Breaking the Mold: How University at Albany's Economic Development Office Uses Salesforce for Economic Growth Reporting

Welcome, everyone. Good morning. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for today's webinar, Breaking the Mold, How University at Albany's Economic Development Office Uses Salesforce for Economic Growth Reporting. I know the holidays and the end of the semester are right around the corner and that is an extremely busy time of the year for you guys. So we really do appreciate you taking the time to join us today. My name is Caitlin McLean, and I'm excited to share a success story with you guys today. We're going to explore how the University at Albany partnered with us at RedPath to enhance and document their processes. centralize their data in a way that benefits their team and other teams at the university and really give them the ability to report on economic growth and impact.

This webinar is being recorded. And it will be sent out. So if you wanted to look back on any of the information that we're sharing today or share it out With others, you are more than welcome to do so. Also, we have both the chat and the Q&A open throughout the webinar. And then we have some time saved at the end to answer questions or any comments that come through. So really quick, I wanted to just chat about red path. RedPath has been around for 15 years. We're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we support higher education and nonprofit customers. We've actually completed over 3,000 projects with over 450 organizations.

So we're very in tune with the mission oriented organizations. And we really love what we do and the impact that our work drives with folks like yourselves. So at RedPath, what truly sets us apart is our partnership model and the people behind it. So we take a very white glove treatment with our potential customers and clients. Our team doesn't just bring technical expertise

They bring dedication and a deep understanding of the industries that we serve. Many of us come directly from the world of college and universities. And mission-driven organizations. So we share a unique understanding of the goals that you guys are trying to achieve. And then for innovation centers and economic development offices like at U Albany, we know that your work is more about just programs and processes. We know that it is about supporting the entrepreneurs, driving economic growth. And really just creating that impact for your communities. that all motivates our team.

And when we partner with you, we are not just checking boxes on a feature list. We're really focused on making sure every aspect of your Salesforce implementation or project makes a measurable difference. Which brings me to our outcomes-based approach. So this is a cornerstone of how we work with clients like you, Albany. At RedPath, we don't just focus on implementing a new system. or delivering the latest shiny Salesforce product.

Instead, we make sure that we really understand your desired outcomes and what success looks like for your organization. We know for innovation centers. and economic development offices. That might mean expanding your programs, growing your outreach. Increasing your economic impact reporting or scaling your ability to support startups and entrepreneurs. We know that Salesforce is the tool, but achieving these outcomes is really the goal. We also love high engagement from our clients during a project. It's really fun when a client team is embracing the potential that Salesforce brings.

Like when they start asking for new page layouts or automations or features but Here's the thing. Without a focused outcome, it's really easy to fall into a common trap that we call a feature factory. So that's when you end up with a collection of a bunch of tools and automations that sound great individually, but then they don't align to your bigger goals. That's why at RedPath, we like to start with outcomes first. For U Albany, for example, it really was about creating and enabling the team to report on those economic impact metrics. So every feature we implemented was chosen because it supports that specific outcome. So I would like to introduce our champion over at UAlbany, Nancy Caviones. She is a program support specialist

In the innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, in the Division of Research and Economic Development at University at Albany. After eight years as a high school English teacher in the South Bronx, she embarked on 15 years of freelancing as a virtual assistant. specializing in crms Like website builds, email marketing, and other digital business tools for small business owners, indie authors, and indie publishers before joining the team at UAlbany. So she holds a bachelor's degree in teaching and learning from NYU and a master's in urban policy analysis from the new school.

She lives with her husband, their three children. Lola, the Black Lab, and Frank the kitten In New York's capital region, her guilty secret is burning through an untold number of romances and cozy mysteries on the Libby app. While piles and piles of books gather dust on her nightstand. So with that, I would like to turn it over to Nancy to give you all a closer look at UAlbany's journey. Hi, everyone. Good morning and thank you, Caitlin, for the info and for inviting us to do a webinar with you.

I'll just give a little background on our Salesforce org. Which currently consists of my office, which is the Office of Economic Development, Entrepreneurship, and Industry Partnerships. And also on our work is my colleague Ross Goodman's Center's which are the New York State Center for Advanced Technology and Nanomaterials and Nanoelectronics, otherwise known as the CAT. and the Center for Excellence in Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology, which we refer to as the CNN. And both of us are part of the University at Albany, which is one of four major university centers.

and the State University of New York City. otherwise known as SUNY. So our departments do really different things. But one thing that we have in common is that we are both charged with reporting economic metric data to the state. and to other stakeholders such as grant funding institutions like the National Science Foundation or other

institution, public and private, that give us money, basically. So a little bit about what is going on in our departments. My program manager is an incubator program, which includes a membership-based coworking space. We also run a collaborative program called Innovate 518, which is a state-funded innovation hotspot program. And we also run a regional national science foundation innovation corps training program for researchers who want to commercialize their work. Our office is overseen by our director of economic development, Maria Pidgeon. and the innovation entrepreneurship program is managed by our program director, Kelly Vuenin.

and supported by myself, the program support specialist So we're a very small team. We don't have an admin and we don't have our own IT staff. We had companies located in nonsensical space. We also have companies that are located off-site in the building. And then on Ross's side His centers are housed at the College of Nanotechnology Science and Engineering, otherwise known as CNSE. And they also work on transitioning innovation to commercial success.

