Technology Assessment, Process Improvements & Migration Business Analysis for Grantmaking and IT Teams (2023-24)
The Feeding America National Office (FANO) internal grantmaking department called “Member Grants” has been using a legacy Grants Management System (GMS) for nearly ten years to administer outbound grants, applications, awards, and reports. However, it was unable to integrate with other key systems, difficult to accommodate the growing number of grants and reporting requests, and slowing performance.
FANO Member Grants, in partnership with the IT department, enlisted Simone Carvalho and Amanda Perkins of SKS to assess, validate, and recommend a path forward to migrate on to a shared instance of Salesforce administered by their IT team. SKS interviewed over 50 stakeholders from 12 different teams to document their Member Grants management processes and systems needs. From this holistic assessment, SKS created process maps to help identify workflow gaps, opportunities for improvement, and visualize a potential future state for internal users and external grant applicants.
In preparation for the GMS migration, SKS supported the FANO Member Grants and IT teams work together to (1) run a vendor selection process (RFP) and (2) implement a list of process improvement recommendations. By serving as strategic business analysts and workshop facilitators, Amanda and Simone have helped (1) develop a standardized approach to grant proposal scoring, (2) create a shared glossary of terms, and (3) establish a model cross-departmental working group to clarify grantmaking roles and responsibilities.
At the start of 2024, FANO kicked off their GMS migration project with their Solution Implementation Partner. Amanda continued to support the Member Grants team by providing critical change management and strategic business analysis capacity. She bridged the gap between the stakeholders and their vendor by translating user needs and technical terms and facilitated difficult decision-making conversations, ensuring the velocity of the GMS migration project was not hindered while also building trust and enhancing user adoption for the future.
Salesforce Migration Technology & Staffing Readiness Assessment (2021-2022)
After 4 years of using Salesforce NGO Connect (“NGOC”) as their donor CRM, Feeding America was still struggling with system performance and adoption. In early 2021, Salesforce announced plans to retire NGOC, and at this critical inflection point Feeding America sought to better ready themselves by enlisting Justin and Simone to conduct a holistic readiness assessment of staffing and capacity for the system migration. This included validating the choice to use Salesforce NPSP and envisioning a future-state data infrastructure to replace roundData.
Feeding America began using NGOC as their core donor CRM in 2017, supported by a back-end SQL database (“roundData”) used for direct marketing campaign segmentation, off- platform data storage, and reporting & analytics. However, due to their large data volume, labor-intensive processes, high barrier to entry for new users, and resulting workarounds, the data quality and day-to-day user experience for fundraisers was greatly impeded.
Justin and Simone interviewed a broad swath of stakeholders to document the gap between NGOC’s capabilities and where fundraisers, Philanthropy Operations, and IT staff were experiencing the most friction (conducting 8 requirements sessions with 23 stakeholders and interviewing 26 stakeholders representing 8 departments). We assessed the entire CRM “program” end-to-end, analyzing the fit-for-purpose of the Salesforce platform and underlying data infrastructure, as well as how the NGOC product was managed; how users were trained and supported on their use of the system; and where additional technical resources and business processes were needed to keep the CRM performant.
We proposed a 9-month programmatic approach to preparation and mobilization for the CRM migration that included specialized staff roles to enable large-scale tech change; creating a Data Governance framework; establishing a project charter and RACI; and providing strategic communication templates. Justin and Simone also led the selection of a solution implementation partner to help ensure a strong, well-resourced migration team.
