Exponent Partners selected TechBridge as the first official implementation partner of Exponent Case Management (ECM) because we believe the right technology can transform an organization’s relationship to their data. We’re enlisting allies to help spread this message to the entire social sector and TechBridge has agreed to join forces.

Headquartered in Atlanta and serving clients throughout the United States, TechBridge’s mission, values, and dedication to the nonprofit sector align with Exponent Partners. Since 2000, TechBridge has demonstrated success matching the needs of nonprofits to technology.

Shared Values and Purpose

“We can’t imagine a better fit in terms of our values and goals to advance the nonprofit sector,” said Rem Hoffmann, Fonder and CEO at Exponent Partners. “Like TechBridge, the goal of Exponent Partners, and in turn, the goal of our Exponent Case Management app, is to help advance a nonprofit’s maturity model so they can scale up programs and amplify their social impact.”

Similar to Exponent Partners, Techbridge helps enable nonprofits leverage tools like the Salesforce platform to advance programs for the people they serve. TechBridge has expertise in nonprofits and all aspects of technology, with a team of dedicated consultants who continuously monitor the latest innovations, insights, and best practices.

As part of the Salesforce ecosystem, Exponent Case Management is a platform solution that can extend beyond other program-specific applications that aren’t connected to an organization as a whole. Program management point solutions may track outputs, such as number of clients served, but only the Exponent Case Management app was designed to go further, propelling a nonprofit’s impact and performance measurement. In this context, performance measurement is about providing nonprofit leaders with real-time, actionable data to measure program outcomes in a transparent way. The outcomes data are used to validate an organization’s theory of change and gauge mission attainment.

“As an official Exponent Case Management implementation partner, TechBridge recognizes the power of the Salesforce platform for nonprofit program management and outcomes measurement,” said Karen Cramer, Director of Performance Measurement, at TechBridge. “We are thrilled to be the first official implementation partner because Exponent Partners has spent over a decade developing the most robust application for case managers, program directors, and agency leaders.”

Next Generation Case Management

Exponent Case Management is built for the needs of today’s human services agencies. You need to prove results to your funders, access data that tells you how to improve your programs, and reduce manual work for your staff. Our product provides automated workflow and alerts, access on mobile devices, drag and drop reporting, and outcomes measurement. Want to see ECM in action? Register for our next webinar and live demo.

For questions about the app or the Partner Program, contact us today!

Chicago Benchmarking Collaborative (CBC) is an alliance of seven education and human service agencies dedicated to increasing the quality of services offered to low-income families in Chicago’s most underserved neighborhoods. Prior to launching the Salesforce platform with Exponent Case Management (ECM) and Einstein Analytics, time-consuming reporting meant infrequent benchmarking and lessened the value of the collaborative.

Exponent Partners implemented ECM for four CBC organizations thus far, plus a central benchmarking data warehouse powered by Einstein Analytics. Christopher House serves as both a member of CBC as well the Collaborative’s Project Manager. Now, with Einstein Analytics, Christopher House has a centralized dashboard with real-time data on the entire population being served across the collaborative.

Compared to the previous solution, Christopher House has reduced three reports into one report of anonymized, standardized data for benchmarking. In the past, Christopher House used to manually create data visualizations for sharing with the rest of the Collaborative. Now, the responsive Einstein Dashboards help them visualize the data in ways much more meaningful than a number or percentage. This provides the Collaborative with greater transparency and insights. Moving forward, all collaborative members can view and explore benchmark data.

Beyond Tracking Outcomes

One of CBC’s programs tracks teaching strategy, goals, and regular assessments for early childhood development and education. The ultimate goal is to prepare children for kindergarten, by focusing on three key domains: literacy, math, social-emotional, language, physical, and cognitive development. Using the filters built into their data model, Christopher House can drill down by location, agency, demographics, classroom, or students with an Individual Education Plans (IEP). This filtering ability allows the Collaborative to move beyond tracking standard program outcomes. They can now test or validate theories about early childhood development and teacher interventions.

Einstein Analytics Provides Actionable Insights for Teachers and Parents

Einstein Analytics allows the Collaborative to problem solve together and idea-share on the most effective strategies. For example, CBC found that data was trending low in children’s math readiness and, as a group, the Collaborative wanted to see improvement. One approach teachers developed was to increase the children’s exposure to math language.

