Client: SitStayRead

Dogs Improve Reading Skills

SitStayRead’s trained dog and human volunteers are improving the reading and writing skills of young students across Chicago. But their out-of-date database was impeding their work.

Services

CRM Strategy & Implementation

The Challenge

If you were a 7-year-old struggling with reading, who would you rather read out loud to: your teacher or a cute, calm, canine listener who doesn’t judge? Definitely the dog!

SitStayRead works to close the literacy gap by providing trained teams of human and dog volunteers to work with elementary students in Chicago Public Schools.

Like many regional nonprofits, SitStayRead started small and is growing to meet the greater demand. But the legacy databases that held the information around their participating schools, educators, students, donors and volunteers (people and dogs) was created early in their history by someone who had subsequently left – leaving no real documentation for what was created. The small and mighty team staffing the nonprofit had since defaulted to spreadsheets and paper documents to manage both programs and development.

With a limited team, budget and time, how could they transition to a system that would let them automate more and better support their current work plus support future growth?

The Solution

Initially, the focus was on:

Extracting the data from their current locations (both the old databases and the spreadsheets);
Cleaning, deduping and organizing the data;
Instituting a consistent data structure with ongoing data governance rules; and,
Identifying a CRM (a Customer or Constituent Relationship Management) system that would support their goals – and within their budget.

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) with Volunteers for Salesforce was configured and implemented to reflect their new data structures, including creating dedicated records for every volunteer including their onboarding process and hours worked. Donors and their gifts were also tracked and managed. Having a single Contact record with at-a-glance view of all that person’s engagement as a donor, a volunteer – or both – enabled the SitStayRead team to better manage their relationships with supporters.

Subsequently, a second phase project was implemented to further integrate the CRM-centered system and automate more manual processes. Additional integration of their QuickBase accounting system with their event management software and Salesforce reduced time to close the month/quarter/year. Using Formstack (with a native integration mapped to Salesforce), created a questionnaire to simplify the collection of each volunteer’s participation requirements for the upcoming school term.

As with every project, knowledge transfer (including training recordings) were provided to ensure they had resources for future support of their own integrated system and processes.

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