Going Live During The Pandemic – UCI Goes Live Remotely With The  Salesforce™ Platform

 The University of California, Irvine’s Advancement Department is part of a large public research university in the Higher Education market. At the tail end of their 18-month implementation, UCI was faced with delaying their implementation of Salesforce with Affinaquest and the threat of decreased productivity for an unspecified amount of time due to wide-spread closures during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic.

Sleek Consulting served as UCI’s implementation partner for the project and wanted to share their success in a complex situation.

The Challenge

The UCI implementation team was required to onboard more than 200 staff members as well as provide support and training to a distributed workforce who were all working from remote locations. They were transitioning their Advancement and Alumni Relations office from Ellucian Advance to Salesforce with Affinaquest. Their office required a solution that would support complex integrations with many external data sources.

Additionally, UCI required a solution that would allow them to manage a large remote workforce. Specifically, they required the ability to manage and distribute communications to users, onboard & train users, and provide support for users experiencing technical difficulties.

The Solution

The Salesforce platform enabled UCI to give their employees access to all the data they needed to effectively complete their jobs while away from campus. Having an integrated single-source data stream simplified the workflow and allowed UCI to quickly make an agile transition to a fully remote office. This was made possible by the flexibility of the Salesforce platform to support custom integrations from a wide variety of key external data sources including event management, digital fundraising, accounting, and more.

 To help their users succeed in a remote environment, UCI employed Cases and Quip to manage their internal communications ranging from implementation specifics to onboarding and help documentation.

The Results

UCI was able to successfully deploy a highly integrated and flexible CRM solution based on Salesforce, Affinaquest, and many other Salesforce apps.

UCI was able to successfully integrate their vital external data sources, including online transactions, lead generation, event management, and more.

As of 04/7/2020, 230 users were successfully onboarded and enabled to work remotely preventing losses in productivity.

Conclusion

We want to congratulate Brian Hervey, Ashish Regmi, Osvaldo Gomez, and the entire UCI Advancement Team on going live with Salesforce and Affinaquest!  Going live is a tremendous achievement. 

Sleek Consulting is honored to work with such an innovative team! Your approach to building system processes and systems integrations is truly exciting.

We’ve been managing Advancement implementations since the 1990s, and this is the first implementation to GO LIVE remotely. The UCI implementation team gracefully navigated this unprecedented situation and moved their 200+ users into Salesforce while working from home.

We look forward to continuing to work with Ashish and the entire UCI team as they embrace 21st Century fundraising. If you are interested in supporting UCI or learning more about their projects, please check out their Brilliant Future Campaign.

If you are interested in more information about Implementing Salesforce at your own organization check out our Salesforce Information Page.