SALESFORCE INSTANCES FOR MULTIPLE PROGRAMS TO BETTER MANAGE STRATEGIC BUSINESS PROCESSES
Like many research institutions, Harvard University is comprised of many departments, schools, affiliated programs, and initiatives furthering a wealth of diverse missions. While each unit operates independently, they all share the same desire for promoting learning and the pursuit of excellence in service to humanity.
“Harvard University is devoted to academic excellence and developing leaders in diverse disciplines who make a difference globally. We’re proud to offer students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the University opportunities to continue driving positive impact outward through groundbreaking research and learning,” said Corey Snow, CRM Strategist at Harvard University Information Technology.
The University, based in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, serves 36,012 students, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, and has more than 371,000 living alumni around the world.
“With a wealth of missions across campus, the technology we use needs to be flexible and extensible enough to model complex relationships and enable delightful interactions with diverse constituencies across our many Schools, programs, and centers. The Salesforce platform provides our Harvard teams with technology solutions tailored specifically to their needs, enabling reduced administrative burden and increased situational awareness to operate more strategically,” Snow notes.
Snow continues, “Cloud for Good has been an incredible partner with a great customer satisfaction score across our campus as more programs and centers move to Salesforce. They bring the industry and solution knowledge that is needed to make every project a success.”
Ariadne Labs
Advancement
Harvard’s Ariadne Labs is a joint health system innovation center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, working to save lives and reduce suffering by creating scalable solutions that improve health care delivery at the most critical moments for people everywhere. Ariadne Labs has collaborated with major U.S. health systems, national governments worldwide, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, global foundations, and health and technology industry leaders to improve the delivery of health care for people everywhere.
Cloud for Good implemented the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to help Ariadne Labs track and manage external funding relationships and other partnerships.
Taking the process from paper-based and Excel to Salesforce, Ariadne Labs is now able to see a more detailed view of their activity in one system without having to rely on employee emails and individual records of conversations and contact.
Harvard Catalyst
Program Management
Harvard Catalyst works with Harvard University’s schools and affiliated academic healthcare centers to build and grow an environment focused on team science – where discoveries are rapidly and efficiently translated to improve human health. They catalyze research across all clinical and translational domains by providing investigators with opportunities such as pilot funding, free resources such as biostatistics consultations, training and mentoring programs, and numerous courses.
Harvard Catalyst came to Cloud for Good already using one instance of Salesforce. However, this instance was used to manage just one of their many programs. Seeing the transformational value Salesforce could bring, Catalyst turned to Cloud for Good for strategic advisory for integrating all program management into Salesforce and an upgrade from Classic to the Lightning Experience (LEX).
Adding to the complexity of the project, each of Harvard Catalyst’s programs had an individual way of tracking applicants, relationship, patent requests and program success. They needed a way to standardize their processes and terminology while preserving the validity of their original program management. To help overcome this challenge, Harvard Catalyst installed the Cloud for Good Program Management Package. This is a LEX-ready, accelerator that helped rename objects in a way that made sense for all their programs, not just the original.
With program management fully handled in Salesforce, Harvard Catalyst benefits from the Reporting features of Salesforce. They are now able to run reports on:
- Program Metrics: Create reports on awards, grants, patents and publications that were awarded as a result of their programs.
- Diversity: The ability to track the gender and race of those individuals involved in their programs.
This upgrade of Harvard Catalyst’s Salesforce instance also helped them gain a 360-degree view of the individuals going through their programs. It is common to be enrolled in one program but benefit from class work or research from another. Before Salesforce, this information was housed in multiple systems, with no connections between the programs. Now utilizing Affiliations, Harvard Catalyst can see this cross-pollination of programs and better understand how each of their programs affects the others.
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Affiliate Management
The mission of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) is to facilitate the production of pathbreaking social science research on international, comparative, transnational, and global issues by faculty and students at Harvard. They aim to advance scholarly knowledge; address important international issues, as well as domestic social, economic, and political problems in a comparative perspective; foster interdisciplinary dialogues, and disseminate knowledge in academia and beyond. This is accomplished through research programs, initiatives, and clusters; through conferences, seminars, and workshops; and by providing competitive fellowships to global scholars and research funding to Harvard faculty and students.
Prior to coming to Cloud for Good to implement Salesforce’s NPSP, WCFIA was using a combination of Excel and CiviCRM to manage data on their affiliates going back to the creation of the Center in 1958. Because their legacy systems were disjointed, contained data that wasn’t clean and they found it hard to export the data in order to run reports, WCFIA was seeking a way to integrate all their programs into one instance of Salesforce.
Since Cloud for Good has helped WCFIA implement NPSP, they can track their programs and researchers in a more complex way. They are now using Affiliations to associate each researcher with different programs and roles and the dates that they held those roles. Since this information is stored in Salesforce and not in outdated, disparate systems, WCFIA is also able to use Salesforce Reports to better understand their programs and the success of their faculty and guest researchers within each of their programs.
While each of these Harvard affiliate programs had different needs, Salesforce has empowered Ariadne Labs, Harvard Catalyst and WCFIA to improve their business processes, strengthen their ability to report and, most importantly, freed up time previously spent on administrative inefficiencies to focus more on their missions.
“Salesforce is changing the technology game for institutions around the world and delivering more innovation every day. Salesforce, paired with Cloud for Good as our design and implementation partner, has transformed the way these business units operate. They are able to better track programs, participants and metrics, and gain new levels of insight into their operations and outward impact,” said Snow.
