Congratulations! You’ve made the important decision to use Salesforce to provide better tracking and insights on your fundraising, programs, and constituents. As you embark on this journey, it’s important to ensure you tap into the right people to achieve project success. We’re here to help with a review of key team member roles and a breakdown of how they should be involved at each stage of the project.

 

Dream Team, Engage!

A Salesforce implementation is more than just a technical upgrade. This process will test communication between staff members and departments, dig into process efficiency, reveal pain points, and require a deep degree of teamwork. Change can be scary – but with the collaboration of a thoughtfully built team, you’re sure to be successful! Let’s get into the key players.

 

Central Executive

Often holding the title of CEO, COO or Executive Director, this person acts as a decision maker and advocate throughout the Salesforce implementation project. The Central Executive has a bird’s eye view of your nonprofit organization with the ability to identify common threads between teams and offer an understanding of how processes should fit together. This person can also help boost cooperation across the organization by communicating with department heads and end users about the benefits of actively engaging in the process. Finally, the Central Executive will be the one to give approvals and make final decisions such as the project’s Statement of Work, purchases of marketing and data capture tools, or other products.

 

Internal Coordinator

This individual serves as the point of contact for communication with the BTH Implementation Consultant, oversees meetings and timelines, ensures that teams have provided the consultant with necessary data and process information, and makes sure outstanding questions get answered. If the Central Executive communicates with team or department heads on a high level, the Internal Coordinator is the boots-on-the-ground equivalent.

 

Technical Resource

This person provides support on all technical matters and is either versed or becoming versed in Salesforce. During implementation, the Technical Resource provides information about “legacy” systems or technologies such as databases and fundraising software that were used prior to migrating to Salesforce. Once implementation is complete, the Technical Resource often steps into the role of a Salesforce Administrator, helping to support users, and regularly maintains and updates the Salesforce instance as necessary.

 

Process Owners

Process Owners are representatives of each team or department who have an excellent understanding of their team’s processes. What exactly are processes? Think of them as all of the steps in the journey from Point A to Point Z. Say you have a nonprofit and someone is interested in volunteering. First, they might sign up on a form through the website. Then, they become a Lead in Salesforce and the Volunteer Coordinator is assigned to confirm their volunteer time slot. Process Owners define these steps and are instrumental in revealing the inefficiencies that a Salesforce Implementation should help to address.

 

Data Owners

Data Owners hold the important responsibilities of aggregating all of their organization’s existing data, pinpointing the most important data points, cleaning and preparing data for import, and assisting with mapping existing data to new Salesforce fields. During a Salesforce implementation, Data Owners provide immense support during the Development and Data Migration project phases. A common Salesforce saying is, “Bad data in, bad data out.” Similar to how Process owners must identify inefficiencies and determine whether existing processes continue to serve the organization’s best interests, Data Owners must decide what information should be migrated from existing systems into Salesforce.

 

Now that you know who your key team members should be, you’re ready to review the Stages of Salesforce Implementation. 

 

 

Written by: Lily Moseley
Lily is a certified Salesforce Administrator and Solution Consultant with 5+ years of experience in the nonprofit industry. Lily is a lifelong writer and has enjoyed writing and editing for publications such as the Northeastern University Political Review and Science Po’s La Gazelle.