The Collaborative’s model leverages peer learning communities. As part of this effort, a professional development program for teachers was opened up to all member agencies. Teachers participated in six weeks of cohort sessions with a teaching coach. Video analysis of classrooms before and after the program found that math language usage in the classroom grew. When children were using blocks to build a castle, for example, the conversations evolved to use math language, such as discussing the height of the castle tower or the perimeter of the castle’s moat.

Einstein Analytics also allows agencies to easily share data visualizations with parents for an immediate impact. Specifically, CBC’s data points on the “frequency of reading” by parents to the children in their programs found that children whose parents read to them five times per week versus one time per week had significantly higher literacy scores. The Collaborative can easily create a chart to share with parents to communicate this data. Parents respond positively to the charts and increase their literacy-based activities with their children. The data visualizations made possible by Einstein Analytics empower parents to take an active role in their child’s success.

Advice for Nonprofits Considering Einstein Analytics

“Einstein Analytics is ideal for agencies who have been using data for a few years with a solid model for tracking outcomes,” said Traci Stanley, Director of Quality Assurance at Christopher House. But a nonprofit’s relationship to data can be flexible, too. “Some organizations in our Collaborative are data-driven, while others are more data-informed, not necessarily driven. If your agency’s culture or program isn’t purely quantifiable, that’s OK, these tools can still inform your approach.”

Excitement about Einstein dashboards has spread across the Collaborative as agencies can see the potential in using advanced data visualizations for funder reports, board reports, and more. “Einstein provides efficiencies of our interventions. As a Collective, all agencies get to benefit from the benchmarking analysis while we share the cost across agencies,” she added.

Traci also described the value of working with a consulting partner during this process. “There is a clear benefit working with Exponent Partners. We may have ideas of what we want to track, but Exponent Partners has the knowledge to show us how to measure our impact and turn our ideas into a reality.”

Interested in learning more about collaboration and benchmarking data? In celebration of CBC’s 10th year, the Collaborative published a how-to guide to help other nonprofits increase their mission impact through collaboration. You can purchase the guide, Increasing Mission Impact Through Collaboration: Chicago Benchmarking Collaborative Processes and Toolkit, directly from the Christopher House website.

For more information about Exponent Case Management and Salesforce Einstein Analytics, contact us today.

The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) held its annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (19NTC) in Portland, Oregon, from March 13-15, 2019. One of the most relevant sessions for our work at Exponent Partners was led by TechBridge, a nonprofit that provides IT consulting and services to thousands of nonprofits.

The 19NTC session Demonstrating ROI on Tech Projects to Win Leadership Approval by Karen Cramer and Sean T. Willams was a master class for nonprofit leaders embarking on a big technology project. Full disclosure: not only is TechBridge helping nonprofits dedicated to alleviating the causes of poverty—by matching the needs of nonprofits with the skills and financial resources of the technology community—TechBridge is also an official Exponent Case Management implementation partner.

This blog describes some highlights from the TechBridge session and also reflects on some of the newer themes that resonated this year.

The Journey Towards More Inclusivity at Conferences

With over 18 years of experience in nonprofit consulting, I have attended the conference multiple times. NTC has always been a rich resource for technology trainings developed by and for nonprofit professionals. It had been a few years since my last NTC and I was struck by NTEN’s commitment to inclusivity. This has likely been a journey over recent years. At 19NTC, organizers and volunteers worked to provide a space—and content—that was thoughtfully inclusive of all participants.

• Amplify, our favorite effort to empower underrepresented people in the Salesforce.org ecosystem, got lots of love. For example, Springboard hosted Amplify at their booth and Hustle invited Amplify supporters to their happy hour.
• Quiet room with Reiki sessions providing space for the more introverted.
• Birds of a Feather group tables for attendees of color and the queer community.
• Preferred pronoun tags for conference badges.
• Multiple sessions on inclusivity, from accessible design to and unconscious bias in hiring practices.

Session Recap: Demonstrating ROI on Tech Projects to Win Leadership Approval

TechBridge’s practical session on how to calculate the return on investment for technology projects included a three-part methodology. This methodology should be required knowledge for anyone making IT investment decisions at nonprofits. In fact, TechBridge now makes the ROI calculation for measuring social impact a required step for each of its projects.

