Grief-Support Agency Upgrades to Nonprofit Starter Pack 3

By: Karen Fitton, Consultant, Bigger Boat Consulting

“By upgrading to Nonprofit Starter Pack 3, we now have a more powerful platform to track our work. Finding answers is also easier with the NPSP 3 documentation and the Power of Us Hub community.”
-Stephanie Murray, Development Director, The Healing Center

Situation

The Healing Center is a grief-support community for adults, children and families. They offer a unique, long-term, multi-faceted approach to grief support, combining support with informal events and social networks. When they approached Bigger Boat Consulting, a Salesforce.org Impact Partner, they were using Salesforce with an outdated version of Nonprofit Starter Pack 2 for fund development. In addition to upgrading to Nonprofit Starter Pack 3, they wanted to expand their use of Salesforce to manage their programs as well.

These programs include a number of support groups to help adults, teens and children grieve the loss of a loved one. They wanted to track and understand who was facilitating the groups, which clients attended which groups, and metrics on group attendance (both duplicated and de-duplicated). They also wanted to know who had stopped attending a group so they could proactively follow up, check in, and make sure they were providing the best support possible. Most of this information was maintained in disparate spreadsheets, and they wanted to centralize it in Salesforce.

What was done

We upgraded The Healing Center to Nonprofit Starter Pack 3 with the Household Account Model and added key functionality for program management.

Often, multiple family members are participating in different support groups, and understanding those connections and managing those participants as a family group is critical. Luckily, NPSP 3’s Household Account Model is designed for exactly this! The Healing Center can now proactively reach out to an entire household on or around key dates for the deceased (death date, birthday), knowing that these times can be particularly tough for grieving family members.

Results

After this successful upgrade to NPSP 3 and coaching for their staff, The Healing Center is now using the Nonprofit Starter Pack for moves management for donors, volunteer and events management, and for tracking and managing the various relationships between the support group members and the deceased. Thanks to NPSP 3’s bi-weekly push upgrades, The Healing Center can now rest assured that they’re always up to date with the latest version. With the added customizations for program management, they better understand who is attending support groups and more importantly, who has stopped attending, so they can reach out and provide the best support possible to families in need.

Looking for some help with the upgrade? Visit biggerboatconsulting.com. And don’t forget to register for the Upgrade Webinar!