Sales order management app for Nonprofit

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right good afternoon this is reuben singh for one tenth consulting i'm going to give another minute here and we will get started all right we will go ahead and get started here uh thank you for joining the webinar this is grant management in salesforce um again thank you i know that uh for nonprofits especially this is a very busy time of year so i very much appreciate you taking the time to meet with us today um i just like to do a quick check to make sure that uh folks on the phone can hear me someone doesn't mind in the chat just uh just indicating that they can hear me okay you can somebody can just drop in the chat if they can hear me then i know all the mics and audio is working okay all right looks like we are okay all right good notification uh so we're good uh let me just present my screen again all right um a little bit about myself uh my name is ruben singh um i have spent um about 15 years in the crm space and um about eight or nine of those years in the nonprofit sector i've been very fortunate to have worked with some of the most impactful non-profits in the country and while most of my experience has been on the technology side i have found that despite taking many organizations live successfully with their crm implementations i've always felt that there was something missing despite finishing projects on time and on budget i realized that time and time and again the technology alone is not going to solve problems um and uh no matter how robust how feature rich or how amazing your software application is if the technology does not have everything else around it and needs to be successful then the implementation will likely fail and what do i mean by everything else around it well it's a number of things it's having clearly defined processes it means having a clear change management plan a well-trained staff the team to support the system ongoing a release management process you name it there's there's many things i can list out here um but uh you know although there's many studies that that are released that say hey this is uh you know 70 of crm implementations fail uh in my experience uh it rarely has to do with the technology itself it usually has to do with everything else around it that makes it successful uh that's one of the reasons why i started one-tenth consulting uh it's to not look at implementations in and of themselves but to really align the people the process and technology all together in order to help your nonprofit achieve their mission and do it in such a way that keeps the your staff in mind and also your end beneficiaries um and we do that through a variety of ways through uh strategy workshops through needs assessments for crm we help with implementation itself either new implementations or fixing your existing one um as well as user adoption and change management so there's there's several ways that we can help but enough of us let's move on to today's topic we're going to talk about grant management and sales first in salesforce uh we'll first talk about you know why it's important to even track it you know why i've chosen to select salesforce for this demo we'll get into the system itself and then talk a little bit about our experiences of what's worked what hasn't worked and you know pitfalls you can avoid and then broadly speaking things to consider as you head into potentially a new implementation and of course time for q a um you're welcome to uh to ask your questions through the chat um and i will periodically check on it um and then um and answer questions throughout um otherwise towards the end i'll open up the lines and we can ask questions then so either way is fine uh so let's continue to move forward so why is it that it's important to track our grant information in the crm many non-profits that i work with especially some of the smaller and medium ones are perfectly fine with their spreadsheets so why is it important to even track it in the crm uh well you know i have a few thoughts on that uh on the one hand there's a lot of crm information to be tracked so you know there's people's there's interactions there's calls there's meetings there's notes the to-do's and and you need a place to track all that historical information in one place that everybody has access to um you know not only the the interactions but also what events a constituent may have participated in or what mailings they've received from us uh the more information we know about the constituent the better and easier it is to establish relationship with them but the reason that this process hasn't always fit well into some of the typical fundraising solutions out there is because the sales cycle is very different than other fundraising it's not very transactional it's not just logging a donation in the system and sending out an acknowledgement the cycle can take months if not years to win a grant in fact it's very much like the sales cycle of many for-profit corporations for large large purchases uh and this is one of the reasons why i chose to demo salesforce because uh for those of you who know salesforce is primarily just that it's a sales tool that manages sales cycles so that cycle is really the bread and butter of what salesforce does um so you know whereas sometimes salesforce gets criticism from the nonprofit community as hey you know they don't have their roots in nonprofits uh they're more for corporations uh i actually think in this case it's it's a real benefit that sales force their their root uh core functionality is built in that sales cycle and it is perfect for grant management but ultimately what we want to do here is make sure that we have that 360 degree view for the constituent i talk to grant writers and development professionals all the time and they say you know every time we write a grant