Methodology Part 1: Project Cost

Technology projects, especially those that relate to program management, all typically have the same set of major cost categories. Understanding those cost categories and what drives the costs is where you start. Similar to building a house, you first need a design that is informed by your programs’ needs for data tracking, process automation and so on. The design will inform a project cost estimate that is used in understanding the project value (ROI) for your organization.

Methodology Part 2: Annual Savings

This is where you break out the spreadsheet! Quite simply it is tabulating the anticipated direct and indirect decrease (or increase) in costs anticipated as a result of the project investment. Direct costs relate to things like change in hosting, licensing, support and other fees directly paid by your organization for the system. Indirect fees relate primarily to staff time saved as a result of the new system. Examples of areas where staff time might be saved include: data entry, developing reports, system management. TechBridge simple interviewing managers to get a sense for how much time (hours) common tasks take then multiplying by $25 to get to a baseline cost for those tasks. For there you can create assumptions around how much time will be saved and thus how much money is expected to be saved.

Methodology Part 3: ROI Analysis

Finally, putting together the project cost and annual savings information into your ROI analysis is what must be done to make your case to leadership for a project investment. TechBridge recommends calculating anticipated ROI over a 5 year period, ideally showing the project having paid for itself by year three. But, just as important as showing a financial ROI a nonprofit should also be concerned with the social return, and to this point TechBridge recommends considering how your organization’s mission metrics are directly impacted by the project. How many more clients can you serve? Including the mission return on investment along with financial will ensure you have what is needed to justify the investment to leadership and funders.

Bonus Highlight: Who had the Best Swag at the 19NTC Expo?

Many great contenders this year but nothing can beat the comfort and usefulness of Okta socks.

What could top these socks? We’ll have to wait until next year to reconvene at 20NTC in Baltimore. The next conference will be March 24 – 26, 2020, in the Baltimore Convention Center.

To learn more about our partnership with TechBridge and the Exponent Case Management implementation partnership program as a whole, contact us today! Interested in seeing what Exponent Case Management is all about? Register for our next introduction webinar and see a demo of the ECM and Salesforce features specifically designed to help you manage your nonprofit’s programs.

Salesforce.org’s acquisition of roundCorner and the foundationConnect product is an exciting part of what I view as the evolution of technology to support nonprofits. This recent deal has solidified Salesforce.org’s commitment to the foundation space. Unlike other recent consolidations, where products have been acquired but not necessarily integrated, the breadth of Salesforce.org’s offerings ensures that the vast needs of nonprofits—from fundraising to grants management—can be met by solutions from multiple vendors, all sitting together on top of a single platform. By acquiring foundationConnect, I think good things are to come for foundations that use Salesforce.

What This Means for Our Clients

I am especially excited about what this acquisition could mean from an innovation perspective. Salesforce.org has the funds and the people to invest in the product, as well as integrate it seamlessly with the many other solutions offered through the AppExchange. I am hopeful that foundations can expect more of an open dialogue between their grantee community, Salesforce.org, and service providers like Exponent Partners, so that together, we can continue to push the envelope on the innovation front. Through collaboration, we can marry Salesforce.org’s technology with Exponent Partners’ expertise and foundations’ processes in a way that enables all of us to better help those who need it most.

The Evolution to Platform

We often take for granted the technology that is now at our fingertips, forgetting what life was like years ago. When an event like this occurs, it is an opportunity to reflect upon how far we have come—from the days of the rolodex (for those of you who remember it!) to the omnipresent smartphone, complete with its plethora of apps. The evolution of technology has allowed us to change the way that we work, empowering us and giving us more flexibility than ever before.

In the nonprofit space, software for foundations has evolved over the years to better serve the needs of grantmakers and grantseekers. It is no longer about a point-solution installed on your computer. Innovation enables you to create a cloud-based technology stack using the solutions of multiple vendors that are, ideally, integrated on a single platform. Salesforce.org is the leader in this area for the nonprofit space, as they leverage the millions of dollars that they have invested to create sophisticated solutions for the for-profit world and give nonprofits access to them.

