Streamlining a Global Bank’s Grantmaking Program on Salesforce
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A global bank was struggling to track key metrics across $3 billion a year in grants and other community programs. They knew they needed a centralized repository to track organizations and contacts, their upcoming grant pipeline, and corporate responsibility programs. They turned to CloudMasonry for a solution that would tie everything together.

 

 

 

CLIENT NAME
Global Bank's Corporate Responsibility Arm
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
PROJECT LENGTH
12-17 Months
TEAM SIZE
6
TECHNOLOGIES
technology
technology
technology
technology
technology
This Global Bank is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.6 trillion and operations worldwide. They have over 250,000 employees world wide and give back $3 billion per year to the community in the form of grants, community development programs, and employee volunteering opportunities.
Why Now
The bank had been operating using disparate processes across their corporate responsibility arm and needed a system that allowed them visibility across teams in order to manage their giving effectively and produce roll-up metrics the executive team could properly segment and assess.
Project Boundaries
>$1,000,000
 project
The Project

The organization had been using SharePoint to track pre-grant steps. Each sub-team had a separate process leaving their spreadsheets impossible to reconcile across teams, limiting roll-up metrics to executive leadership. To solve this, we implemented Salesforce for pre-grant processes, worked with each sub-team to find similarities in processes, and coached them through combining disparate processes so there were a few standardized grant pipeline processes across the organization. All grant-making sub-teams have been rolled onto Salesforce and the organization is now able to report on roll-ups by organization, by geography, and by key pillars.

The organization had also been using a combination of SharePoint, Cybergrants, and emailing for all employee engagement and volunteerism efforts. Due to a lack of data centralization, the teams were unable to easily keep track of participants and their progress, or alumni and their feedback.

We solved this by using Salesforce campaigns to track internal marketing efforts and responses for new programs and by using Contacts to track employee participation history and preferences. We also built an internal employee portal using Salesforce Experience Cloud to assist employee onboarding and the intake funnel. 

Their employee engagement and volunteering team is now able to work collaboratively in the cloud and new employees can self-service sign up for programs, thus boosting overall program headcount, and maximizing their impact on the community.

The Deal Clarity Moment
When we kicked off the project, we resourced the project with a single full-time person to support the build. We'd been brought in from a former Bluewolf colleague and we expected the project to be small and straightforward. We were presented with a list of user stories and in order to get a feel for who we should staff to the project, I reviewed the stories in scope and immediately realized the breadth of the project. We spent the next week talking through the stories. To demonstrate the size of the undertaking we began piecing together a high-level solution mock-up. As we presented it back to the client we made a strong effort to highlight the major gaps and the complexity of combining the disparate processes across teams. As we talked through it, the client saw what we were trying to communicate. When we got to the adjusted commercial summary the client had the clarity they needed to extend the project by 6 months and allocate the right resources.
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The Moment of Trust
The project itself kicked off after a failed implementation of a homegrown CRM system. The client came into the project with a lack of trust and a lot of fear to commit their time and energy to another potential failure. We staffed an incredible team with the goal being to buy trust piece by piece so they could see the value of CRM and Salesforce in particular with every interaction. By month four of the engagement the primary drivers on the client side were coming to us with ideas and their thoughts on solutions in Salesforce, of course, we had to manage scope, but it became very clear that they were thinking of Salesforce in all of their internal meetings and thinking of how it could help their other work streams. We'd turned an anti-CRM team into a team that saw the value in considering the system they use in every process.
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CloudMasonry understands that it's not a transaction, it's a relationship. With their delivery methodology, nimble team, and model of constant support, I’d hire them again and again, and have recommended them for other projects across the firm.
TEAM
Sofia Davis-Kos
Engagement Manager
Rachel Plowman
Project Manager
Jamie Patterson
Business Analyst
Sarah Leone
Business Analyst
Richard Blackwell
Technical Architect
Benjamin Hersh
Solution Architect