Cross-Functional CRM Staffing and Reorganization (2023-24)
Over the course of 9 months, Justin worked closely with CARE USA’s Chief Information Officer in the Digital (IT) Department and AVP of Operations, Planning & Analysis in the Resource Development Department to reassess the staffing roles and structures supporting CARE’s fundraising CRM on Salesforce NPSP and related marketing and analytics technologies.
CARE brought on nonprofit consultancy Cake Byte in the first half of 2023 to assess how the organization was leveraging Salesforce to support fundraising. Working closely with both CRM technology experts in Digital and subject matter experts in Resource Development, Cake Byte brought in Justin in the summer of 2023 to lay out several high-level organizational design options for CARE to consider as a direction of travel.
Following on from those preliminary designs, CARE then engaged Justin to lead a full CRM Organizational Design Assessment through the fall and winter of 2023-2024, where he interviewed over 50 CARE staff members to understand the organization’s goals and pain points related to CRM and explore potential resourcing options to alleviate friction and facilitate more strategic, scalable use of the Salesforce platform.
The resulting design created role specialization opportunities for the existing CRM technical staff in Digital, and recommended additional capacity to support CARE’s evolving needs related to marketing technology and data infrastructure. It also laid the groundwork for a new “bridging” Development Data & Systems team in Resource Development that would serve as the business-side partner to the Digital CRM team. This structure allowed for more shared, “programmatic” ownership of the Salesforce NPSP fundraising product, allowing technical teams to focus on the solutioning and administration of the software while business-side teams took the lead on user support, training, and change management for fundraising users; prioritizing and translating fundraising requirements for the Salesforce roadmap; connecting the strategic needs of CARE’s Mass and Mid-Level fundraising teams to their marketing data and tools; and providing dedicated support for data quality efforts.
CARE began implementing the new staffing model in the spring of 2024. Activities and outcomes for this project included:
- Developing the structure, roles, and role descriptions for a new Development Data & Systems team reporting to Resource Development
- Updating and creating new role descriptions to enable Digital CRM staff to specialize in areas of Salesforce product management and administration, Tier 2 support, marketing technology administration, and data engineering
- Conducting skills and interest assessments of current staff to align them with new roles, identify skill gaps, and recommend training to prepare staff to take on new roles
- Establishing the foundation for a triage-based user support model shared between Resource Development and Digital, leveraging new specialties and Salesforce case routing to facilitate a smoother, more transparent user experience
- Laid the programmatic groundwork for an ongoing partnership between Resource Development and Digital to collaborate more effectively to evolve Salesforce in lock-step with the evolving strategies and needs of CARE’s fundraising programs
