North Bay Housing Coalition
“
I believe in technology’s ability to create efficiencies for nonprofits to provide services. I really feel strongly that we need to access all the technology possible. We need to optimize gathering, collecting, and storing data so we can pull reports and communicate what’s happening back to our boards and communities. This information is so valuable to our mission, our goals, and of course, each individual.
Mary Eble
Executive Director
ORG LOCATION
Fairfield, CA
TYPE OF SERVICE
Housing Services
STAFF SIZE
~10
FAVORITE FEATURE
Integrating Everything into one Database
A Database Makeover for North Bay Housing Coalition
Why not just have one powerful database that's very customizable and allows you to structure all your data exactly how you need? I don't see the point in having something that's just cookie cutter, because no nonprofit is a cookie cutter, right?
Mary
North Bay Housing Coalition (NBHC) serves clients with developmental disabilities and has three main programs. First is creating and managing housing for their clients. The second is helping their clients find and apply to housing. And the third is running a special needs trust program for about 250 beneficiaries with around $20 million under management. Needless to say, there’s a lot of different kinds of data that NBHC has to manage including client data, program data, and data about tracking staff time for billing reasons.
Mary, NBHC's Executive Director, and the NBHC team are always looking for new and better ways to serve their clients. They were already using a Salesforce database when I began working with them. As many resourceful nonprofits do, they had a mix of volunteers, consultants, and staff building their database from the very beginning.
The upside of this was its minimal cost. The downside was that the database system was a bit chaotic with inconsistent fields and input affecting data accuracy.
Before Patrick started working with us, we’d been in a Frankenstein process and the database reflected that. What is all this stuff? What are these random accounts and fields? It’s been a lot of cleanup.
I'm jealous of people who get to have Patrick starting from scratch. I've got the scars to prove how difficult it can be trying to piece things together without that expertise – financial scars too. It was a real bomb to work with some other Salesforce consultants. Starting off with someone with his level of expertise is such a gift.
Mary
A Drive to Make Everything Efficient
Part of Mary’s drive to make everything extremely efficient includes automating as much as possible. This both saves staff time and also reduces input errors. One such example is a structured intake process I designed for them so that staff don't forget to ask questions and ensures that data is going to the right places.
Salesforce automations eliminate a lot of human error for us. Making sure a piece of data goes into the right place may sound trivial, but it’s not. Because if it's in the wrong place, then we can't track it correctly and that means we can't generate the right reports and dashboards.
Mary
Another huge time-saving process was created to fulfill NBHC’s agreement with one of their funders. NBHC is required to send a funder a monthly report for each client. The report must include a list accounting for every minute service provided, and each one is sent to the client’s specific case manager employed by the funder. Currently NBHC sends about 60 or 70 reports each month.
The process has evolved considerably. The first version entailed cutting, pasting, creating, and emailing reports individually. Even with fewer clients, it still took Mary hours each month. The second version entailed a lot of complicated exports and formatting and a mail merge, which saved time, but was very error-prone and still took a while.
Now, the correct clients are simply selected in Salesforce, a single button is pressed, and the reports automatically go out with all the right data to all the right people. It now takes just a few minutes.
In terms of our monthly reports, we really had to be more efficient as we have to do them since it’s part of our contract. But remembering how long it used to take... Oh my gosh. I used to send them out one-by-one. I mean, I’m still so in awe of what we have now. Kimberly, our Executive Assistant, and I get so excited about Salesforce because we've seen how things used to be and so fully understand how much time it’s saving us.
Mary
Automatic Alerts When They're Needed Most
NBHC has also made very good use of alerts. As with many nonprofits, NBHC has to track many different kinds of dates for each client. The most important for them is knowing when their authorization to provide services is ending. Before, they just had a spreadsheet that they would need to periodically check. Now, they'll receive an email notification to their inbox as well as an alert within Salesforce. They can also click a few buttons and see a list of clients who have expiration dates in the near future.
Other examples include tracking when clients were last worked with – so that no clients fall through the cracks. Another really important one is tracking the hours that each client is worked with because each client has a maximum allowed number of hours. With Salesforce, email notifications are sent when clients remaining hours fall below a certain level. These notifications save money and headaches.
I love the alerts we’ve created. So when – uh-oh! – time is starting to run out for our services with a client, we get notified: make sure you take care of this! Or gosh, we can check the report we have on a dashboard that lets us know when a client hasn’t been worked with in the last 15 days.
Without Salesforce, it's just too much to keep in one's head. It just can’t be done. And nor should it. I want things out of people's head and into the database. That way other people can see it too. If someone’s out sick that day, we need to be able to see the notes!
Mary
On working with Patrick
One of Patrick’s main strengths is how well he listens: he’s really listening. To me, that’s one of the the most important things he offers. He’s got great technical expertise, but from my experience that’s not enough. He takes what I'm saying and makes sense of it. He often says: "What I hear you saying is such-and-such." He repeats it back to me, and helps me dig deeper into what really needs to happen here. It gives me the confidence that he understands what I need and we're headed in the right direction.
mary
Challenges
Results
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