Bridges Outcomes Partnerships

Our client was using a flawed implementation of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) which had not been set up according to best practices. This meant that they struggled to leverage their Salesforce solution effectively, and to get the results they needed from it, discouraging them from using it at all. The online forms they were using, for carer self-referral and for professionals to refer carers, had bugs and did not align with the organization’s current operating processes

Crucially, it was hard to easily get a picture of a carer’s full journey with the organization, spanning the first contact, assessment, action plan and beyond. This hampered their ability to easily provide joined-up assistance to carers, across all the touch-points, and handle their heavy caseload of referrals.

What’s more, the poor implementation meant that the partner did not have the reporting capabilities they needed to analyze their activities and impact – and with which Bridges Outcomes Partnerships could demonstrate the impact of their partnership themselves. The existing solution also lacked the scalability necessary as they grew. They needed a Salesforce Partner with the expertise to resolve all these issues and enable success.

The VRP team quickly set about applying Salesforce best practices and re-engineering the solution and its functionality. For one thing, the care organization had previously been using individual programs to track carers’ journey through their system, instead of using NPSP the way it was intended – via its program management and case management capabilities – breaking the best practice of “adopt rather than adapt”. So, the team implemented both NPSP’s case management and program management modules. Existing custom objects were also amended to better fit their processes.

VRP also created a new screen flow (visually-guided automated process) allowing users to enter data in a better, easier and faster way, making full use of Salesforce’s user interface (UI) features, and fully meeting the partner’s needs and operating processes. This included pre-populating certain fields with information. A new data model was created to accommodate this, as well as migration of the partner’s very large dataset. The team also conducted a comprehensive data cleanup initiative, to ensure all the information on record was usable and could be trusted, with duplicate records removed and data validated.

All of this was made possible by two key things. The first is excellent cooperation in ascertaining the partner’s requirements and translating them into Salesforce functionality, via a robust feedback loop and regular check-ins. The second is the VRP team’s expert knowledge of Salesforce best practices and technologies.