“I just want to get through all this paperwork so I can get to the helping people part!”

Over the last 15 years working in the human services field focused on data and compliance, I have heard this frustration more times than I can count. Nonprofit organizations, particularly those in human services, often have complex or lengthy processes to both intake and provide services to clients. We can all list the variety of valid reasons why the path to that helping part is full of forms to complete and documents to get signed. From making sure that we have informed consent, to collecting the data each funder wants to know, and even to wanting more information so that we can learn about and advocate for the people we serve, each step, while important on its own, can start to add up and feel like an obstacle course for both the direct service professional and the person seeking assistance. 

Can we have the best of both worlds?

Luckily, there is a way to structure your processes in a thoughtful way that balances the vital need to check the boxes for data and compliance while embedding focus on the client experience. In fact, I would argue that doing so will improve the quality of the data collected and better engage both your staff and the people you support. For example, a lengthy intake process may be at odds with what program staff ultimately want to achieve: building trust with clients, meeting their immediate needs, and having long-term impact on their stability and success.  

So how do you identify where you can be intentional about embedding your empathy into your processes as part of the client’s overall experience with your teams? Well, there are two complementary tools that are widely used to define and visualize a set of experiences: a process map and a client journey map. I’d like to share the differences between these two tools and how each working together can provide insights into how to balance process efficiency and data/compliance needs with the client experience. While many organizations are familiar with a process map, pairing with a client journey map may be new to you.  A client journey map is a great way to view processes from a new perspective and can be instrumental in helping assess your processes and reorder them to improve client and staff experience.

Process mapping vs. client journey maps: What’s the diff?

The fundamental difference between these two models is that a process map is outlined from the perspective of the staff while a client journey map views the same interactions from the perspective of the client. Both tools are equally important and provide distinct views of an experience. When used together, you get a roadmap to efficient, quality service provision that feels less bureaucratic and more empathetic. 

While the focus for a process map is to identify and visualize every process and task involved in intake or service provisioning, the client journey map looks through a different lens: client motivations and emotions at each phase. In the human services space, clients are often motivated by an immediate, pressing need such as having a safe place to sleep for the night. Understanding their primary motivation and the emotions associated can allow you to prioritize activities and tasks and identify those that can wait until a later date or time.  

A client journey map looks closely at each step of the way to ask:

• What are the needs at that stage?
• What is the person thinking or feeling?
• What interactions are they having with agency team members? Are they in-person, on the phone or in a virtual setting?
• What other things are going on in the family environment that may impact how they’re feeling?
• What is needed to move them on to the next stage  in your process?

The real magic here is that by understanding where the client is coming from at each stage of your engagement, you can calibrate your interventions to build on the trust and rapport that happens over time to better sequence your activities for improved impact.  In addition to a stronger client and staff experience, the quality and reliability of the data can skyrocket as well.  

How can you use client journey mapping to incorporate the client experience into  your processes? 

In our advisory services practice, we work with nonprofit organizations in human services, education and philanthropy to map out their client’s journey through their processes and seek out opportunities to structure interactions in a way that best supports their mission.   

We work with the folks delivering services to uncover three critical insights:

• Moments of truth: touch-points that have the most influence on the client 
• Moments of glory: opportunities to exceed the client’s expectations
• Moments of pain: risks for bad client experiences

While we’d all like to just jump right in and get our neighbors what they need immediately, we have a lot of valid, real reasons for filling out those forms and capturing those signatures. Even so, we can restructure when, where, and how we do those important tasks to find the most optimal structure to support our operating demands within the client’s current situation. Going through the activities of overlaying the client journey with your process map can be a powerful tool to find that balance. 

You spent hours working late on grant proposals to raise the funds. You sweet-talked major donors into supporting an unglamorous infrastructure project with promises of future efficiencies, of freeing up human staff time to do the things that robots can’t. You negotiated with vendors to bring licensing and implementation costs down. You persisted through all the challenges that come with collaborating remotely in a global crisis. You celebrated with your team on the day the system finally went live. And now you have a working, top-of-the-line, flexible system that meets all of your most important needs. (At least, it meets the needs you had when you sat down to write that grant, all those months ago.) And through it all, you and your colleagues worked tirelessly (and sometimes exhaustedly) to make sure that you were meeting your mission and serving your constituents to the best of your ability. You did it.

So … why does it feel like you’re just beginning? Where did those efficiencies go? You know you have new possibilities at your fingertips – how do you find out what they are and make the best use of them in support of your mission?

The truth is, in some ways, you are just beginning. What you’ve done so far is the introduction; welcome to Chapter One.

Where did those efficiencies go?

Of course, computers can do certain things a lot faster than humans can. And it’s exciting to think about not having to do some of the rote tasks we do every day, or at least to not have to take quite so much time on them.