The Partner You Need for What’s Next

This is an exciting time for nonprofits and for those who serve them. Along with my colleagues at Exponent Partners, I can’t wait to see what’s next! Contact me if you’d like to discuss the Salesforce.org acquisition of foundationConnect in more detail.  If you’re a grantmaking professional attending the PEAK2019 conference in Denver, be sure to come find me in the Exhibitor Hall, too.

Salesforce.org is moving into program management and impact management with intentionality, and that is big and welcome news for all of us who work in the social change information systems ecosystem!

A key promise of the Salesforce platform is that it enables a nonprofit organization’s ‘whole agency’ strategy, where all key business processes are creating useful information in one integrated system. This is such a departure from the more typical proliferation of data silos that it is hard to understate the importance of this platform. And this is what makes the Salesforce platform such a compelling improvement over legacy point solutions like Blackbaud and all the other smaller fundraising, marketing, and communications systems.

This increased focus on program management also opens up the door to social impact measurement, monitoring, and management. Impact – social impact, impact on a community, impact on a neighborhood – is achieved by changemakers in the nonprofit sector who design and deliver great programs and great program outcomes to their participants. Extending the power of the Salesforce platform to this indispensable part of an organization’s social mission will also enable increasingly sophisticated and real-time connections and analyses between ‘what works’ and ‘what it costs’.

Dreamforce 2018 provided a wealth of experiences and announcements where this focus on program and impact was evident.

Roadmap

In the Salesforce.org Product Roadmap for Nonprofits session, SFDO’s Lori Freeman, who leads nonprofit product management, unveiled the roadmap for Salesforce.org across three domains: fundraising, engagement, and program. Shelly Erceg, the program management director, then focused on the program roadmap. And while it is certainly early in its development, it is clear to see that the emerging framework starts to pick out vital capabilities, like case management, program management, services management, and impact measurement (all of which are part of Exponent Case Management (ECM), natch!), in addition to volunteer management, project management, and call center capabilities. A key takeaway is that program management is now finally given equal billing with the traditional strengths of the Salesforce platform in fundraising and engagement. And that is a welcome development indeed.

Sessions!

The tone was set with the nonprofit keynote – Become an Impact-First Nonprofit. There were more sessions focused on program management than at previous Dreamforces, especially in the human and social services domains. Considering that these types of organizations represent more than one-third of the nonprofit sector, this is good to see. Just among Exponent Partners ECM clients, we had great representation. Sandy Allen of United Way Bay Area demonstrated her organization’s deep knowledge of program management, evaluation, and impact in her talk on planning for systems change. Kai Harris at California Human Development talked about using program data to go beyond backward-looking reporting and to start looking forward with data through diagnosis and prediction. Program and impact were everywhere.

Tools

The new capabilities in Einstein Analytics and Einstein AI are directly supportive of the work of program management and impact management. Analytics are vital in describing, building shared understanding, and working to continuously improve ‘what works’ in programs (i.e. what social interventions are effective for what participant). Einstein AI will enable machine learning applied to our clients’ program management data sets, and tease out the learnings and insights about which interventions should be applied to which participants in what situations and contexts. This ability to provide predictions and prescriptions right within program staff’s case management application represents a leap forward that other point solutions just cannot match.

These are early days in program management for Salesforce.org, but all the signs above are incredibly encouraging and point to a bright future for salesforce.org, our partner ecosystem, and especially for the nonprofit organizations which look to us to help build their social impact and program success! Onwards and upwards!

The annual Salesforce user conference finished up on Friday, September 28 and, once again, it was an amazing spectacle. Somewhere north of 150,000 people flooded session rooms around downtown San Francisco, all there to learn about some aspect of the Salesforce platform.

My first Dreamforce was in 2006, when I was one of 5,000 attendees. That year marked the launch of Apex, the Appexchange (it had over 400 apps!), sandboxes, validation rules, the new Classic user interface, and so much more. The keynote let us watch Marc Benioff log in on stage, head over to Setup, and configure Salesforce. It was quite a different world from 2018.

Dreamforce is a splashy event, and so there are always some big announcements. But because Salesforce has three releases per year, Dreamforce isn’t a big-bang announcement-fest like events held by other companies, such as Apple. There’s often some interesting new services, partnerships, and features announced, but we get used to the drumbeat of new features in October, February, and June each year, so sometimes Dreamforce can be a bit less dramatic than it seems from the outside.

