Center for American Progress Engages Key Stakeholders With Salesforce.com Cloud Computing

Challenge

• Center for American Progress, a multi-issue progressive think tank, is devoted to offering policy ideas and proposals to influential audiences in the time and format that is most useful to them.
• Recognizing that the elite media, policymakers in Congress, advocates, and high dollar donors each play a different role, the organization wanted a tool to help identify and segment these key stakeholders for outreach.
• Stakeholder data resided on multiple systems maintained by individual departments and was shared ad hoc.
• The organization couldn’t fully capture its relationship with high-value stakeholders. For example, staff lacked a full and accurate picture of donation history and was not tracking outreach to other core stakeholders.
• American Progress needed an open, flexible, and scalable solution it could quickly deploy and integrate with existing systems.

Solution

• American Progress selected Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition and has deployed the cloud-computing solution to more than 50 users.
• Salesforce CRM is now used to track every donation and grant received by the organization, as well as all donor contact information.
• The organization also uses Salesforce CRM Marketing to track outreach activities to other major stakeholders including meetings, mailings, testimony before Congress, speeches and conferences. Integration with an online marketing system lets American Progress link all Web visits and email marketing activities to an individual.
• To better track the impact of the 100+ events sponsored annually, American Progress uses Salesforce CRM for on-site event registration to know more about who is attending these events.
• The organization integrated Salesforce CRM with Eloqua for email and Web tracking. American Progress also integrated MS Outlook, congressional data feeds from Know-Who, and press data from Vocus.
• The organization customized Salesforce CRM by building the following applications on the Force.com platform:
  -Project Management: To better manage internal workflow and manage inter- and cross-department projects. American Progress is incorporating additional Web-to-lead functionality for staff to request various projects.
  -Content Management: To establish an inventory, manage editorial production and dissemination of major policy assets, including columns, memos, Web interactives, and videos.
  -Scheduling Reports: To create a “pipeline” of all future policy products, events, and major activities.
• Management uses Salesforce CRM dashboards to track key performance indicators including policy output, online marketing, offline outreach activities, TV and media hits, and fundraising information.

Results

• American Progress can better target and engage valuable stakeholders leading to more effective and efficient outreach:
-Donors -- Identifying how and when current and prospective donors interact with the organization helps American Progress’ Development team engage them on issues they care about and secure donations
-Elected Officials -- Monitoring which offices and staff are interacting with American assists the organization’s Government Affairs team in targeting those interested in specific subjects and extends its influence on Capitol Hill and in the Executive Branch
-Press – Analyzing which journalists have covered previous events and reports lets American Progress’ Communications team better target scarce resources toward securing more press coverage
• By streamlining email processes with Force.com workflows, American Progress increased email productivity by 414% and sent more than 1700 separate batches of email within the past 10 months.
• With Salesforce CRM Marketing and Eloqua, the organization increased its number of contacts by 263% in 2008. American Progress also saw a 565% increase in online marketing opportunities in the same year.
• Visibility into event attendees gives the organization insight into whether events are engaging the intended audience and improves American Progress’ ability to better target follow-up outreach activities.
• The “Pipeline” scheduling report created in Salesforce CRM is now American Progress’s primary planning and coordination tool.
• American Progress plans to use Salesforce CRM for human resources and budgeting. The organization is also considering Salesforce CRM's ideas community for engaging with its core stakeholders.