we're starting from scratch you know we've written all this information before we've tracked all this information before but we never know where it is um and so this is a place not only to keep all the information about your relationships in one place but also the history of the grants that you've written the grants that you've won the grants that you've lost and the processes that took you there all of this builds institutional memory and all can be kept in your system to make you more efficient over time so why did i choose to demo salesforce there's other fundraising tools other grant management tools out there um but i did choose salesforce for one it is an innovative platform as many of you are probably familiar with you've seen any of the marketing it's it's a platform that's used for organizations all over the world in any type of sector um but they do have a non-profit specific app that sits on top of the application it's referred to as the non-profit cloud or the nonprofit success pack or the npsp um i might use any of those terms interchangeably and uh so that is one area where it's definitely unique and the grants management application or the feature i should say is part of that app it comes free with the app salesforce is a configurable and customizable system so you know even if you're not a programmer you have the ability to configure and tailor the system to your needs and if you are a programmer you can customize it to do just about anything so in that sense it's a highly customizable platform uh the other thing here is it has the app exchange so it's a app exchange is like a marketplace of various apps that can extend uh or enhance the features that you have in salesforce um so there's all these developers out there who are building apps on the platform similar to like an iphone and the ice uh and the itunes store uh you can basically add these apps to enhance your experience um so there's there could be prospecting tools that you might want to add to your system or a grant distribution that might be you want to add to your system so these are various apps that you can find and add to your system of course you would need to test them all out but it's a very very robust exchange our marketplace of apps the next item here is uh the non-profit cloud is is driven by the community so once you have access to the nonprofit cloud you have access to the power of us hub where nonprofits all over the world are exchanging ideas and best practices and questions and troubleshooting but they're also suggesting ideas on how salesforce can enhance their product and recommendations uh and salesforce does from time to time review that and incorporate some of that feedback into their roadmap so unlike some of the other tools that i work with that has like a dedicated product team that really you know focuses on on advancing the product you know salesforce does take information from the community and incorporate that into their roadmap the last point here is if you are a registered 501c3 salesforce.org will donate 10 licenses um through their power of us program you would just need to apply for it you get the licenses um it's a very generous offer i would say i also put it low on the list i don't think it should be your deciding factor to go with salesforce um i wouldn't call it a cost saving mechanism because you know salesforce is also one of the more complex systems so you know you might have some uh you might need some help loading data you might need some help with some consulting hours or third-party apps um so you know there there are costs involved so it is it is free in the same way as as i say you would get a free puppy it might be free at the time but but it takes some love it takes some care and it takes some maintenance so uh that is a little bit about salesforce nonprofit cloud and why we chose to um to demo that i'm gonna take a quick pause here just to make sure there's no uh questions that i have in the chat looks like i'm okay so we will continue all right so um there's lots of grants management processes out there for non-profits i i you know i just picked one that that i thought uh resembles a little bit about what we're going to talk about but you know they all sort of follow this general process there's this vetting or researching prospecting analysis whatever you want to call it then there's the actual applying it to grants and that is in the pre-award stage there's some level of payment scheduling you can call that an accounting phase so this is sort of the post-award step and then there's the monitoring and reporting um so once you've awarded there's typically some deliverables some reports or some things certain things that you need to follow up on certain dates that are critical and then of course reporting on your your impact in your outcomes um so this is sort of the overall grants management flow that we're going to talk about as we jump into the system so one thing before i demo a couple of caveats or a couple of um disclaimers i should say one is if it's not obvious already i should have mentioned this beginning um this is more designed for non-profit professionals who are applying for and receiving grant money um there are other organizations that actually distribute grants there's non-profits that distribute grants that's really not going to be the focus for this discussion um i have thoughts on it it might be a separate webinar on on grant distribution and other tools that you can use but the um the goal of this particular webinar is more for fundraising professionals non-profit development professionals who are accepting uh grants and applying for grants um also as i demo things uh you'll you'll know if you've seen my webinars before i like to keep the demos as out of the box as possible i'm more of a technologist than i am a sales person so i like to see what i'm going to get not what i'm