When Harlem Pride reached out to KELL, the organization had already implemented the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. For most tasks, NPSP worked perfectly, right out of the box. But Harlem Pride needed certain customizations. Chief among these was a more flexible connection between the recipient of a gift membership and the person who originally paid.
“We have a lot of people who buy two or three memberships at a time, and of course for Salesforce that would be one contact with one big gift,” said Carmen Neely, President of Harlem Pride. The all-volunteer organization found it difficult to target the right person for renewal. In addition, a lack of integration with certain third-party apps resulted in wasted time.
In the organization’s sixth year, however, Harlem Pride hit a milestone in terms of both the success of its events and the size of its budget. It was time to unleash the full power of Salesforce. Fortunately, the KELL Partners team has tons of experience helping nonprofits go faster and further with the platform.
“What the Salesforce implementation is going to help us do is use the data to make better decisions,” said Neely. As a fully customizable relational database, Salesforce has tons of built-in features for recognizing connections between pieces of stored information. But it’s also adaptable to unique business models.
As a first step, KELL Partners Senior Project Manager Jitschak Rosenbloom integrated Salesforce with the add-ons that Harlem Pride uses. Now, volunteers spend less time on reporting and more on programs.
“It’s just automatic now,” said Neely. “Before we were pulling reports from multiple sources and then having to manually re-consolidate it.” She estimates the integrations have cut reporting time by 20%.
In addition, Rosenbloom created custom objects to redefine the fundamental structure of memberships in Salesforce. “We can now track our membership in the way that we like,” said Neely.
KELL also created a seamless architecture on which Harlem Pride can continue to build. They provide workshops on health, trans needs, homeless youth and other issues of importance to the community. With Salesforce, they are integrating additional apps to see what programs truly help, what’s needed, and who wants to be more involved.
After wrapping up their most successful fundraiser, Harlem Pride’s board feels inspired about the future. “It was larger than ever before, higher attendance, greater visibility,” said Carmen. “And now just internally we’ll be able to see what these numbers really mean when we have our retreat next month.”