Here are some of the interesting announcements  from this year’s Dreamforce, plus a few others that were revealed over the summer.

Low Code Tools

From the start, Salesforce has had point and click tools to customize and automate the platform. There are two new low code tools that are interesting:

Lightning Object Creator allows you to turn a spreadsheet into a Salesforce application without any code. If you use spreadsheets for a process, you can drag and drop them into the Object Creator, review fields for accuracy and publish a digital form, available on desktop or mobile. You can further analyze the data or add it to existing records with support for Search, Notes or Files within Salesforce. Check out the blog post for additional details.

Lightning Flow Builder is a revamp of Flow Builder, which helped us all create drag and drop processes, forms, and automation. The look and feel of Lightning Flow Builder has been matched to the Lighting Design System, giving us a level of familiarity that improves the user experience. In addition, Salesforce announced Flow Actions – pre-built, reusable components that can be dropped into any Lighting Flow. Lighting Flow Builder and Process Builder have some overlap in what they can do–it’s clear that Lightning Flows is where R&D energy is going at the moment. Here’s a Trailhead that may help you better understand when to pick one over the other.

A New Lighting Page Layout Editor is coming in the future, and will include ways to filter out blocks of detail content based on context. While information is limited at this time, it’s hard not to get excited about what this blog post says is coming–the power of having sections of a page render or not render based on data, user, etc. We’ve been wanting this capability on the platform since day one, and we’ve had to use Record Types as our only recourse other than a full UI rewrite. I’m excited to learn more!

Google released the Data Connector for Salesforce, a free add-on for Google Spreadsheets that allows you to query, create, and update Salesforce data right in a spreadsheet. While there are existing, similar tools, the fact this is put out directly by Google is interesting. I’ve used tools like this to do very complex data manipulation in a spreadsheet while maintaining the benefit of data directly linked to Salesforce. Simply press a button and your data is refreshed from your CRM. It’s worth trying out the Data Connector–my only issue with it is that it will only pull 2,000 rows from Salesforce reports, leaving you with incomplete datasets. For very large data sets, you can write SOQL queries, or use a tool like Xappex’s G-Connector.

The Einstein Family of Products

Salesforce kicked off Dreamforce with the announcement of Einstein Voice. The next version of the Salesforce mobile app on iOS will be able to take dictation, help you smartly connect that note to records it has discovered in your note, and even create or complete Salesforce Tasks. It’s a pretty cool piece of app functionality.

You will be forgiven if you’re not sure how this fits together with everything else that falls under the Einstein family of products. Think of Einstein as Artificial Intelligence on the platform, and you’ll be mostly there. Each of the core areas of Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Community have turnkey tools that can be used to apply artificial intelligence in smart ways to solve common problems. In Sales, for example, Lead Scoring uses artificial intelligence to prioritize the Leads that are the most likely to turn into deals. There are about 15 of these out-of-the-box AI components listed on the Salesforce Einstein product page.

In addition to those turnkey components, there are a number of Einstein services created for platform developers. These services allow developers to build their own AI tools to work with Salesforce. With Prediction Builder, Language, Vision, and Bots, developers can tune AI for use cases that are unique to their industry or  specific needs. We are very excited about Prediction Builder. Lead Scoring for salespeople is a nice feature too, but we’re much more interested in the possibility to use AI to identify the right interventions for kids receiving services from a direct-service nonprofit. This is an exciting toolset on which to build really smart software, and we are just at the beginning of this journey.

The final member of the Einstein family is Analytics, and it really is different from the others.  Formerly called Wave, Analytics is a data visualization and dashboarding solution. It has an AI component called Discovery that analyzes large data sets and helps see connections between data that might not be clear at first glance. But all in all, Analytics is more about data and dashboards than AI.

A Million Other Things

Salesforce.com spends around $1B on R&D every year, so it is impossible to note every improvement they have made, even in the last few months. All you have to do is watch this DX Super Session to see how many new technical aspects of the platform can be jammed into a 40-minute presentation. It’s remarkable, and a big reason we love Salesforce–it’s being driven forward by an economic engine much larger than the nonprofit sector could ever generate, and we get to take advantage of all of it. The hardest part is keeping up!