being sold so the demo that i'm going to show you is is very minimally configured for the purpose of this demo um and uh here's what we're gonna cover we're gonna talk a little about accounts relationships what a grant opportunity looks like how to track activities action plans grant deliverables some basic automate automation you can do uh and then a quick look at reports and dashboards um so this is what we're going to focus on as we jump into the demo let's do that now all right um i'm also making an assumption here that those who've seen this uh they have some familiar familiarity with salesforce so i won't really talk too much about you know what this is and navigation uh so i'm assuming that you have some knowledge of what salesforce looks like but um if you need a little bit more of an overview of that by all means send us an email and we'd be happy to do a free uh overview for you and demo the system for you and so uh what i have here is my uh home page and um you know i have all the key things as a non-profit professional certain things that i want to see you know what are my tasks for today what are some um key things i should be aware of hey some of these grant opportunities haven't had any activity where are my grants in the process right now and any recent items that i've looked at of course this can be configured and customized to meet your needs of the specific things you'd like to see when you log into the system and we're going to start off by looking at an account in the system i'm going to go to the the gates foundation and i'm just going to take you through a little tour of what types of information that we have right now so obviously some basic contact information their foundation my primary contact phone website emails addresses a little bit about who they are their history of giving within our organization so on and so forth but as i scroll down you'll see that there's a few out of the box fields here one is called grant making information sorry one is called fun uh funding focus and the other is just a checkbox to indicate that they are a grant maker because i can have lots of accounts in the system and uh you know i can indicate what area of interest there they are in so obviously this is a configurable box you can put all your values in there that are of use i can enter as many as few of these as i want and i've indicated that here that they are grant maker these are just two fields of course you can configure and add as many fields as you want um you know as you're researching let's say on philanthropy.com or grants.gov if there's certain information that you want to track about this account you can store it uh right here so these are just two very basic fields to get you started and having that grantmaker check box is nice because then i can always create a list view that says give me all my grant makers and i'll just do that really quickly here i'll go to accounts um and then i will create a new list view and um i will say this is just going to be for grantmakers for now i'm going to be the only one who can see it and i'm going to say give me all my accounts where grantmaker equals true and uh save that and those are my three grant makers um so again very simple creating list views any user in the system can do this to create you know very simple or very complex filters um moving along here uh now that i have my accounts i track some basic information or prospecting information another point to call out here is tracking your affiliated contacts so right now i have three people who are attracted who are tied to the gates foundation i have their grants manager their administrator co-founder but yeah i like to have you think a little bit broadly here who are all the people that you might have that you might know of that might be affiliated not necessarily work for but might be affiliated with the gates foundation in some way shape or form you want to make sure you track all those people as you track them in the system you might find hey well you know if i go into mark's record i'll see that he has an affiliation with the gates foundation he may have also attended the same university as me or he may have be he might be a part of the same associations or donate to those other nonprofits that i donate to so this is where the relationship building comes into play so make sure you have all your affiliated contacts track to the gates foundation so you can see where maybe internally you might have some influence so key thing is once you have your organization set up set up all your affiliated contacts both the people who work there as well as people who are affiliated uh once all this is set up you want to create your grant opportunity so for those of you familiar with salesforce um it does use the grants uses the opportunity object and it um it has its own record type so i'm going to say new opportunity here for the gates foundation it's going to give me my list of opportunities i can choose from i'm going to select brent and uh let's say for example here i'm going to call this the twelve thousand dollar fy 19 q2 grant opportunity for the gates foundation um put my primary contact bill and i are on a first name basis here i'm going to put 12 000 and i'm going to say i'm really aggressive we're going to close this by the end of the year and i'm going to link this to a campaign because there might have been some marketing activity that we've done to get to this point i'm going to select my stage so these stages are specific to grants you're not going to find this on the donation or the major giving side and these are a set of standard grant stages i can use of course i can configure this to whatever is specific to my organization i'm going to call this prospecting it defaults to probability it says our probability our confidence level is about 10 right now as i change the stages you'll see it will increase