And they also oversee industry compliant testbed facilities. for research, development, and deployment of nanotechnologies. So… was when I first came on board a little over a year ago, my office was… using a CRM that was incredibly buggy

didn't have good UI. There was no customer support really Our processes were kind of all over the place. And we didn't have a single source of truth in addition to the CRM that we were using to manage our programs in our incubator, we were also using the whole Microsoft suite of products, which we still use.

So we really needed something that was scalable and more efficient Our lead generation intern outside of these systems and everything is brought in to OCM. So we needed something to replace the CRM that we were using when I first came on board. It basically sunset without warning. They stopped offering updates, customer service. We couldn't get contact with anyone. And they also, all of our data within their system and we couldn't get it out. Because we didn't have that level of control

So BVLE needed a solution. Trevor place that and give us additional functionality that we were looking for. All right, so what were we looking for? Some of our goals. wanted to have something that would be a single source of truth. everything would be in this one place and this is where we would go. This is where we would end up. that I'm looking at, maybe you had spreadsheets all over the place.

We wanted to be more efficient in how we were managing data and analyzing our data We wanted to streamline our communication You know, we have lots of team chats all over the place. And we wanted to be able to have all our communication tied

to one topic in one place. We wanted to be able to focus on our priorities. that I'm doing a lot of no admin work and figuring things out. And we also wanted to reduce the administrative burden since we don't have an admin Specifically, we wanted to be able to track our programs We needed a solution for invoicing. We wanted to have better economic impact reporting.

You wanted a user interface that was more intuitive, and we also wanted scalability and something that would be easy to adapt. to our use case. um so We knew that the platform you wanted was Salesforce. But we needed a partner to help us implement all of this. um we

actually had a conversation with our counterparts at SUNY Buffalo who um who So that's a model for us in terms of what they were doing with entrepreneurship and industry partnerships and tracking their metrics. And their data, they were using Salesforce and they also had worked with Redpath So it was a direct recommendation to us from another university center in the Sydney system.

So the red path came highly recommended. So we… really like that red path. understood what it was like to work on a university project that was not student-centered. and looking kind of outside of that. student focus.

um we Um… specified med path as our partner when we were writing our proposal on our purchase acquisition and having that direct recommendation from another SUNY school really strengthened. our proposal. Okay. So what was it like to work with that path? And really was like a very collaborative and iterative process.

And it really helped us to kind of build and refine our processes, a lot of which were brand new. We were starting from scratch with some of these processes And other ones, we were trying to refine them. Myself and my colleague, Kelly Reardon, we're both new to the team. So we were kind of figuring things out together. And figuring out things as we went. Since we didn't really have like a formal CRM in place that was working. So through the discovery sessions with

Sandra, we were really able to really think about how we wanted to do things, why we were doing them, in what order we were doing them. And really, you know, challenge some assumptions we were making about what we thought was the best way to do things. So we worked with Santer and we worked with Mary, which was really, really

They helped us understand how what we wanted to do would work in Salesforce. Basically. And we also were kind of working back Because we knew what the end product needed to look like because there's certain reporting requirements, certain formats. certain data that have to be in there. So we looked at what we needed to end up with and worked backwards.

I designed to make sure that what was being built for us matched what needed to happen at the end. So aligning all of that. And we were really looking at Salesforce as a tool for growth. Which is something that we learn from SUNY Buffalo that we weren't just trying to replace what we had. We were trying to put a system in place that would enable us to grow. and scale.

all right so um have really just started using Salesforce, we wrapped up our project with red path In October, I think. And since then, we've been working on getting our data in there. and streamlining our

processes and really training ourselves use Salesforce as a first place to start. So we have streamlined workflows, which makes it easier to turn around reporting. And makes it ECO to see our data where it needs to be cleaned up, where we have gaps in the data. And working on those. So our processes

I'm much more aligned. now from beginning to end. We also are using Chatter for communication My favorite thing about the chatter that like now, instead of having messages all over teams If we're talking about a certain company, all the messages and conversations about that company's day with that company's. decade, which is really, really helpful.

And then we have overports in our dashboards, which are already showing us data that we can act on and we can pull reports faster. And we're also starting to see patterns in our data And we also really looking forward to

being able to report this data whenever people ask for it. So it's been exciting. So I'm looking forward We are hoping to expand our org. two other cats and COEs that we have on campus. And we are hoping to

really make this a home where we can centralize all of our data show the overall picture of the economic impact of our university of the region of the companies that are being incubated on our campus. And we're looking forward to broader engagement and collaboration with other entities on campus. And then our next

big thing is going to be tracking our industry relationships. We recently added on a new team member whose job it is to develop those industry relationships. So we'll be bringing all of his work into a Salesforce app. As well, and then the other entities on campus also have industry So this will really help us prevent duplicate conversations.

like we know that somebody is talking to a company we have. you know context for that conversation and we won't have to use repetitive confrontations or over asking things from one particular company. So that's exciting. That's so great. I love hearing the story of centralizing the data. I think that is something that resonates with a lot of other universities and teams at universities of like having

multiple systems with spreadsheets and everything and just having a place to look at that data and then accurately report out on it is definitely a really great kind of takeaway from this. Yeah. So, um. It looks like we do have a question in, so I'll go ahead and read that for you. What metrics did you use for tracking economic impact?

