in Salesforce, but instead as opportunities
In the past, Salesforce consultants were only able to focus on one department at a time, leaving TNP with unresolved issues. They appreciated having a different experience with Terranox.
Safford shared, “I told Terranox, ‘I don’t know what to ask for, but I have this budget. Can you help me figure out how to just make things work better for us?’ They did a really great job of meeting with each of our departments, scoping things, and really talking to me about what was affordable, what was necessary on the back end, and what was possible.”
IMPACT & RESULTS
%
STAFF ADOPTION
ANNUAL EDUCATIONAL PARTICPANTS
ACTIVE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES PROJECTS
BEST START GRANTS ALLOCATED
Unlocking Value of System Investment
TNP had already invested in Salesforce but it wasn’t as valuable as it could be. Terranox’s precise and budget-friendly approach made high-impact fixes our priority. Our team used active listening to all stakeholders to set up key displays, fields, and automations, optimize processes, fix broken pieces, and streamline user experience with just the information the team needed.
TRUST IN SYSTEM ACCURACY ACROSS PARTNERS
With more of TNP’s key data being tracked in Salesforce, staff save time that they would have spent asking colleagues about time spent on calls or meeting attendance, or checking multiple spreadsheet tabs. As well, having more data in Salesforce has resulted in some new employees being able to more quickly step into their roles.
Safford said, “We lost two of our entry-level staff. But Salesforce enabled someone to step into their role and prepare invoices for our TAMI program and our professional services program in a pretty painless way, even though they’re not super involved in the day-to-day and didn’t design the invoice. It helped make that transition easier.”
Demonstration of Impact to Board and Funders
We set up an executive dashboard and reports that helped the TNP team collect more high-quality data and pull that data together in powerful ways, in the form of bar graphs, pie charts, and statistical trends. Now, they can quickly see the big picture view of their program headcount, consulting pipeline, grant allocation, staff activity, and much more.
Tracking of revenue on initiatives also makes it easier for TNP to report utilization of services and types of projects grants funded to their partner foundations for their TAMI and Best Start initiatives.
“The billing and documentation and reporting functions for all of our initiatives and larger grants that we put into initiatives has been a game changer,” Safford said. With real-time, visualized data, leadership at TNP can make data-driven decisions and communicate impact to their board and grantmakers.
An Effective Source of Organizational Knowledge for New and Returning Staff
TNP staff have been empowered with Terranox’s training to craft their own reports and use the system freely. Any staff user can look for a dashboard and be able to effectively discuss organizational activities and the number of people or organizations served.
“The great thing is we’ve had 100% adoption,” Safford noted. “It’s enabled us to get quality data from Salesforce in a very painless way.”
A Partner to Share with Other Nonprofits
We are grateful that TNP, a capacity-building nonprofit, trusts us enough to recommend us to their own nonprofit clients. “I have been referring Terranox to anybody who comes,” Safford said. “We’ve actually been looking for organizations who need Salesforce help, to say, ‘We have the right consultants for you.’ It’s nice when I have faith that they’re in good hands.”
Our partnership gave TNP’s team precision upgrades for their system that help them tap organizational knowledge, inform decisions with data insights, and demonstrate impact.