again i can change that mapping if i want to depending on the stages that i create now as i scroll down i can fill out as much grant information as i want so my requested amount is here i can enter the website because it's not always the standard company website that has all the grant details if there's a contract number if there's a specific program areas that are funding that they're willing to fund for for this event for this grant um contracting i can track as much as i want to so again you can extend this to add more fields about specific things you want to track about this individual grant for now i'm just going to keep it simple for twelve thousand dollars uh i'm going to call this unrestricted very optimistic here and i'm going to save the grant record so there's a lot of information you can fill out but uh you know very little information you have to fill out in order to save it so here's what the grant opportunity looks like and you can see the various stages you can see i'm currently at the prospecting stage uh and we've filled out some basic information um i did talk to you about the stages um now that i have this set up i can also create some activities so let's say i'm going to uh i'm gonna go to my activity tab here i'm gonna create a task for myself to do an intro call with bill um i'm also going to i'm going to schedule that for tomorrow um i can you know send a follow-up letter of some sort to remind myself to send a follow-up letter after that call cool there and we'll schedule that for monday all set of bill and so i can again just create and you can see all my next steps are created here all my calls meetings notes to do's all the history will appear here and all the next steps will appear here but there are some organizations that say you know for our grants process we have a very specific process we want all our people to follow it's a tried and true method and we want everybody to follow it um and so rather than having to create these one-off tasks and meetings every single time you create a grant you can use what's called an engagement plan this is standard out of the box salesforce functionality i'm going to go to engagement plans right here i'm going to say new and i've actually created a template ahead of time which took me about five minutes uh called and i created a template called prospecting new grant opportunity and if i save this it's going to automatically create a series of activities i'm just going to refresh that yep there you go here let me go back to where i was and i'll go back to the activity tab and it automatically creates a series of activities that i need to follow up on um as a as a fundraising professional so i have my intro call i have my research i have a follow-up these are actually the two that i created individually the rest of these came from the engagement plan i draft internal research summary report i schedule internal review meeting and you can see that i can set the intervals however i like and of course all these do all this does is it drops these activities onto your opportunity i can edit each one of these uh you know sign it to a different person change the dates change the details but this is just a quick way to get all your engagement plan activities uh onto your opportunity at once so those are how you would use engagement plan uh within your opportunity to manage your grants uh so we talked about stages engagement plans activities um let's say you get to the point where you want to submit your letter of intent i can mark that as the current stage you can see that it changes it here if i go to the details you'll see it changes the stage and increases my probability to close um and let's say i have a physical document the actual letter of intent that i want to upload to the doc to the record i can surely do that i'm going to just select add files i have the sample letter of intent letter that i that i can upload for my hard drive and there it is of course i can put several documents here again probably something i should have mentioned if this uh instance of salesforce looks different than what you have um you know it's probably because this is the lightning edition lightning version so last couple years um salesforce has been encouraging folks to get on the lightning version um and i i bring that up now only because files looks a little different than in the classic version so um if you if if my sales force looks different than yours it's most likely because it's been upgraded to lightning and we encourage everybody to um to move to lightning as quick as possible because you can take advantage of a lot more functionality that salesforce has to offer all right um so so that was the the last thing i wanted to show there with attachments um the the last couple pieces about grant management is scheduling payments and then deliverables let's talk about deliverables first so i have all these activities these calls these meetings notes to do to do's these are all the interactions but i don't want to lose the the specific deliverables that are due as part of this grant so um what we have here is this object here called deliverables and i can say that um you know i have a letter of intent is actually a very good example of a deliverable so this is the letter intent due it is um type lli and i can indicate specifically when it's do it's on the first and then i can indicate when it's actually closed any details i want about the requirements so this allows you to separate where the key deliverables are for the grant without getting it mixed in with all the calls and meetings and notes and that sort of thing um what i also like about this and i've seen other organizations do this they don't just use deliverables for the pre-award stages they actually use it for the post-award stages too so let's say i have a quarterly report that i need to submit as part of the grant