We have a few different ones. that are requested by the state. There are metrics such as the number of employees like net new employees jobs created grant fund being received or other sources of funding like DC funding Things like that. So it's really specific to the program.

that we're collecting data for. And I think if one of my colleagues is in can probably put specifics in the chat if they're here. awesome. can put some additional metrics in the chat. that he collects for his cats. I know that he has to collect data on tool tracking. And the value of that time and resource.

We'll leave it open for other questions for the next couple of minutes. While we do that, I wanted to just say thank you, Nancy, for taking the time To just come in today and do this presentation with us. It's been really great working with you. And your team. And it's really exciting just to see the progress that you guys have made and are going to continue making. It looks like here we have a chat from Ross. He said. collected metrics from the centers are increased sales Fed funds received other funding and capital expenses.

So a lot of our, you know, and this is why, you know, it was so important for us to work backwards We looked at what was being asked about and making sure that Our implementation was set up to collect that data. In the way that we needed it. And in the intervals that we needed it, you know, like annually or quarterly or like fiscal year and that kind of thing so That was like really valuable

that they asked us to think about that. Yeah, so I saw that there was a question about Yeah, yes, we're using Sales Cloud. And I'm not sure what the second question means. So the second question is, are you using person accounts or not? I'm wondering if they mean like within Sales Cloud

are your accounts? people versus organizations, I think maybe is what that question is asking. Um… Oh, yeah. No, our accounts are companies So we set it up so that our account or companies and then we have related

for all of those companies. And they're not all companies in the traditional sense because we have this innovation quote program where the companies are actually teams of people that go through the program. So we just refer to them as like the company team, company name. When we put them in as accounts.

No problem. You're welcome. All right, I'll give it a little bit in case anyone else wanted to ask any other questions. make sure we get those answered. You know, somebody did ask me last week If you have. to use an implementation partner.

And, you know, I mean, the answer is no, you don't have to Five is definitely really, really valuable to work with an implementation partner. I mean, I know for me, this is like way over my pay grade. And it really just like having being able to say to somebody, I want to be able to do this. And, you know. Fondra and me, we're able to figure it out.

without having to Google everything, which is what I would have to do. Yeah, that's a really great point. Yeah. I was like, oh, yes. You should work with an implementation partner. Yeah.

Welcome back to Unpacked. So Nancy has mentioned Sandra and May. They're both consultants here at RedPath who are part of her implementation team. So if you had questions on who she meant there, that's who she's referring to. And they were great to work with. All right. So like I mentioned at the top of the webinar, this is being recorded. So all this information will be available to you. It looks like we might be having one question come in, so I'll wait and see if that comes in, Laura. So thank you again for joining us today.

Let's see, here's the question. Can you talk more about how you manage sharing information across groups who use other non-Salesforce tools such as IT tools and spreadsheets, as you mentioned. That's a good question. So, and definitely something that we talked about when we were working on this project. We… have not really run into this issue yet because right now it's just myself and losses Santos, but

There are a lot of integrations for Salesforce and you can also import data. So if we were working with somebody that had data that we needed, but they weren't part of the Salesforce org. We could just get a spreadsheet from them and upload that data. into our org. We use job form and that integrates with Salesforce. So there's lots of ways to like set up those integrations and work with people that are not using Salesforce. I hope that answers the question.

Okay, and then… Do you want me to read the question or do you want to read it? Yeah, go for it. That's fine. So Dina. Who is one of our UAlbany colleagues, actually, asked who input the data and does each company put in their own data. So we have, like I mentioned before.

One of the ways that we get data is we use chat forms and that automatically is mapped into Salesforce. Usually at the lead. And then we work with the data from there and then um As far as like the companies in our incubator, we put in all the data So we collect data from them, we track it, and then we put it into Salesforce. So our companies are not using, they're not Salesforce users. They're not the end user.

Basically, the end users and myself And my colleagues in this office. And then… Yeah. Yeah, I think that covers it. Yeah, and then like we if we have data and spreadsheets, again, we input that data and upload it to Sales Voice.

All right, I did just put in Nancy's email address in the chat as well if you wanted to jot that down if you had Any additional questions, Nicole, it looks like a question for me, can we access the recording Yes. So the recording will be available within the next day or two. It will be sent out via email. And then also will be available on our website. Awesome. Alrighty. Well, we are at time. So thank you again for joining. Thank you again, Nancy. And thank you all for the wonderful questions. I hope you guys have a wonderful holiday season.

And a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Happy holidays.