Introduction

Nancy and her team took this as an opportunity to reassess the tools they had and compare them with the other industry tools out there. They conducted a study to identify the CRM that would give them the best ROI. QSS™ for Salesforce emerged as a clear winner. Salesforce was a platform Nancy was familiar with and QSS™ promised a single platform that could unify their Advancement business processes. The decision was made to transition, marking the beginning of an exciting transformation. 

Sharp Deadline? QSS™ to the Rescue

The plan to implement Salesforce had a major caveat: access to Raiser’s Edge was being cut off imminently, so the project needed to move quickly. BCC turned to Sleek’s Quick Start Suites (QSS™), which with its out-of-the-box configurations, flexible training and workshops, automations, and ready-to-use reports and dashboards, provided exactly the leg up the Brookdale team needed. QSS™ leverages industry best practices from more than 300 years of combined Advancement experience providing tons of new metrics for easy reporting and automation to easily improve ROI. Personalizing QSS™ with Brookdale’s unique business rules was fast and painless. 

Nancy remembers thinking, “We’re going to blow things up. We’re going to build new planes. We have to fly it while we’re building it, and we have to kind of think about what it is that we want to get out of it.” With the planned go-live date drawing near, Nancy had to shift focus from end-user training to making sure all business processes would be covered by Salesforce when access to Raiser’s Edge ended. Even with her rockstar assistant, Margaret, quickly proving herself as a Salesforce power user (Margaret joined BCC, learned Raiser’s Edge, then learned Salesforce all in the same year), the BCC team needed a few extra sets of hands. QSS™ is designed to be flexible in this way.

System implementations take a lot of work, and what makes them even more difficult is that you can’t just pause your regular business processes while you focus on learning and personalizing Salesforce—it’s like you have two jobs. Our Salesforce-certified business analysts train and empower your team. But they’re also ready to jump in as members of your team, utilizing their own experience working in Advancement to put out fires and make sure business keeps moving.

From Raw Data to Reports to Board Presentations

BCC has the power to create meaningful summaries of their data (or stories) that lead to actionable insights. Salesforce’s straightforward yet flexible Lightning Reports and easy-to-digest dashboards make that possible, and the dozens of ready-to-use reports and dashboards that come standard with each QSS™ package serve as a strong jumping-off point. But Brookdale’s team are the ones who made it happen. They know their data better than anyone else and these tools really let them represent it in ways they couldn’t before. 

QSS™ for Salesforce Supports Friendraisers: BCC’s Go-Live in Retrospect

When asked about BCC’s advancement teams’ mission, Nancy shared some wisdom that anyone who’s worked in Advancement can relate to: 

“When we created the advancement division, I said, okay, before we do anything, we need to figure out what our mission statement is. Even though we’re a division within the college, the college has its own mission statement, we need to understand what it is that we need to be doing. I can say what people would normally say “philanthropic support and engaging alumni”, but the bottom line is, this is what we’re here for. It’s relationship building. I like to call it friends and fundraising.”

Salesforce supports relationship-building beyond mere gift entry and year-end totals (of course it does those things, too). It lets you use your data to create that 360-degree view of your constituents. The way the system lets you manage tens of thousands of relationships in way that is still personal aligns well with Nancy’s and the advancement team’s vision. Looking back on the implementation project, Nancy emphasized, “We highly, highly recommend [QSS™ for Salesforce] to anyone in higher ed thinking of going this route.” The journey from an old-school CRM to Salesforce, propelled and enhanced by Sleek’s QSS™, positioned the BCC team to do what they do best: make friends and raise funds. Go, Brookdale!