requirements and i can call this interim reports and um you know indicate my due date and so obviously now that this is a custom object i can run review views on it i can do reports on it i can have dashboards on it so uh you can track all your deliverables both both for pre-award as well as post award that's a feature i i personally like very much and then the last part of it is scheduling the payments piece of it so let's say you get to this point you're in the loi stage you submit let's let's move to application submitted and um you're at a point where you're starting to talk about how these payments would be paid out so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the payments uh list right here related list i'm going to say schedule payments and um i it's twelve thousand dollars and let's say that they are going to give me 12 payments monthly so i'm not going to change anything there i of course can change it if i want to if there's a different arrangement um and it's going to come in as checks and i'm going to say calculate payments what it does is it gives me a payment schedule and nothing has been paid so far and it just evenly distributes it 1000 each and you know before i actually say create them i can change anything i want here so let's say up front they say you know what we're not going to be able to do those first three months of payments um you know just uh add those that three thousand dollars to um to the the march payment um so if you have a customized payment schedule you can adjust all that here the dates the amount so on and so forth um and then say create payments before i say create payments i'm going to indicate that we got one payment today that's not realistic before we've awarded it i just wanted to show you uh how that would look so the payments are created and if i highlight the payment section here you'll see that the first one is paid it has the payment date and then all the unpaid ones associated with it and of course if i get to a point where and and i can still on an individual basis update any of these payments if i need to make changes again change the date change the amounts write off specific ones or i can write off all the payments if i select the write-off payments right here it will change all these unpaids to cancels so rather than having to go one by one you could write them off all at once if you had to for some reason um so that's how you schedule payments now i will just sort of throw out there that that's about all you do with payments uh there's this is not like a full uh general ledger accounting system so um this is kind of as far as salesforce takes it um you can manually update that a payment has been made but this is by no means an accounting system you'll probably need a separate accounting system um to reconcile your books for your end and that sort of thing and that's surely integrations that we've seen and worked on um so uh that is the grant uh opportunity um the grant module uh and um one thing just that i think is is nice is that when you go to back to the um the opportunity it will show you when the next deliverable date is due so it's going to kind of take a look at any deliverables that you associate with this grant and call out when the next date is all right um and that really wraps up most of the things i wanted to cover we'll just briefly talk about process builder and reports and dashboards but i'm just going to pause for a second here to see if there are any questions in the chat i do not see any so that's good hopefully this is all making sense um let's talk about process builders so this is a very very basic automation that i created um uh you know one thing that's very important here is communicating um because especially since grant's life cycles can take a very long time you want to make sure that you are communicating with everybody on the team i always recommend chatter so anybody who is in any way affiliated with this uh with this grant opportunity is going to want to follow this record and so by selecting follow here um and they'll also see all the chatter associated with it there are some things that are automated in the chatter um so in this case it shows when there's a stage change i can also indicate here hey team we're very close to closing this very close to winning this grant and i can do all kinds of things you know emojis images all kinds of things i've seen people put in this it's basically a social media center um but for this particular record so you can really tag anything that you want and anybody who's following the record will either get their email or they'll get a daily digest of all the chatter associated with the records that they're following um but one thing i thought i would add here is when i win the when the grant is won i want like a i have to make sure that i send out a chatter because i want everybody to be aware that we won the the gift uh we won the grant so rather than having to enter it every time i created a process builder or an automation that automatically posts a chatter when we win so let's say here i set this to close i say select close stage and it's it's awarded so we win it and it's saved and i'm just going to refresh this for a second and i go to chatter there we go you will see that there is this um you will see that there is just now a uh chatter has been added saying congratulations team we've just been awarded a grant to 12 000 thanks for all your hard work so i didn't enter that but it just automatically showed up so i'll show you how i did that um and so this is sort of borderline i'd still say that a non-developer can do this i'm not a developer but this is probably the far end of what you want to do unless you are our developer so i'm going to go into the setup here of course you would need admin rights to be able to do this i'm going to go to process builder and i set up a very simple process it