It’s easy to imagine what our lives could look like if we did all the same things, but faster. And in a lot of cases within our organizations, tech can help us realize that vision. 

But if we aren’t intentional and collaborative about how we use and develop the tech, it can also help us do some not-as-exciting things a lot faster, like surface conflict, spend precious resources on changes that don’t impact our mission, and create messy, duplicative data that we can’t trust to make decisions or demonstrate our impact. When we’re confronted with all these things, it can feel like the technology is making things worse, not better.

How do we get back on track?

To keep your investment on track, you need a process to make sure that the efficiencies you’re developing are the ones that will speed your organization along the path toward the outcomes you care about the most. This means gathering a braintrust of key team members from different parts of your organization who can review requests for technology enhancements and ask some important questions:

Who would be impacted by this change? How?

We can make this change… but should we?

When should we make the change?

How should we communicate about it?

How will this change impact our data?

The jargon-y name for this is a governance team, so-called because they are making decisions that will govern how your system gets used and enhanced over time. Your governance team meets regularly and makes decisions about things like:

• System security (who gets to see what data? How do you handle providing and revoking tech access for new and exiting staff?)
• What processes need to be fixed with technology, and what really needs more training, documentation, and/or new business processes instead
• How to prioritize when different users have needs that conflict with one another
• Which requests need your biggest investments (time, energy, money) because they help move your organization’s big-picture goals forward. 
• Whether to take on a request that may create more work down the line (technical debt)
• Whether to build a custom solution, hire a tech role in-house or purchase an existing product or service

They also help set the rules for how technology changes are rolled out across the organization – they define your protocols for development and testing, getting input from stakeholders, documentation, and training.

Who needs to be involved?

Who should be part of your governance team will depend on your organization’s structure. At a minimum, it should include the person or people in charge of making technical updates, someone who can speak to business priorities, and a decision-making representative from each department that uses the technology you need to address. 

You will also need a straightforward path for your staff outside the governance team to submit their feedback about the technology they use. The governance team will probably have thoughts about what to improve, but they shouldn’t be the only ones coming up with ideas for enhancements or identifying when issues need to be addressed; for the system to grow and evolve for the entire organization, you need feedback and contributions from all kinds of users. (And make sure you’re covering all of your stakeholders – if the technology you’re working with impacts your constituents or clients, they should be consulted too!)

Just as importantly, you’ll need a process by which your governance team can follow up with staff once those enhancements are released or issues have been resolved, so that you can understand the impact of your work on their day-to-day and long-term needs.

This feels like a lot. How do we start?

This might feel a little overwhelming. All this might feel like a lot more care and feeding than you expected when you started raising funds for this new system. And that makes sense – many of us in nonprofits are used to working around static technology that was purpose-built … for someone else’s purpose. And chances are, one of the big reasons you signed up for this tech in the first place is because you know your organization needs to be more adaptable than that static technology can accommodate.

The only way to eliminate the need for continued systems work is for your organization and the environment it operates in to stay exactly the same, from the moment you identify your requirements onward. And if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s to expect that won’t be the case.

The good news is that you don’t have to do this alone, or from scratch. Through our Managed Services offering, Exponent Partners can help you establish this critical governance framework, make recommendations for how to develop your team, while also supporting you in executing on those enhancement requests and issue fixes. Reach out to us today for a conversation on how to incorporate governance into your organization’s social impact platform.

Here at Exponent Partners we do our very best to operate in alignment with our values of impact, diversity, learning and innovation. Diversity, equity and inclusion is a critical aspect of our identity as an organization and is fundamental to how we seek to be as a company.  The past couple of years have given us the opportunity to dig deep, reflect and carefully consider how we can live our values of prioritizing diversity, ensuring equity and promoting inclusion. One way of doing that is identifying events or community engagement opportunities that align. Luckily, there’s a great one happening later this week in Raleigh, North Carolina. We are proud sponsors of Dreamin’ in Color, an event to promote the growth and development of Black Salesforce professionals. As a proud, Black Salesforce professional, I am thrilled to be attending this event and representing Exponent Partners.

Dreamin’ in Color is a conference geared toward current or aspiring Black Salesforce professionals and focuses on how to succeed, grow thriving careers and overcome obstacles to success in the Salesforce ecosystem. We are thrilled to be sending a team of three to Raleigh to attend this important event. Marisa Lopez, Mandy Kutscheid and yours truly (Pamela Fitch) look forward to connecting with attendees there. Better yet, visit us at the Salesforce.org booth from 11:45-1:00 on Thursday or from 1:00-2:00 on Friday. 

