My Story: Ad Council and Salesforce.com

Spreadsheets Spreadsheets Spreadsheets

The Ad Council of Rochester advances the work of social service and cultural organizations by providing marketing communications guidance and services. They partner with businesses, volunteers and nonprofits to achieve a positive community impact through a variety of educational and other programs. Managing all of their business contacts and volunteer information is no easy task.

The old system they had to manage this data was difficult to use and overcomplicated--they referred to it as a "Roladex" since it really only held basic contact fields. They knew they were not using the system to full capacity, but it was not user friendly or intuitive. Simple changes in outbound emails (such as bolding a word) for example would take upwards of 10 minutes.

As a result, the staff at the Ad Council often used spreadsheets for the various marketing and communication efforts they did throughout the year. For example, there would be a separate spreadsheet for events, donors, grants, volunteers, and A/R. These spreadsheets might then be accompanied by an Access Database since, in the case of a new event, it made it easier for Ad Council staff to duplicate an existing Access file and remove/replace data. Without realizing it, this additional busy work became the norm. An unplanned, unintended distraction from the Ad Council mission. And while this patchwork approach worked when the organization was smaller, it certainly wasn't scalable. Adrienne Cavallaro, Program Manager for Ad Council acknowledged, "Knowing what little I knew then, I couldn't even imagine a workable solution existed."

The Move to SalesForce.com

Perhaps one of the most pronounced changes made when the Ad Council moved to SalesForce.com was invoicing. In addition to using a single system to manage all of their constituent types (donors, volunteers, etc), events and processes, the Ad Council was able to replace sending several hundred custom invoices a year to a single, streamlined invoicing process. Today, SalesForce.com's Orders module makes it easy to auto-generate invoices on demand. With the ability to customize invoices, Ad Council can even send an invoice for donated services showing $0 in order to communicate the value the nonprofit organization (npo) received from the donation of marketing services. They were also able to include a reminder right on the invoice so the npo could be sure to send a thank you note to the marketing communications firm that donated its time and talent. Although this seems like a small thing, in the past, such simple reminders had to be done manually and many times. SalesForce made it easy for the Ad Council to close the loop on this process, allowing NPOs to acknowledge how much they appreciated funders, donors and volunteers.

Even better was the "workflow" established around these Thank You notes. (A workflow is a way to make SalesForce make something happen when a specific trigger occurs, e.g. sending a reminder email to the NPO contact that contains the contact info for donor, volunteer, and/or funder). One such workflow was created so that when any "order" (an "order" in SalesForce does not need to be a physical product) was placed within a certain Ad Council department, SalesForce would automatically send an email to the President & CEO as well as the corresponding Program Manager. This used to be a word of mouth effort that was often hit or miss. Now that all services are tracked in SalesForce, Adrienne can run a report to determine what services were provided to whom, by whom, when, what is outstanding balance exists and more. Adrienne lauds, "Donors are our bread and butter. They absolutely should get a Thank You note. And now we finally have a way to ensure this small, but significant gesture takes place." This is just one example of how a manual process became automated with SalesForce.com.

Since SalesForce allows the Ad Council to track in-kind donations now their accountant can easily track and record the real value of such donations. Anyone with the authorized security can run a report on the value of in-kind donations and even see which orders (i.e. engagements) are still awaiting confirmation from the marketing services donor as the the monetary value of the services provided. Today, Adrienne is able to create a new email template in SF on her own and make it so that a reminder email is automatically sent to any donors who have yet to provide the in-kind donation value to Ad Council. This process used to involve databases, spreadsheets, forms, envelopes and stamps. Although it's early, it appears that the new system already saves 20% off the time in normally took. In addition, Ad Council can now track this information in real time, running reports on all their statistics for the year (including grants and member solicitations) in approximately 33% less time than it used to take.

As NimbleUser automated more processes like these, the Ad Council found themselves asking, "Can it do this...?" a lot. During this time, Adrienne also had to train a new employee on their processes. With SalesForce, she said it is easier to transfer knowledge because the framework is so intuitive. Even the processes themselves are stored in SalesForce. Adrienne has become quite the guru of writing her own SalesForce reports to get what she needs when and how she needs it. She exuberantly claims , "Almost anything you think you need a report for you can get... versus answering a question by piecing together three different pieces of information from three different databases."

Todd Butler, President and CEO of the Ad Council stated "NimbleUser brought game-changing value to the SalesForce product. Without NimbleUser we would not have had such a positive experience." He believes that SalesForce provided three things to the Ad Council: efficiency, accuracy and confidence in their data. Todd mentioned that he once thought SalesForce was just a sales tool and didn't realize that with some configuration help from NimbleUser SalesForce can understand the sometimes complicated and unique needs of nonprofit organizations. He also commented, "NimbleUser seems like a company that is passionate about what they do and make things enjoyable for the client as well as themselves. They are good people doing good things. They really do want to help non-profit organizations work better."