took me about you know five ten minutes um i called it post grant wind chatter and very simple i'll just kind of walk you through it um i first said that the object i'm working with is opportunity uh this action is gonna fire only when a record is created or edited so not just when it's created and then i set this up saying once the stage hits awarded so once this condition is meant for the opportunity stage name equals awarded then what are we going to do we're going to post the chatter and the posted chatter is going to be congratulations team uh we've just been awarded this grant and i've put the amount uh it's this is a merge field so i can so whatever the amount is it's going to drop in there thanks for all your hard work i indicated that i wanted this to go to this record post the chat of this record as opposed to some like brands management group or something but i could choose a group if i wanted to and that's it so a very simple you know two-step process um check to see if the stage is awarded if so post this message to chatter with this variable and that's it um and so this is just an example of a very simple automation that you could do to uh streamline your process and make things a little bit more efficient all right um so that is uh yeah the last thing is reports i'm not going to go too far into reports because i feel like uh you know there's there's so many things available for report writing so it's probably not too too interesting but if i just search for grant here under reports oh i'm sorry i went the wrong place under all reports and i just searched for grant you'll see these are out of the box reports that we have so anything from my pipeline planning to see what grants came in this year organizations total grants received so these are out of the box reports that you will see specific to grants um another one that i often use and i see some of you know a lot of admins typically use is expected payments that are overdue um these are just expected payments in general um in general these are all grant record types but you know it could potentially have other record types in there in which case i would just create a quick filter and only use grant but in this case it only has grant opportunities in here so plenty of opportunities there with reports that are out of the box um that usually they're typically typically sufficient um there are also some dashboards that are available specifically for grant purposes let me show you one or two of those yes this is the one the npsp grants management dashboard a very simple dashboard that uh gives you a few key key performance indicators to look at um so using the close date you know what is the amount by close date you have your gauge right here um grant planning what stages are they in total grants receive i haven't won any yet so not not great data here not to support this um but just know that i have this ability to um uh to use this uh to use this there we go i just refreshed it so it showed some updated information so you can see the gauge uh you know based on what our goal is our goal is seventy five thousand dollars here's where we're at um and um you know grants received we just awarded that grades foundation one so on and so forth so uh just an example of one of the dashboards that you can create and of course you can subscribe to it get you know daily updates of this uh of this dashboard or have it emailed to you so that concludes what i was hoping to show with the demo let me again take a quick look to see if there's any questions in the chat it doesn't look like it so i'll cover the other items in my presentation here we'll probably wrap this up a little early so one thing i i often get um is uh you know you've implemented this grants functionality this module for other people you know both with salesforce as well as as well as other apps you know what worked you know what worked what didn't work how can we avoid some of the mistakes others have made well here you go here it is so first is i recommend having a very clear process um lots of times i work with organizations who do not use any particular centralized platform and they're using their spreadsheets they're using their google docs they're all using their own things and then we say okay tomorrow you're going to start using salesforce and it's a complete mess because everybody's using it differently so um as simple as it sounds i recommend starting with a very clear process and if you don't have one that's okay start with what salesforce offers out of the box there's some best practices already baked in so if you're okay with it start with the one they have there with the prospecting loi submitted so on and so forth um so but having a clear process before you get folks in the system is critical second thing is use your terminology if you don't use a letter of intent or you don't call it awarded or you use some other terminology salesforce is highly configurable so change it to what your terminology is it's going to make it a lot more clear it's going to avoid mistakes and it's going to help user adoption over time if people see language that they're familiar with third is track everything and i know this is especially tough for people working with grants because you know why does this one phone call really matter when you know this grant is not really going to get paid out for two years well it does matter um you know all those calls all those meetings all those to-do's all those interactions uh really demonstrate your relationship with that organization over time um so all that can come in handy and and really in the most unpredictable ways ways when you have conversations with a grant maker so track everything in the system and again for the reasons that we talked about earlier you want to make sure that you have institutional memory institutional history um you're not reinventing the wheel every