New Leaders for New Schools Increases Program Effectiveness With Force.com and Salesforce CRM

Challenge

• New Leaders for New Schools, a national non-profit organization that recruits and trains outstanding urban school principals, needed to track participants from application through the program lifecycle.
• The organization had been using another solution that was difficult to manipulate and expensive to maintain; reports were often out of date and inaccurate. One department used Microsoft Access but the two systems did not integrate.
• New Leaders for New Schools wanted a flexible solution that could be easily customized to meet its needs. Cost was also an important consideration.

Solution

• New Leaders for New Schools chose Salesforce CRM for its flexibility and point-and-click customization. The Salesforce.com Foundation, which provides 10 donated licenses of the nonprofit edition and a further 80% discount on additional licenses to qualified organizations, helped make it affordable.
• With assistance from salesforce.com nonprofit partners Exponent Partners and Idealist Consulting, the organization deployed Salesforce CRM for recruitment, admissions, and principal data tracking in just 3 months. A fundraising system was rolled out concurrently and took only 6 months to complete.
• Salesforce.com Certification & Training programs allowed New Leaders for New Schools administrators to quickly get value out of Salesforce CRM. Custom online video tutorials and user guides helped increase employee adoption.
• Applicants use Salesforce CRM's customer portal to upload admissions materials; the organization used Force.com's pages to adapt the interface to have the look and feel of an application process.
• Tools built with the Force.com platform help the admissions team evaluate program applicants. Custom tabs support additional processes including donation payment processing, program participant placement, and school achievement data tracking.
• Dashboards give access to reliable, real-time recruiting, application, and fundraising metrics. Workflow automation keeps applications moving quickly through the approval process and helps close fundraising opportunities.
• Salesforce CRM and Google AdWords and VerticalResponse from AppExchange provide support for search engine marketing and email campaigns.
• Force.com's connect for Microsoft Outlook keeps a record of critical email communications and events.

Results

• With the cloud-based Salesforce CRM solution, New Leaders for New Schools has reduced annual systems maintenance costs by 85%.
• Salesforce CRM makes the recruitment and admissions processes more efficient; employees spend less time on administration so they can analyze data and focus on strategy instead.
• Data can be updated quickly and effectively for more timely and reliable reports, improving decision making and business planning.
• Program participants are now tracked through the complete program cycle, for more detailed measurement and increased program effectiveness.