We have identified two big priorities in attending this event in Raleigh. The first is to learn firsthand from new and seasoned Black Salesforce professionals in a conference setting that highlights and celebrates their contributions to the Salesforce ecosystem. We also want to share the opportunities that are available for professionals at Salesforce implementation and ISV partners like our company.  We are participating in the hiring fair to promote the roles we are actively recruiting for at our company. Interested to learn more? Check out our open positions. We are always looking to connect with interested candidates. Plus, don’t miss the opportunity to connect with Mandy at the hiring fair at Dreamin’ in Color from 10:00-11:00 on Friday.   

We can’t wait to connect with folks at Dreamin’ in Color. Hope to see you there!

At Exponent Partners, our purpose is to help nonprofits achieve greater social impact through radically better use of information systems. From our inception, we’ve worked to create long-term partnerships with nonprofit organizations that are committed to positive, progressive, systemic social change. Exponent Partners’ vision of a just and equitable society demands social changemakers as powerful as business and government. The actions in the last 24 hours by the Supreme Court in overturning Roe v. Wade, politicizing gun control, and overtly threatening gay marriage rights proves how essential this strength is. So it is especially important at times like this that our actions and decisions are aligned to our core values of diversity, learning, innovation, and impact, and to our core purpose of supporting social changemakers with all our work. And as a B Corporation and a California Benefit Corporation, we strive to hold our organization to the highest standards for social performance. 

We stand with the change-making nonprofit organizations that are working tirelessly to eliminate systemic barriers of oppression and to fix what’s broken in our society. We are dedicated to investing in the work that fosters true systemic social progress. As a social venture working for nonprofits, we support the changemakers who are making a difference in their specific areas and with the communities they serve.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by world events right now, and to not know whether your individual actions can make any difference. For us, working closely with our changemaking clients and supporting them to do more of the critical work they do helps us stay aligned with our purpose and our values. We will continue to work tirelessly to support our nonprofit clients because seeing them increase their social impact is our way of working toward a more just and equitable world. 

This Salesforce Summer Release 22′ recap is brought to you by Exponent Partners’ Customer Success team.

It’s that time of year again: Salesforce is releasing another new version of their platform. This time around, we’ll get to see a bunch of cool new features and functionality—but before you go searching for them, take a moment to really consider what they mean for you as an admin or developer. And if you’re a user, don’t forget to check out the features coming your way and to pass this along to your Salesforce system administrator!

When will the release happen? 

There are three possible dates where the release may affect your organization. So you might be wondering: How do I find the exact date when the upgrade is scheduled for my org? 

On the Salesforce Trust site, you can check the Maintenance Calendar to look up your org instance or domain to crosscheck for the exact day the release will update in your instance.

It will be one of these three dates: 

• May 21st, 2022
• June 4th, 2022
• June 11th, 2022

So what are some top features in the Salesforce Summer 22’ release to keep your eye out for? 

Custom Address Field

A custom address field that functions in the same fashion as the standard address field but you will need to have state and Country/Territory picklists configured first. Otherwise, the new field isn’t available. 

Filter Related Lists

You can now create custom-related lists that can be filtered to display only when particular criteria are met. This is configured as a new component for Lightning pages: ‘Dynamic Related List – Single’.  You can configure which fields are displayed, the order they are displayed, the number of records to display, and select which actions are available. 

Do More With Picklists

If you love productivity, you’ll enjoy the new functionality to delete, deactivate, activate and replace multiple custom picklist field values at once!  

Productivity lover you say? What’s even better is that you can now receive an email when custom picklist fields have more than 4,000 inactive values instead of checking each field individually. You can also bulk delete the inactive picklist values in custom picklist fields. Lastly, instead of just noting that there is a duplicate picklist value when you are adding a new picklist, the error message will tell you which value is a duplicate.

Just remember to opt into Advanced Picklist Values Management (Beta) in Picklist Settings under Setup to use these new picklist features. 

Do More With Reports

If you want to limit the number of results showing in tabular reports, you can now set a row limit so only the first X records show in Lighting Experience. Be sure to sort by a column first so the option to add a row limit becomes available. 

Summary functions now include Median as an option and you can edit multiple fields and rows inline in a report without needing to rerun each time.

Highlight Feature: Sort Report Types by Object

You can now filter on specific objects when creating a new report. This service is in Beta, but you can still try it out! 

Highlight Feature: Customize Cumulative Rollup Names

In the Summer ‘22 release, you are now able to customize cumulative rollup names. This means that you can change the label of a cumulative rollup. This does not impact regular rollups, which already have this capability.

Marketing Cloud is rebranding!! So who’s that feature? Here are some changing terms to keep your eye on: 

• Messaging/Journeys/ → Marketing Cloud Engagement
• Interaction Studio → Marketing Cloud Personalization
• Datorama → Marketing Cloud Intelligence
• Salesforce CDP → Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform
• Advertising Studio → Marketing Cloud Advertising
• Pardot → Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

So how can Salesforce System Admins prepare for this release?

