The world’s leading CRM platform is transforming the way NGOs deliver, measure, and improve programs.
Over 32,000 nonprofits around the globe use Salesforce for CRM, but over the last decade the world’s leading cloud-computing platform has also steadily become a leading platform for impact measurement, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and program management. In this post, we profile seven nonprofits who are leading the way in leveraging Salesforce to better understand their impact and use data to drive more effective programs and outcomes. Want to discuss how your organization can take advantage of Salesforce for impact measurement and program management? Drop us a line – we’d love to help out!
Aga Khan Foundation (Europe, Africa, Asia)
Having delivered innovative community development programs for over 50 years, the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) uses Salesforce and Amp Impact to track the reach of its programs across 20 countries and 7 sectors: health, education, early childhood development, economic inclusion, habitat, civil society, and agriculture / food security. AKF and Vera presented at Dreamforce 2017, with a live demo on Amp Impact has been tailored to AKF’s needs (video below). AKF started its Salesforce-based M&E journey in 2015, when it moved its Global Education Management Information System (GEMIS) off of Excel and onto Salesforce to track student enrolment and teacher training and over 6000 schools (see a video of their Dreamforce 2016 presentation here). With support from Salesforce.org, AKF and Vera have also developed a Salesforce-enabled, offline Android app for teachers to track student attendance, performance, and learning outcomes.
Grassroot Soccer (Africa)
Managing an innovative sport-based HIV prevention program across 30+ countries, Grassroot Soccer (GRS) was one of the early pioneers of Salesforce-based M&E, having used Salesforce to track its programs and participants since 2009. The so-called Skillz Scoreboard now provides detailed intelligence on the organization’s work with over 100,000 young people each year, over a million all-time. GRS has gone further, using Salesforce to manage randomized controlled trials in South Africa and Zimbabwe and to send its beneficiaries SMS’s that reinforce key curriculum content. Founder and CEO Tommy Clark says the system “has created a culture of transparency, accountability, and data-driven decision making.”
Skoll Foundation (USA)
A leading funder of entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, the Skoll Foundation has used Salesforce to manage its grants since 2005. In collaboration with Vera Solutions and Exponent Partners (and with support from a Salesforce.org grant), Skoll took its system further in 2015-2016, launching a new Profiles Platform on Salesforce Communities to strengthen reporting from grant recipients to Skoll on everything from annual results on key performance metrics to financials to key changes in staff or strategy. Built on an early version of the Amp Impact data model, Skoll’s community helped strengthen and validate Amp’s market-readiness.
In a 2016 Dreamforce presentation, Ehren Reed, Skoll’s Director of Evaluation, called it “a shared online platform that is accessible, usable, editable by all the foundation staff as well as all of our awardees. In essence, they now have access to our Salesforce database—everything we know about them. [They can] see that information and update it so that we have a dynamic, shared understanding of where we all are.”
Prior to the platform, Reed admits “it was the epic Swiss cheese of data. At best, we knew some of this information for some years for some grantees. I cannot overstate how dramatically this has transformed our practice from the Swiss-cheese operation to where we now are.”
Women Win (Netherlands, global)
A global leader in girls’ empowerment through sport, Women Win has been using Salesforce to measure impact since 2012, tracking partnerships and programs that support over 2 million adolescent girls in over 100 countries. Vera worked with Women Win to launch a global M&E system that they have now been using for over five years. Reflecting on the move to Salesforce, Impact Manager, Manu Wildschut says: “Salesforce provides a user-friendly platform and database that allows both Women Win and our partners in the field to better manage, store and analyze a much broader range of data for better results. This has led to very positive and successful outcomes. Our program partners can make informed and evidence based decisions through intuitive and interactive reports and dashboards in Salesforce. As an organization, we are better able to learn, share and demonstrate the collective impact of all gender-sensitive sport and life skills programs.”
