Problem

At first, Housing Connector used Excel and Google Sheets copiously to capture their data relationships. Executive Director Skëlqim Kelmendi said, “Over time, these Excel books [spreadsheets] transformed into the blueprint of our current infrastructure.” Soon, they outgrew these methods. The team turned to the customer relationship management (CRM) system Salesforce.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “To know what to leave out and what to put in, just where and just how—Ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity.” Indeed, a simple foundation is typically the result of focused choices. The elegant Salesforce architecture is the fruit of a close partnership between Housing Connector and Salesforce implementation firm Bigger Boat Consulting. Bigger Boat’s Seattle-based consultants specialize in implementing Salesforce systems for human services and affordable housing organizations. 

Together, the Housing Connector and Bigger Boat implementation teams mapped out both immediate Salesforce needs and future requirements to fulfill Housing Connector’s ultimate goal of a national organization with thousands of partners. 

Kelmendi called out some of his favorite highlights of the implementation process: keeping object relationships in the system clean and logical, a one-third focus on Salesforce training so his team could become “active participants in the solution and not merely passengers,” and putting the big, foundational rocks in place before starting on additional features.

Doug Minkler, Senior Manager of Product and Technology, was brought in after the initial Salesforce implementation, in part, to help maintain and enhance the team’s system. Minkler serves as Housing Connector’s systems administrator and translator of business needs into technical requirements, as well as their data and analytics manager. He learned to navigate the Salesforce system after it was already built, adding to its design. From that vantage point, he was able to appreciate the value of its deceptively simple data architecture.

Lessons Learned

How can your organization replicate Housing Connector’s system success?

1. Understand your organization’s current processes, infrastructure, and friction points. Take stock of what is vital to have and what facilitates effective business processes.
2. Think through object and entity relationships. How do your data points relate to each other? Which are essential to track and what processes are built around them?
3. Start simple. Get the fundamentals right before any accessories, and you can grow quickly with add-ons and automations. Those add-ons often make existing processes more efficient as opposed to being net new functions. 
4. Invest in a great consulting partner. They will help you think through these questions and get your team up to speed on the system that they and your organization designed together.
5. Invest in both a project lead for your system and a Salesforce admin. These may be the same person or they could be different. Make sure to give the admin significant dedicated time. They will be key to your long-term success.

Outcome

Housing Connector has housed and supported over 2,700 individuals while helping property owners rent out vacancies. Their system supports their daily program work and iterations to that work provide them and their partners with organized data to drive better decisions and automates labor wherever possible. 

Doug Minkler reflected, “Without Salesforce we would be stuck back in the days of spreadsheets and endless copying and pasting. Very little about our infrastructure two years ago could have handled the quantity and complexity of data, outputs, and partner engagements that we conduct today.”