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When Bob Bennett talks about leading Family Services Agency of San Francisco, his primary focus is innovation in delivery of services for the mentally ill. This can be a surprise because Bob’s organization is well over 100 years old--a veritable institution in San Francisco’s history of human services delivery. Bob has built a culture of innovation over the years, and he’s done it in a way that I’ve seen repeated many times among the 14,000+ organizations who have received the Salesforce.com platform over the years. In my view, the most impactful organizations in our customer base, like FSA, have all followed a similar pattern:
Most groups come to salesforce.com with a specific problem. Their data is in 10 spreadsheets. They are losing track of their constituents. Their online systems aren't in sync with their offline systems. These kinds of operational problems are very common and are usually what brings an organization to invest time and money in a salesforce.com solution. They want to make their daily pain go away.
It makes a lot of sense, and it's smart strategy. Efficiency gains are fairly easy to make the case for. The pain is often easy to articulate and gets a chorus of seconds from staff. Solutions to common efficiency problems are well-known and fairly safe to implement. How many organizations have moved from paper customer tracking to CRM? Thousands. While it may be the great unknown for a single organization, the path of migrating to more efficient CRM is a well worn one. Because of this, groups often see a definable win that is achievable with the right system and perhaps come consulting help. So they tackle these problems first.
The next step is to live in that new world. What does it mean to be an organization with an information backbone? How does that change the daily work that needs to get done? What other issues are surfaced? What does this new competency enable? It’s often not clear to an organization when they make the shift to an information platform where it will take them.
There’s a ton of change management that goes on during this period. The people in the organization need time to adjust it’s operations to the new reality, and adjust to how their jobs are different. As change rumbles through the organization, the operational efficiencies will be fully realized. This will allow staff to think less about workarounds to inefficient systems, and think more about what new things might be done. I’ve seen this freeing of brain space to be very freeing.
It’s at this point when an organization can feel the chains come off, when they realize that the audacious, impossible ideas they have for delivering their mission might now be possible. Getting their house in order has freed them up to think innovatively, to make bets on new things, and solve problems that have been a bridge too far in the past. Not every group does this. It takes bold thinking to try new things in mission delivery--new things are risky. But some do make this transition. 180 Turning Lives Around did just this.
180 Turning Lives Around took the smart step of moving its paper-based teen-suicide prevention hot line into the modern age with a salesforce.com-backed call center solution. Countless companies and nonprofits have made a similar move over the years, so they could be fairly certain they would achieve a level of operational efficiency with the move. And they did. They were rapidly able to achieve double-digit increases in the number of calls they could take. And as a suicide prevention hot line, this meant they were saving more lives.
What they were surprised to find is that getting on an information system with robust analytics, allowed them to see problems they weren’t able to address in their paper system. They discovered the true depth of their frequent-dialer problem--prank callers and teens who just wanted someone to talk to were clogging the lines. They had 100 numbers that were calling them more than 100 times a month. This problem, and a potential solution, became apparent to them after they started using Chatter in their call center. Through collaboration, they were able to flag these frequent-dialers and route them appropriately to keep lines free for teens in crisis. In a month they had zero numbers calling them over 100 times a month.
Family Services Agency of San Francisco, which I mentioned at the outset, treats the mentally ill in San Francisco who have failed out of all other options of care. FSA saw salesforce.com as a powerful platform to drive efficiency in their service delivery. After moving its client tracking to the platform and working on the platform for a few years, FSA is now actively innovating their service delivery.
For quality mental health care, it’s critical to gather data from clients periodically about how they’re progressing. It’s often difficult for clients to come in for interviews, so the best way to ensure the best care is to make in-home visits and record how the client is doing. This is hard work, and at the end of the day it left the case worker with paper notes to upload into FSA’s Salesforce system. Bob Bennet invested in an innovative solution--he built an iPad app with a highly-usable interface that allows the client to answer questions about their status. That information is entered directly into salesforce.com via the 3G data network in San Francisco. The app also speaks Cantonese--making it possible for clients who don’t speak English to correctly respond to questions, even if the case worker doesn’t speak their language.
180 Turning Lives Around and Family Services Agency of San Francisco are just two our customers who has moved to a modern information system, enjoyed operational efficiencies, and then leveraged those efficiencies to innovate in their service delivery. It’s a powerful, stepped approach to increasing mission impact, and it’s one reason the salesforce.com platform is such a powerful tool for positive social impact.
To see more of the unique ways that nonprofits and higher educations are using salesforce.com, please check out our customer success stories.