TechnoServe (USA, global)
TechnoServe promotes business solutions to poverty, linking people to information, capital, and markets. Working with individuals and businesses to address local or regional constraints that prevent market systems from operating efficiently, TechnoServe relies on strong data systems to track its impact and effectiveness both locally and globally (working across 29 countries). TechnoServe has used TaroWorks to monitor programs in Latin America and CommCare to track its work in East Africa training over 60,000 coffee farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda. In both cases, they push real-time data collected offline on mobile devices to a Salesforce database enabling “project managers [to] use scheduled and adhoc reports to determine the effectiveness of the trainers who deliver the training.” Beyond these mobile integrations, TechnoServe also uses a ‘Corporate Measurement’ Salesforce app built in collaboration with Vera Solutions to track aggregate results against their key performance indicators (like incremental financial benefit and adoption of sustainable farming practices) in all 29 countries. The app feeds data to PowerBI for dynamic visualizations.
myAgro (West Africa)
myAgro is a social enterprise working in Mali and Senegal helping small-scale farmers save for seeds, fertilizer, equipment, and training. To date, they have served over 40,000 farmers, with net income increases of $150-300 per year. Vera Solutions and myAgro first worked together in 2013 to move the organization’s day-to-day program processes off Excel and onto the cloud. The solution leverages Telerivet to send and receive SMS’s, integrating with a Salesforce CRM–through via OpenFn.org–that stores everything they know about each farmer, from demographic information to savings goals to real-time savings data. “We’re able to aggregate real-time data to see program trends across the board,” said myAgro Development Director Tamara Chao in a 2015 Dreamforce presentation. This really helps us improve our operational efficiencies because we can see what’s really resonating with farmers and where we need to do better.” myAgro has since further built upon the system, integrating with CommCare to streamline farmer enrollment. The system is playing a crucial role as myAgro scales to serve 1 million farmers by 2025.
BOMA Project (Kenya)
The BOMA project implements a poverty graduation model for ultra-poor women in the drylands in Africa, helping them start small businesses to better support their families. Having replaced a slow and cumbersome, paper/Excel-based data collection process, BOMA now uses TaroWorks for mobile data collection to qualify women for the program and connect them to savings groups as well as to track progress among groups. Like TechnoServe and myAgro, Boma pushes the mobile data to Salesforce to monitor and analyze program data week-to-week and month-to-month. Since 2009, Boma has enrolled over 15,000 women, established over 800 savings groups, and helped launch over 5,000 businesses.
“There was critical loss for program decisions,” said Boma’s Director of Strategic Partnerships Jaya Tiwari, speaking of the old paper-based system during a Dreamforce 2016 presentation. “If we take 10 weeks to know a participant is struggling or a mentor is struggling, then we’re really not going to meet our target.” Of the move onto TaroWorks and Salesforce, she said, “We went from 8-10 weeks for decision-making to more like overnight….from our M&E team in Nanyuki to our field team in Marsabit to Manchester, Vermont we all look at this data so we can make quick decisions and efficient delegation of resources ”
Resources:
“Amplify Impact: A Live Demo on Managing Indicators to Track Performance.” Aga Khan Foundation, Vera Solutions, Salesforce.org, Dreamforce 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OydF1kPQfAo
“Global Impact: Tracking Programs & Measuring Outcomes Across Multiple Continents.” Aga Khan Foundation, Vera Solutions, Dreamforce 2016: https://www.salesforce.com/video/297110/
“Grassroot Soccer Impacts 100,000 Young People a Year with Salesforce.” Salesforce.org: www.salesforce.org/stories/grassroot-soccer/
“Creating a Digital Foundation.” Skoll Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dreamforce 2016: https://www.salesforce.com/video/458867/
“Women Win impacts the lives of girls and women through sport using Salesforce.” Salesforce.org: http://www.salesforce.org/stories/women-win/
“Monitoring Programs and Collecting Data in Challenging Environments.” The Boma Project and Vera Solutions, Dreamforce 2016: https://www.salesforce.com/video/297028/
“Digitizing Coffee Agronomy Training & Monitoring.” Dimagi Blog.
https://www.dimagi.com/blog/digitizing-coffee-agronomy-training-monitoring/
“Innovator Demo: Empowering Farmers In West Africa With SMS-Based Services.” Salesforce.org, myAgro, OpenFn, Dreamforce 2015.
https://www.salesforce.com/video/194275/
“Monitoring Programs & Collecting Data In Challenging Environments.” Salesforce.org, Boma Project, and Vera Solutions, Dreamforce 2016.
