Nonprofit business process assessment increases efficiencies for participant intake, volunteer management and donor management allowing more time to focus on helping families in crisis.
The Drake House (TDH) works to respond to the growing number of single mothers and their children who are experiencing homelessness in North Fulton, GA. They provide short-term emergency residential housing and in-depth assessments, support and empowerment programs to approximately 40-50 families a year. By facilitating financial and housing stability, they transform the lives of families in crisis.
The Drake House came to Apparo using many different tools to gather and keep their data. Many of these tools did not integrate together, causing difficulty in gathering and analyzing their donor, applicant and volunteer data. This created an overall lack of efficiency in their day-to-day operations. The organization wanted to improve operational efficiencies for their donor, applicant and volunteer management and reduce bottlenecks and delays caused by the manual tasks required with their current system. These improvements will allow them to grow their organization and increase their mission reach.
Apparo partnered The Drake House with skilled volunteers from LexisNexis, who assessed their current participant intake, volunteer management and donor management processes and systems. The volunteer team noticed that The Drake House was doing many manual tasks to track volunteers, donor information and applicant information. The Drake House was using disjointed systems that created duplication of work. The LexisNexis team found some of the systems TDH were already using, such as Salesforce, were not used to its full potential.
The LexisNexis skilled volunteer team assisted The Drake House in putting together a workflow into Salesforce. This streamlined the process for collecting applicant data. By integrating Salesforce with their website, applicant information synced into Salesforce for easy access and analyzing. This not only eased the manual labor on The Drake House end but allowed applicants to easily see their application status via the secure online portal. Donor and volunteer data are also easily tracked in Salesforce and can be utilized for better fundraising and volunteer efforts.
Centralized nonprofit data for greater impact
By centralizing their data into one place, the new process will reduce the amount of manual data entry and streamline the processes between departments. This will save The Drake House 10-15 hours of work per week. This saved time increases the time they can focus on their mission. The Drake House estimates their reach will increase by 10-20% more constituents served.
By using one main tool for their data, The Drake House will eliminate duplicates and have more accurate data for their volunteers and donors. This cleaner data will improve their ability to apply for grants, leading to increased revenue to serve their mission. It also mitigates risks as their data is now in a secure, centralized platform.
Business Process Assessment Project Reflections:
- “The LexisNexis team dove in to understand more about our processes. We so appreciate all of the time that you gave – over 100 hours! This is going to help lay the groundwork so we can continue to serve our mission and grow.” – Dianne Berry, Director of Operations, The Drake House
- “We were just underutilizing Salesforce in so many ways. This process was a huge eye opener to all the different entry points of information. When you have a disjointed system, there’s much more opportunity for error. So, streamlining those processes and being able to really use Salesforce better certainly makes us better across the whole organization, which in turn translates to better service for our clients” – Nesha Mason, President, The Drake House
- “I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Behind the scenes, there are so many processes that need to be followed. And there are so many people involved in taking care of this and supporting our community. Hopefully I can participate in this kind of experience again.” – Ashley Diaz, LexisNexis
- “I’ve been doing volunteer work for quite some time now, with many organizations. But this was definitely a very unique experience. Thank you for the opportunity. I thoroughly enjoyed it.” – Anwer Abbas, LexisNexis
