Issacs Center Salesforce Experience Relaunch

The Isaacs Center is a New York City based non-profit that focuses on the needs of children and low-income families. Acquis worked alongside the Isaacs Center to reimagine their organizational processes and the day-to-day experiences of their employees, resulting in an overhauled participant tracking system powered by Salesforce.

CLIENT NAME

Isaacs Center

INDUSTRY

Nonprofit

PROJECT LENGTH

3-4 Months

TEAM SIZE

TECHNOLOGIES

The Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center (Isaacs Center) is a non-profit, multi-service organization located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan focused on the needs of children and low-income families, out-of-school and out-of-work youth, and aging New Yorkers, including our isolated and homebound elderly neighbors. A Meals on Wheels pioneer since 1964, the Isaacs Center promotes dignity and self-reliance across generations.

Why Now

With a grant in hand to modernize operations, there was a pressing need to update Salesforce which served as a core Participant Tracking System. By modernizing their processes that surround Salesforce, Issacs Center knew by acting quickly they would ultimately benefit more Participants.

Project Boundaries

$40,000-$70,000

The Project

Their Education and Workforce team provides out-of-work and out-of-school young adults, ages 17 to 24, with intensive case management, job readiness training, and placement in sector-focused internships and employment. Participants enter or re-enter the workforce, and pursue educational opportunities that boost their hourly wage earnings and put them on a sustainable career path.

To support this important work, Issacs Center had been using Salesforce as their core Participant Tracking System. While integral to daily operations, Salesforce had become difficult to navigate over time; it had become hard to understand where a Participant had been within their own journey engaging with Issacs Center. For Case Managers, working on behalf of Participants had become overly complex, and business processes had become hard to follow. Additionally, due to a poor data model, the critical reporting to prove program efficacy took weeks to produce through manual workarounds.

This ultimately led to a cumbersome Participant enrollment processes - a lot of manual work resulting in slow and costly processing of time-sensitive Participant data. The struggle was knowing that on the other end of this inefficiencies was a disadvantaged youth who was hoping to hear back from Isaacs and be enrolled in their programs to better their situations in life.

Through our custom methodology, Acquis helped Isaacs both streamline their processes to be more efficient, as well as overhauled the data model and user interface of Salesforce so that Case Managers and other employees of Isaacs Center could quickly input and access the information, they needed to help the youth they were working with. Acquis was able to do this by working alongside Isaacs Center employees to truly understand the employee experience, to understand current processes, pain points, and bottlenecks so that we could prioritize true organizational needs while revamping Salesforce. The result of experience relaunch not only provided the first three-dimensional view of all interactions between Issacs and their Participants in an easy to navigate system, it also cut down the processing time for onboarding Participants from weeks to hours.

The Introduction Moment

Isaacs was introduced to Acquis as a go-to partner for strategic consulting in the Salesforce space for nonprofit organizations. Through direct relationships with our consultants' historical work, the quality of our people was already known.

The Deal Clarity Moment

Scope became clear after a series of interactive exercises which allowed us to get to the true organizational needs, as well as a few reverse demos to understand the current usage of the system. We were then able to understand the broad strokes that were needed to move this organization forward, utilizing our proprietary framework.

The Moment of Trust

Through a series of iterative virtual whiteboard scoping sessions early on in the relationship, Acquis was able to draw out information from Isaacs Center in a fun, interactive way that drove trust in the relationship. By proving our project methodology within the sales cycle, Isaacs was able to gain trust that the delivery methodology would work for their team.

The Eureka Moment

The Eureka moment came when Isaacs Center described their current manual Participant on-boarding process which was slow, arduous, very manual, and had become a bottleneck for providing real support to the Participants. From our first conversation with the client when they described their current pain points and issues, it was clear the system that was built was not designed with the end user experience in mind, and had quickly become antiquated. We wanted to make Salesforce easy for them to use, understand, and ultimately to drive business value by expediting the throughput of work and ultimately Participants served.

The ROI Moment

We knew the project would have an impact from day one, because we focused on usability and the employee experience - keeping true user needs at the forefront of our build exercises. That said, when we learned that the project had saved processing time for for Participant onboarding from weeks to hours, we knew we had made a major difference within the organization.

In the time that we have had the pleasure of working with Acquis, we have been completely blown away by the customer service, follow-up and overall personalized attention that they have been providing us and this project. From their communication styles, their interactive brainstorming boards, and detailed emails, presentations and excel documents....They were able to listen to what a challenge was for us, fully dissect it to gain a better understanding, and then brainstorm with the help of our staff, how to fix the challenge, who and what it will affect and what the end result will be.

Katherine Robles, Director of Advance and Earn

TEAM

Andrew Gross

Engagement Manager

Ekaterina Dus

Project Manager

Story By Brightr

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