The Client:
Association of Certified Fraud Specialists (ACFS) is an educational 501(c)(3) Nonprofit organization headquartered in California that provides low cost learning and networking opportunities to law enforcement teams, attorneys, public and private sector investigators, auditors and other risk management professionals in the US. It also administers the Certified Fraud Specialist (CFS) designation, helping members who work in the anti-fraud profession achieve leadership, attain higher levels of recognition, authenticate skills and transform knowledge into a meaningful career.
Being a member of NASBA, MCLE, POST, CFS-CPE, the organization believes quality training should be within affordable reach of every anti-fraud professional, with the importance of standards in education held in high regard.
The Challenge:
Being a membership focused organization, the organization wanted to customize their Salesforce NPSP which could keep their membership, training and events information organized and was scalable as the number of members would grow. The key challenges identified were:
Data Management: ACFS had been using a legacy system ‘iMIS’ to manage their memberships; the data exported from iMIS was found to be highly inconsistent, causing poor results, duplicative efforts, and wasted time.
Membership Management: Within the ACFS model exists different types of memberships; retirees, students, renewals, etc… Without a simple process, it was difficult to send customized information based on membership level,interaction, and campaign. It was even more difficult to manage the ever increasing number of memberships as the organization scaled up; the existing process was not designed with growth in mind.
Event Management: Events and conferences have been a critical component of the ACFS model since inception; events are a key platform for educating law enforcement officials and other risk management professionals. However, the management of events was being done manually, making it very difficult to engage members through events, programs and conferences.
Expense and Revenue Tracking: Events and conferences, marketing efforts, licensing, memberships, and campaigning, all generate inbound revenue and outbound expense; one of the greatest challenges found in the previous model was the inability to track these components in an automated, clean, and related fashion. Invoicing and financials were tracked manually, through paper forms.
Goals and Objectives:
Based on our initial fact finding discussion, we understood that ACFS’ long term organization objective is to build a larger community and create a buzz around the organization. This required implementing a membership focused NPSP solution that could manage all constituents effectively, enhance operational efficiency, and provide a one-stop-shop for all of their organizational needs.
The Solution:
The Power of Us Program
ACFS selected Salesforce through the Power of Us program on Salesforce.org. The ‘Power of Us’ program provides registered nonprofits with 10 free user licenses; any additional license would come at a fraction of the cost. The Power of Us Program provides a user interface (nonprofit success pack or NPSP) that overlays the Enterprise platform; this means Nonprofits receive the same powerful platform as some of the largest Enterprises in the country, but with a nonprofit interface at a fraction of the cost.
We achieved the implementation and customization using the following process:
How the Configuration Helped ACFS:
1. Data Management: Simplified data collection through NPSP made it very easy to collect and load data from various sources. Putting the data in the CRM with all the relevant information created a consolidated view, while refining and restricting the field structure streamlined the data quality. Because the data sourced from another CRM, converting the data into Salesforce friendly terminology was the first step, followed by scrubbing the data and completing several system loads.
Reports and dashboards, designed exclusive to the objectives of ACFS, ensured that information about constituents could be extracted in real-time by any of the users. Reports that used to take hours to days to compile now take minutes. With information on their constituents, programs, and events now transparent and readily available, the team is more engaged and enthusiastic about the overall progress of the organization.
2. Event Management: Salesforce provides streamlined event management through
“Campaigns”. For ACFS, this includes Parent Campaigns (Q1 2017 Training Event) and Child Campaigns (Marketing Efforts). This allowed all event tracking to occur in a single consolidated location, such as calls, emails, invitations (outbound + responses), and costs/revenue.
3. Membership Management: Scalable membership supports an ever increasing number of members that join through various channels. Through NPSP, the ACFS national office and network of chapters operate more efficiently and are now organized. All member detail is now centralized on one platform, storing details like: Contact Information, Payment History, Education Detail, and so on.
Education detail is a critical component for members, so is stored on each members contact record. Each member record supports multiple degree/certification levels, and allows for a quick view into their details:
4. Expense & Revenue Tracking: The Salesforce Platform is unified, future-ready, and connected, with robust APIs and services that helps integrate back-office data systems. We integrated NPSP with Zapier, allowing us to build streamlined processes to connect with Quickbooks; this integration helped in creating connections for transactions, such as estimates, invoices, and sales receipts; integrating this functionality in one system allowed us to create customized reports with insights for better cost management, planning, and general ‘big picture’ campaign understanding.
To support the expense management component, we built out the “Expense” functionality; this allowed for receipts, payroll, and so on, to be tracked directly on the source. If an event was scheduled under a “Campaign”, expenses such as food, hall rental, and payroll, would be logged as an “Expense” record under the Campaign. The Zapier integration would then send the expense data to Quickbooks, provide detailed reporting, and give a much better understanding of the impact events have on the organization.
As you’ll see in this example, the Q1 2017 Training Event would accrue a $500 Room Rental expense for fees and taxes; a copy of the receipt could then be attached to the expense (scanned, saved email, etc…). Further detail could be tracked, breaking out the unique expenses into individual fields, but that is not a level of detail required in this case. The decision was made to not include these components, as adding fields to complete creates the risk of administrative waste.
Conclusion:
The implementation has helped ACFS streamline it’s processes, manage and track constituents more effectively, thus ensuring significant improvement in operational efficiency. In addition, the Nonprofit Success Pack configuration will help keep membership, training and event information organized and easy to manage given the scalable nature of platform.
About Ebizon:
Ebizon is a leading software product development and consulting organization working with enterprises across the industry spectrum, including nonprofits and publishing, healthcare, ecommerce organizations to create and implement strategic solutions using Cloud Software.
With offices in USA and India and founded in 2007, the management & advisory team has years of industry experience in software consulting and product development.