time it's important to track everything um some of the more successful organizations have this you know mantra if it's not lauded in salesforce it didn't happen um so that's uh something i always think is very helpful and that leads right into the executive buy-in um if your you know development uh director says oh that's nice i'm glad you're using salesforce now bring me a spreadsheet of all your grant opportunities uh you know chances are your implementation is not going to get very far and you've probably wasted a lot of money um so organizations that are successful are ones who run their grant meetings through salesforce um or their crm tool they say okay you know it's time for our one-on-one let's bring up your dashboard and see where your grant opportunities are at so executives and leaders who use the system to measure and report on uh they're the ones who get the most user adoption and the most out of the system the fifth thing is uh define a communication process to tie back checks to grants i get this question all the time well you know i set this grant up in 2015 the actual check came in in 2018 uh how do i loop it right back to the original grant um you know there's no silver bullet to that there is there's no easy way i've seen some organizations build some complex algorithms to say okay if the gift is for this amount and it's for this company and with this contact then assume it's part of this grant and automatically associate with it but moreover i'd say that it tends to be a bit of a manual process when that check comes in especially large checks you're going to want to check the organization see if there's an open payment due and manually tie it back and and that really requires a lot of communication it requires chatter hey you know i just received this gift is this tied to any open grants um so that communication process is really key because you really can't you know which is number six here tracking and measuring your results you can't really track the the roi on your uh grant efforts uh if you are not tying those dollars back to the grants so it's very important to have a good communication plan with your with your entire development team um to socialize those checks when they do come in and make sure they're tied to the appropriate grant uh and that allows you to do number six here is tracking and measuring your results the the seventh here is tracking tracking and measuring your process and this is something that nonprofits often forget it's like you know sometimes you the grant is awarded and you just kind of move on to the next one but you know ask yourself what are those things that we did you know if we look at our last five successful grants what were the steps what were the meetings what were the notes what were the to-do's what was the frequency what was the cadence uh what was the actual mailings that we sent out what sort of combination of email versus face-to-face versus letters versus phone call what are those what's the process that worked because perhaps that's something that we can um incorporate in our overall process and as we bring on new fundraising professionals that is the process that we encourage them to follow so having all this tracked in the system allows you not only to track results and dollars but also the results of your process and identify what's working um so those are some suggestions on what's worked um so here are some other broader things to consider uh if you're considering either a new implementation of a grants management software or a sales force or you know you want to sort of clean up what you have the first thing i would do is revisit your grant management strategy again make sure the stages make sense the action plans or the engagement plans under each engagement under each step make sense and if not now is a good time to change it before you throw it into a new system also define the rules of engagement so if you're an organization that manages all your grants in a separate application or in spreadsheets and now you're you're in the centralized platform and other people are looking at your data you want to make sure that you have a good communication plan on you know when it's okay for them to speak to someone else to speak to a prospect of yours and when it's not so these rules of engagement are very important rather than just siloing data and saying i don't want anybody to see my data it's good that everybody can see the data but just have clear rules as to when it's okay and not okay to speak to any of my prospects you also want to invest some time and thinking about your business processes so if your grant management cycle is not working and you have a new system and and you just sort of throw that not working system into a new system you're probably going to have the same results so it's always a good idea to rethink your business processes document the current document where you want to go and that's what you end up building into the system uh i would strongly invest in data cleansing and duty duplication at this point of the project so before you really go ahead first into a new system or a revised system you want to invest some effort in cleaning up your data um you know obviously if uh you want to build relationships with your constituent and if there's five records in the system for one person nobody knows who's the right one um you're not really getting a clear view of who that constituent is and how they've engaged with you and when people see data they can't trust they tend not to use the system um if you're starting up with a new implementation or project here identify all the key metrics and reports that you want to see so you know i want to know on a daily basis x i want to go on a monthly basis why you know have all those things ready so you know when you're looking at demos or you're talking to your consultant about what you want to do