Transitioning to Salesforce: One Piece at a Time

Millikin University’s Advancement Department is part of a 100-year-old private university in the Higher Education market. Millikin needed to transition well-rooted legacy processes from Ellucian Banner to Salesforce.  The small Millikin team needed to manage their workload while continuing their aggressive fundraising efforts. To minimize disruptions and maintain current fundraising efforts, the transition from Banner needed to be managed over at least two-years.  The Millikin fundraising team, however, wanted to take advantage of the powerful Salesforce CRM tools now.

The Challenge

Millikin needed to transition its well-rooted legacy processes to Salesforce but budget and workload limitations made a full system transition impossible.

The transition needed to minimally impact current fundraising efforts and be compatible with data sources from around campus. This meant that during the decoupling phase – the fundraising team would need to be able to use the Salesforce CRM tools and functionality to ensure their success.

Millikin operates an ambitiously broad set of academic programs with a lean budget and their IT team relies on a demanding set of integrations & automations interconnecting different systems on campus. This meant any solution needed to include established conventions and standards and be compatible with tools already in place.

Any implemented solutions needed to support a high degree of automation to maintain service levels without increasing staff.

The Solution

In order to manage the workload the migration of data was staged over a two to three-year period, divided into functional, business-process oriented groups.

To minimize impact on current fundraising efforts, Sleek Consulting devised a modular implementation approach wherein particular business processes were moved from the legacy system to Salesforce and taken live in short implementation cycles mimicking the Agile development framework.

To enable migrated business processes to utilize the new database without taxing the IT team’s limited resources with conversion and synchronization tasks, Sleek Consulting developed an automated, on-going migration stream utilizing currently available resources to keep the Salesforce database in sync and up-to-date with gift, pledge, address, relationship, and education data still being entered in the legacy system.

Aside from utilizing data entry automations and workflows in Salesforce, Millikin also implemented Pardot to enable their communications team to automate legacy processes.

The Results

Migration of individual business processes were successful. Automation began with communications, then bio, prospect management, prospect research, events, engagement, etc. until the final component gift processing was complete.

Due to the short implementation sprints the modular implementation strategy successfully minimized the impact on current fundraising efforts.

The initial business processes were migrated to Salesforce and an initial set of data was moved into the new system. Then automation was turned on. A set of automated routines to sync the databases enabled the business process to function properly while also freeing IT to begin working on the next business process.

The Millikin communication team successfully implemented Pardot and migrated their communication efforts from their legacy system.

Conclusion

We want to congratulate Amy Brilley, Mandi Podeschi, and the entire Millikin 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 look forward to continuing to work with Amy and the Millikin team as they embrace 21st Century fundraising. If you are interested in supporting Millikin or learning more about their projects, please check out their website.

If you are interested in more information about Implementing Salesforce at your own organization check out our  Advancement Quick Start Suites.