Building Healthier Communities with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

The Problem

Our client is the largest provider of integrated care in the southern United States. However, their data was anything but integrated. Processes related to grant, participant, and career management were spread between different booking, form, and time tracking systems. That meant that there was no source of truth to connect grants, participants, and their career development goals. Let’s break down the challenges of each.

Grant Management

Grant management is complicated, and manual processes make it even worse. It involves a web of stakeholders, workforce development teams, accounts payable, partners, and applicants all trying to stay on the same page. When people applied for grants, administrators manually transcribed the submissions into spreadsheets. Every update required more manual work, creating endless opportunities for errors, missed deadlines, lost files, and version control mistakes.

Each grant has unique quirks around budgets, reporting metrics, requirements, and deadlines. Spreadsheets just weren’t built to handle that complexity. Take document storage, for instance – the workforce development team couldn’t centrally store crucial documents or receipts. Even worse, communications between program leads, finance, legal, and the grants office were scattered across forgotten email threads.

The result? Gaps in the process stretched timelines and slowed the ability to deliver grants.

Participant Management

Managing participants was a juggling act, completely manual, and full of moving parts. Recruiting, collecting documents, tracking progress, handling finances, and measuring outcomes at every stage of the grant process? It was all pieced together with spreadsheets. Keeping track of details like purposes, types, descriptions, and contact info from evaluation to onboarding was a constant challenge. Participant success depends on timely communication about deadlines, funding priorities, and key events. Applicants could easily slip through the cracks without the right system in place.

Career Development

Career planning for grant participants is nearly impossible without a framework for goals, roles, and objectives. At our client, disorganized information made connecting participants with the right training opportunities difficult. And without automated systems, measuring long-term impact was a matter of guessing. Accurately tracking outcomes like completions, transfers, promotions, or employment was painstaking, making it challenging to repeat success.

The Solution

Penrod centralized processes, unified data, and drove smarter decisions with automation and insights in a custom-built Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud implementation.

First, we ditched the scattered spreadsheets and created a single source of truth. Program, participant, and grant data now live in one unified system. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud organizes the complex relationships between participants, employers, funders, and partners. Tracking grants, participants, training milestones, certifications, and job placements? A breeze.

Monitoring participant progress has never been easier. Our client can manage every grant applicant like a case, with each touchpoint and milestone documented from evaluation, to onboarding, to promotion.

With data unified, ROI analysis helps our client fill gaps in community health, measure the performance of grants, and repeat successful tactics. With the help of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, integrated data is helping our client deliver better integrated care.

The Results