Like every nonprofit, the ultimate goal for Montana Conservation Corps is doing more with less—with time being the organization’s most valuable commodity. MCC’s outdoor youth leadership training programs are delivered over-prescriptive phases that often require teams to work against the clock (not to mention the changing seasons) on projects involving fuel reduction, weatherization, watershed restoration, fencing, biological research, habitat enhancement, and trail work.
When You Don’t Have Time for Inefficient CRM Solutions
But time wasn’t a luxury MCC had when users began to spot serious problems—namely, lags in user adoption and training—within their fundraiser data management processes. Given the organization’s goal of completing 200 projects per year, leaders knew that waiting to tackle the issues would be catastrophic for their mission.
Now IT Matters launched a partnership with MCC that started with an initial two-week Assessment. During that time our experts determined the best first step would be to migrate MCC from the two-access instance they had been using to a Salesforce setup that would allow them to double the number of participants in the system without increasing their staff.
How Year-Long Salesforce Guidance Optimizes Decision Making
From there, Now IT Matters moved into an intensive Guidance engagement. Over the course of 12 months, we provided insight for both individuals and groups to help them program and utilize Salesforce to meet their organizational goals. Jointly, our teams created a brain trust to optimize the organization’s decision-making capabilities.
This set the stage for tackling the three areas of focus we identified moving into the Build phase of our engagement with MCC:
- Enhancing leadership development;
- Reducing duplicate data and creating alignment for regional leaders; and
- Decreasing reporting time for management crews.
Success would call for combining MCC’s fundraising Access database and member/project Access database into one streamlined Salesforce system, actions we took with the ultimate goal of closing the gaps in MCC’s system that had been causing precious time—and even more precious dollars—to slip through the cracks.
Teaming with Nonprofit Leadership to Boost Confidence and Drive Results
In the final Support stage of our work with MCC, we augmented the organization’s leadership team until they were able to find the right pacing and confidence to effectively manage their system without our help.
And manage, they have.
In the first year, MCC freed up more than 900 staff hours and saved upwards of $100,000 by doubling the number of system participants, eliminating redundancies and aligning regional leaders, and decreasing reporting time. In some cases, tasks that once took the better part of an hour can now be accomplished in under five minutes. Meanwhile, expanding internal expertise allowed key staff to focus on strategic vision, resulting in a 58% ROI.
The organization’s five-year outlook is even brighter, with planned enhancements and further optimization measures that will save MCC as much as $505,000 and result in a 200% ROI.
