Utah Division of Arts and Museums Saves over 800 Hours per Year in Reporting with Salesforce CRM

Challenge

• The State of Utah’s Department of Community and Culture, Division of Arts and Museums, needed a solution to efficiently track outreach efforts and interactions with artists and the general public.
• An existing GoldMine system resulted in siloed data. Frustrated employees began tracking information in FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word, resulting in duplicate records and processes.
• Building reports required by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Utah State Legislature was a manual and time-consuming process. Reports took as long as 800 hours per year to generate at a cost of $20 an hour.
• The division also wanted a platform on which it could build functionality beyond CRM, ease of customization, and flexibility.

Solution

• After considering several on-premise and cloud-computing solutions, the division selected Salesforce CRM for its ease of use, and extensibility.
• The division easily deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition in two weeks without help from outside consultants. Monthly staff training sessions helped drive more than 70 percent user adoption during the first year. The division anticipates 100% adoption during the second year.
• Applications downloaded and installed from AppExchange allow the division to extend Salesforce CRM easily beyond CRM. Solutions such as Vertical Response and Strike Iron help save money by reducing the cost of communications, while AppExtreme’s Conga Merge makes reporting and invoicing more efficient.
• Salesforce CRM’s Web-to-opportunity capabilities enable outside organizations to make an exhibit request directly from the division’s Web site. Automated workflows ensure the requestor receives educational materials 30 days prior to the exhibit’s installation and trigger an email, notifying drivers of a delivery 7 days prior to an exhibition.
• Using the Force.com platform, the division built an application to track grants, programming events, and other interactions with its constituents.
• The division uses RegOnline from AppExchange for attendees of its annual conference to submit registrations and pay for the fees online. All information is subsequently updated or added into Salesforce CRM. Last year’s conference generated about 15% new leads of people wanting services from the division.

Results

• Salesforce CRM users can now easily generate reports, enabling the division to save as much as $16,000-$20,000 per year on the creation of reports sent to the National Endowment of the Arts.
• Centralized data provides the division with a clear view of its interactions with constituents.
• The cloud-computing model allows the division to avoid infrastructure and upgrade costs associated with traditional on-premise CRM systems.