Igniting Education Reform Through Salesforce

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool for managing constituent relationships, but have you ever wondered how it can be transformational within the education reform movement? Implementing Salesforce allows your organization to develop a strategic plan to manage your program, enhancing your social impact while connecting the communities you serve.

Program Management

One of the most important elements within education reform is an organization’s ability to prove its impact. It is mission critical to collect large volumes of data from children, schools and communities. Taking it a step further, that data needs to presented in a way that makes sense to the masses. Using Salesforce’s Reports and Dashboards makes this once time consuming task almost seamless. Whether your organization is tracking the impact of after school volunteers, student achievement, or funding scholarships to academic rock stars, Salesforce simplifies the process! Track these custom data points and build out stunning ways to show your findings.

In order to achieve true education reform, help is needed from our outstanding volunteers and partners. This too is managed incredibly well within the Salesforce platform in a variety of ways. One of my personal favorites is Volunteers for Salesforce. This application makes volunteer management much easier, creating ways to organize volunteers to help read with scholars or tracking which chaperones are available to help on a field trip. You can also ensure a robust application process in Salesforce to ensure volunteers have the skill set to maximize their impact in a classroom. But it doesn’t stop there!

Community Connections

The core functionality of Salesforce allows organizations to manage relationships, which is vital for education reform. There are countless stakeholders in this movement – children, parents, teachers, school staff, community members, partners – the list is endless. Leveraging Salesforce improves your ability to track these relationships and highlights the connectedness of all parties in this movement. Any and all interactions with individuals can be recorded within the platform, ensuring adequate and proper communication with stakeholders that are important to your mission. Nurturing and maintaining these relationships puts your organization in a position to know how and when to encourage your stakeholders to unleash their passion for education reform!

Salesforce also offers integrations with mass data suppliers like SchoolData.com (at an additional cost), for those that work heavily with multiple schools or across an entire district. These types of partnerships can provide up to date information on any school you need and position you to overcome huge hurdles within education reform. Access to current, publicly available information such as school leadership, populations served, and test scores gives your team the opportunity to be analyze more data, instead of just entering it.

Those heavily engaged in the education reform movement are likely on the go daily. Utilizing Salesforce grants access not only to Salesforce1, but provides the ability to develop mobile apps for individual organizations allowing access data. Imagine a custom app that lets you see what volunteers you have in a school, the rooms they are teaching in and the ability to log notes from the app right in Salesforce coming out of the visit… What an incredible way to keep you in the field doing awesome work instead of spending countless hours on prep and follow up for a day in the field!

Donor Management

Salesforce is a powerful donor management tool, as well. It can often be a game changer for an organization’s Donor Development team. Several components of the Nonprofit Starter Pack are designed to help you unlock the power of Salesforce in the realm of fundraising. The Household Account Model helps you neatly organize donors and their giving as a family. You can also dynamically track donations, memberships and company affiliations to help your team brain storm and focus on fundraising campaigns and donor strategies. And if that wasn’t enough, the Nonprofit Starter Pack comes with the ability to manage and track recurring gifts and payments permitting a stronger focus on grassroots campaigns.

This truly is “just the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to how education reform organizations can use Salesforce. The platform positions you to provide transformational impact. It gets you out from behind a desk, into classrooms, in front of donors and meeting with stakeholders, ensuring you are one step closer to achieving your organization’s mission.

If you have any questions or are considering Salesforce for your organization, contact us to talk about any implementation partnership questions you may have!