People Serving People

The Challenge

People Serving People manages the largest and most comprehensive emergency shelter for families experiencing homelessness in Minnesota and serves as a dedicated leader in homelessness prevention. They had a vision to grow their capacity to serve their community, but the current state of their technology tools posed many challenges to accomplish their vision. Their challenges included:

• Development and volunteer data was scattered across a failing and inflexible Microsoft Dynamics database, multiple spreadsheets, personal emails and other siloed systems which prevented the team from collaborating in their work with donors and volunteers.
• Time spent on administrative tasks was taking time away from higher value fundraising activities.
• Management of grant writing, which funded many of their programs, was done with spreadsheets which took a great deal of administrative time and made reporting very challenging.

The Solution

People Serving People engaged Redpath to customize Salesforce NPSP as a single source of truth—all their documentation was available in one place—that could be used uniformly across the Development team to gain a 360-degree view of their constituents and optimize staff time. Redpath worked with People Serving People to create a system that:

• Leveraged Salesforce integrations with Classy, Outlook and MailChimp to automatically consolidate event registrations, online giving and communications into Salesforce as a single source of truth.
• Streamlined the full cycle of tracking a donation from the point of request all the way through to reporting on those gifts.
• Created an automated process to efficiently manage tasks assigned to a constantly rotating staff of intern grant writers.

The Results

The People Serving People Development staff now has a centralized work center in Salesforce NPSP that has allowed them to:

• View each constituent's giving history, event attendance, volunteer engagements and history of communication in a way that can be easily viewed and reported upon by all team members.
• Reduced time spent on administrative tasks by an estimated 10%, allowing for staff to focus on higher value tasks and engagements.
• Efficiently manage a rotating staff of grant writing interns with automated deliverable creation and easy tracking, thus allowing more time to be spent on valuable grant writing tasks.