you know don't let them tell you what what you should do if there's already things you know you need so bring those up even bring those up in sales demos and say these are the metrics i want to see how does this system present this uh especially when it comes to implementations number five identify your must-haves for day one so if you have some you know quirky accounting process every time a grant comes in and the system needs to account for it make sure that information is is exposed as early as possible uh last thing you want is is uh you know you can't process a donation on the day that it's received um so any sort of must-haves or critical things needed for day one make sure that's known early on um as always i recommend a cons a phased approach so let's say you want to build integrations uh with prospecting software you want to build integrations with you know grant distribution software all good stuff i wouldn't do it in phase one i i recommend the crawl walk run approach where you basically just get the platform up and running you migrate some data uh get people comfortable with the system then let's talk about enhancing the system then let's talk about adding you know more fields let's talk about adding more reports let's add a dashboard then let's build an integration so you know doing all that at once it can be very costly and end up not being what exactly you really need so a phased approach really helps uncover that and help you make some smart decisions number seven here is is to have a post go live plan ready so you know you got all these new fundraising professionals in your system they're using the grant management functions and they have all these suggestions all these great ideas and enhancements uh you need to be prepared to to triage those and troubleshoot those and prioritize those and get them in a subsequent release um so the systems that are most successful and the implementations that are most successful are when people see that they they have a living breathing system it's something that's evolving with their organization it's not just a one and done and then you know a few years we'll do phase two uh they want to see this system that is as constantly evolving to their to your business so um having a post go live plan ready having a regular release schedule is critical and the running theme through all these is is really investing time in change management moving from a spreadsheet or a different a grants management application to a centralized crm platform is a huge shift uh bigger than it might seem so rather than just cutting things over overnight and saying okay you know starting tomorrow you're going to use salesforce it's really important to engage users day one you know even from the planning to the implementation to the testing to the training really have folks engaged with the system as much as possible using the system touching and feeling it understanding what's going to change and more importantly understanding what's not going to change your calendaring is going to stay the same your email is going to stay the same this is really just a way to manage your grants better so all these things are our key to remember for change management so that when when go live comes around uh nobody's really surprised with what they're gonna get so those are some suggestions uh things to consider and for many organizations this is easy you know this is you have changed man professionals you have training professionals you have admins you have developers in-house project managers uh and so you know addressing all these things in the last couple slides is very straightforward but for many nonprofits i work with it's not it's not that straightforward and you don't have all the resources in-house that can help you manage this um there are consultants that can help you and so i would choose wisely you really want to make sure that you have a trusted advisor uh and not someone who's just going to be stuck there forever you want somebody who's gonna be there to help you only to the extent that you need um nothing more nothing less and those are some of the things that we do at one tenth we help everyone from you know business process mapping to project management fundraising strategy as i mentioned to guiding you or doing the implementation itself change management and for some organizations we stay on as the system administrators if you don't have one in-house so um you know we do encourage you to find a consultant that you've worked with or somebody you know has worked with someone who you can really trust to guide you throughout the process and of course here at one tenth we're we're happy to help um and so i want to end this the same place where i started with gratitude i thank you very much for your time i'm gonna take one last look at the chat um to see if anybody has any remaining questions and i don't see any so i will uh so i will wrap things up again thank you so much and i encourage you to please stay in touch with us uh follow check out our website follow us on twitter um facebook linkedin you name it send us an email if you have some questions or if you'd like to have just a no pressure consultation um you know talk about your unique situation your nonprofit and where you need a little guidance we're happy to chat through any of that um we also have a pretty active on our blog um so i would check that out as well on our website and um you know even if you're not ready to make a move for you know six months a year uh definitely check out our blog check out our um uh social media sites because we like to post uh insights uh pretty regularly so these are things that might help you as you're making decisions or or if you're thinking of making a change or how to get the most out of your crm with that i thank you again very much appreciate your time and have a great holiday week here and happy new year