The Platform That Grows With You: How ImagineCRM Supported Barr Foundations'​ Growth

Client Name: Barr Foundation
Services Offered: Salesforce Migration, Implementation and Community Portals

Project Background

In 2016 Barr Foundation, a Boston-based nonprofit, implemented Salesforce to track interactions with donors and grantees. At the time, Salesforce’s Foundation Connect was the perfect tool to manage donations and contacts. Years later, additional growth and new processes prompted leaders at the Barr Foundation to update Salesforce to access new features and functionality that would enhance their ability to be effective stewards and catalysts for change.

Barr Foundation began by hiring a Salesforce administrator to be an internal Salesforce evangelist and to find an experienced partner to bring their vision to life. After much research and careful consideration, Barr Foundation selected ImagineCRM.

What They Needed

  • A complete migration to a new Salesforce instance

  • New and improved stakeholder portals

  • Third-party integrations and enhancements

What We Did For Them

The team at ImagineCRM began by diving deep into operations at Barr Foundation to understand the ins and outs of existing processes and how to configure their new instance of Salesforce to foster ease and efficiency for users. Once they clearly understood the current state and desired future state, the ImagineCRM team chartered a plan to guide their work. Rather than tackling all the tasks simultaneously, they divided the work into three phases:

Records Clean-Up & Process Validation

Before updating Barr Foundation’s existing instance of Salesforce, the team at ImagineCRM wanted to ensure that any data they would migrate would be accurate, relevant, and stored in a way that would line up with simplified processes and improved reporting practices. To determine which records and processes would work, ImagineCRM's team completed a comprehensive audit of the current system.

Create Custom Portals

Once the data was validated and prepared for the new system, ImagineCRM moved on to creating custom portals for each of Barr Foundation’s constituents. In addition to crafting individual portals for donors and grant recipients, Barr Foundation’s main stakeholders, ImagineCRM also built a self-service portal for employees to report their charitable giving and personal involvement with other nonprofits.

Migrate Integrations

Another critical action during the project’s second phase was migrating existing integrations to the updated system including: Spring CM, DocuSign, and Sage Intact. While this may seem simple, it is an often-overlooked process that has important implications for how nonprofits work. Integrations involve complex mapping, permissions tracking, and a host of other steps that make seemingly simple processes work.

Results

“I have nothing but good things to say about ImagineCRM, they’ve been incredible partners–they’ve been innovative in the way that they think of solutions to problems we bring up and understanding them in demonstrating how we’ve done it in the past and how we want to do it in the future…which is amazing, I couldn’t have asked for a better team.”

—Christi Craig, Senior Manager of Grants Management & Business Systems at Barr Foundation

Close examination of Barr Foundation’s original system revealed several opportunities to consolidate records, eliminate duplicate files and make changes that would foster improved functionality. One such change included decoupling grants from contracts in Salesforce. Rather than keeping both elements as a single Object, ImagineCRM created separate Objects for both elements making it easier to access information and make changes when needed.

Furthermore, the newly created portals were able to speak directly to the needs of each audience, making interactions simple, easy, and quick. These improvements were helpful to Christ Craig, the Senior Manager of Grants Management & Business Systems at the Barr Foundation. She said, “We are changing the type of grants that we give and how we ask grantees to report back. We do not just need them to fill in cookie-cutter questions anymore like we used to.” Craig continued by explaining how the updated system will allow them to deliver more personalized experiences at scale. She said, “Not every grant is the same, so we should not be asking every grantee to fill out the same questions and to report in the same way.”

Additionally, the innovative employee portal replaced a cumbersome manual process making it easier for employees to access matching funds to support causes and report potential conflicts of interest that may impact the Foundation.

While ImagineCRM put in a ton of work to upgrade Salesforce, there’s plenty left to do to get the team at Barr Foundation where they want to be. In addition to supporting their team and resolving issues as they come up, the team at ImagineCRM is working to integrate Barr Foundation’s accounting system with Salesforce. While the current integration has dramatically increased automation for critical processes involving the grant-making and finance teams, Craig looks forward to closer collaboration through Salesforce. She says, “The way we input payments in the system and can report out on future budgets has been a huge enhancement for us. Having that direct connection and automation [with the accounting system] will make everything better.”

We look forward to working with you.

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