Get started by reviewing these detailed released notes.  It’s important to know how and when features become available.  In preparation, we highly recommend bookmarking the feature list as a quick reference to find out what is enabled for all users, enabled for system admins, if it requires direct action before users can benefit from the feature, and what you’ll need to contact Salesforce to enable. 

Be sure to register for a Salesforce My Domain if you do not already have one since the Summer release will require all organizations to have a My Domain. If you don’t have a My Domain, then claim and register your brand name. Claim your domain name now and deploy it in your sandbox later. Learn more about My Domain here. 

Then get ready to have some fun by exploring the new picklists setting in the setup tab. Look around this tab and activate any beta features you want to test out for your organization. Lastly, be sure to address any pending critical updates which can be found in Setup. 

If you have questions about any of these updates, our customer success team provides regular updates on Salesforce releases and can help you understand what these changes mean for your organization. Contact us to learn more about our customer success and managed services offerings. 

Hey, reader. We see you. We see that you’re struggling, that you’re overwhelmed, that quite possibly you didn’t realize you would be acting as your organization’s Salesforce admin on top of your other responsibilities, yet here you are. A common way to describe your role is “ad hoc admin”. And trust us – you are definitely not alone! We understand where you’re coming from because we’ve been in your shoes. Basically, we would love to help you get some support. This support may come in the form of working with an external virtual administrator (also known as virtual admin or “VA”). A virtual admin is a very real person whose job is to help you focus, prioritize, and execute on changes to your system, reporting, keeping up with system upgrades, and generally keeping your users happy. Is it hard to know whether working with a virtual admin is the right move for you? Let’s start with some of the most common pains that Salesforce admins at nonprofit organizations face and then talk about how enlisting an experienced and knowledgeable VA can help you overcome them. At the end of the day, you are not alone and it doesn’t have to be this way! Read on to learn more.

You’re constantly reinventing the wheel

Many ad hoc admins can get stuck in the cycle of having to continually invent – or reinvent – ways to address issues with their system or handle requests as they come up. This can lead to frustration, burnout, and inefficient or overly complicated processes. (See our second point below.) An experienced virtual admin has a perspective that’s informed by their work with many other organizations in addition to their specialized training. They know what’s been successful for organizations like yours, so you don’t have to feel like you’re starting from scratch every time. Virtual admins help align your organization with best practices and offer a helpful perspective based on their wide range of exposure to other organizations.  

Your organization has complex needs

Salesforce environments in the nonprofit space can be a labyrinth to navigate; full of complicated automations and a lack of knowledge or documentation about why things are the way they are. It’s super common for urgent issues to push that critical documentation or important big-picture item to the back burner. The impact of that is often felt much later: when you have staff turnover, or need to adjust something you built a year ago and can’t remember why you decided on that particular approach. This can make it very hard for internal admins to see the forest for the trees, scale up effectively or make the best decisions about how to align ad hoc requests with the overall business objectives. Virtual admins can help break through some of these barriers and identify the best ways to streamline and optimize your environment. Additionally, they consider the ripple effect of any updates or changes to existing automations, helping ensure you can get the result you need without making things even more complicated.  

Too many cooks in the kitchen

A lot of organizations, particularly smaller to medium-sized ones where staff are asked to wear lots of different hats in order to make the most of limited resources, have too many Salesforce users with the ability to change settings and access admin-level processes in their environments. This can result in people inadvertently working against each other, duplicating work or creating environments that are increasingly difficult to navigate, especially for new staff. Virtual admins can help put structure and process around any admin-level change to the Salesforce environment, with a goal of making things easier rather than more complicated. Having a specialized expert owning the administration of your environment will help keep things on track when things pop up, which they always do. Virtual admins can help keep the executive needs, user needs and system all aligned and ensure that any changes in setup are carefully considered.   

It’s hard to measure your impact

Nonprofit organizations, particularly in human services, often struggle to produce the data or reporting needed to accurately measure and demonstrate their impact. Measuring and demonstrating impact is critical when it comes to accessing funding or grants that help keep critical programs running. Ad hoc admins are often so overwhelmed with user-level requests and keeping the lights on (so to speak) that aligning the system to effectively measuring impact can feel like too much to manage. In comes the virtual admin! Virtual admins can provide the critical professional guidance and best practices to help organizations get out of the weeds of the day-to-day and focus on what matters most for long-term sustainability: measuring and demonstrating their social impact. 

If the points above strike a chord with you, then perhaps it’s time to talk to your leadership about working with a Salesforce virtual administrator. Interested to learn more about the virtual admin services offered through the Customer Success Center at Exponent Partners? Check this out. Better yet, reach out to us.