Since 2003, the Fund for Global Human Rights has had one goal: to move human rights forward by providing resources and tools to the people and organizations on the ground who have real potential to generate positive change. Their grants and technical assistance are focused on crucial and difficult work that otherwise might falter for lack of resources. They bring financial stability to human rights groups, and help human rights defenders increase their visibility and impact. The Fund supports a wide range of human rights issues, such as defending indigenous land rights in Guatemala, promoting women’s rights in Morocco, pressing for accountability for war crimes in West Africa, and ending the practice of bonded labor (a form of slavery) in India.
Learn more about their work on their website.
Case Study
Background
The Fund for Global Human Rights reached out to DaizyLogik in early 2017 to help them tackle a number of challenges. Among their top priorities, the team wanted to upgrade to Salesforce Lightning, improve processes to manage account distributions and account for multiple incoming payments, and improve Salesforce’s ability to track donations in multiple currencies. The team also wanted help addressing a sync issue between Salesforce and Salsa, and to explore ways to integrate direct marketing tools.
As the project began to pick up momentum, it soon became clear that the solutions needed were far from cut-and-dry. For instance, in order to achieve a clean and simplified solution, it was important to remove layers upon layers of old apps that were no longer being used. Apps such as iATS, iContact, and EventBrite, along with their associated data, had not been uninstalled when the FGHR team moved to Salsa. In order to not accidentally remove valuable information, our team worked with FGHR to evaluate and remove one layer at a time.
For a variety of reasons, the FGHR team soon determined that Salsa no longer met their needs. Specifically, it did not fulfill the organization’s requirements around tracking multiple currencies and email marketing needs. Furthermore, the Salsa-Salesforce sync was unreliable, and they did not feel as though they were receiving the level of support they needed. The team began to research alternatives and settled on Engaging Networks to support their online donation tracking and email marketing needs.
The Solution
DaizyLogik partnered with Saasinct for this project, and together our teams worked closely with FGHR to identify and implement solutions. Below we provide an overview of some of the key takeaways from this project.
Agility is Key
By implementing the Agile Methodology in our work, we recognize the importance of responding to changing needs, and prioritize customer collaboration and interaction. Through transparent project management, we ensure that our clients are always in control, and that at any given time, we are addressing their top priorities. This approach proved to be extremely valuable as the team priorities and scope of this project frequently changed.
The FGHR team allowed us to push them and challenge their thought process, which enabled our team to successfully identify and address curveballs as they came.
Documentation Decisions and the Benefits of Strategizing Long Term Solutions
When time and money are both at a premium, it’s no surprise that many nonprofits will frequently seek a quick fix to a problem. While this technique may frequently address the issue at hand, a compilation of quick fixes can also lead to larger problems down the road.
Our team worked specifically with the Development team at FGHR. While we knew their team was the one primarily using Salesforce at this time, we worked with them to take into account the impact of their decisions on a long term integration with other departments. This was particularly important as the team discussed how the Development team could be on the same page with the Accounting team, especially around tracking and reporting on donations.
Taking the time to document decisions, and to think through the possible impact of each decision on other departments may take a little extra time in the short term, but will save substantial time – and resources – as the organization continues to grow and change in the future. Such documentation does not need to be extremely complicated, and in this case included help bubbles and descriptions for work flows to provide additional context to users.
Our team also took advantage of collaborative tools such as Google Drive and a development wiki while building in the sandbox to ensure that the development process was fluid and transparent. Additionally, documentation helped to ensure that the team was able to identify and thoroughly test critical integration points and internal system functionality before turning on upgrades, and track installed apps to monitor compatibility and develop a roadmap.
While the Agile Manifesto prioritizes providing working software over “comprehensive documentation,” this does not mean that documentation should be overlooked entirely. Rather, it means that the focus should be on providing “pertinent” documentation to provide context, maintain transparency, and give users the information they need to make future decisions.
Lightning Adoption
There are a number of factors to consider when you’re preparing to migrate to Lightning, among them the importance of identifying below-the-surface challenges an organization may face around user adoption and training. In some circumstances, it may be better to migrate early and develop in only one system. In others, it may be more beneficial to first clean out all unnecessary legacy data and remove complexity in the system.
For this project, our team determined that there was not going to be a perfect time to migrate to Lightning, and since the migration to Lightning was at the top of the wishlist, our team would tackle this transition early on. We worked closely with the FGHR team to navigate around the speedbumps that appeared throughout the migration process.
Strong Partnerships Lead to Success
DaizyLogik’s partnership with Saasinct enabled our combined team to deftly tackle a myriad of challenges as the team passed the baton back and forth, and enabled us to provide valuable face-to-face support to our client. A combined, in-depth knowledge of various Salesforce plugins helped ensure we provided FGHR with a comprehensive list of available solutions.
Agile and transparent project management meant our team could limit direct participation in meetings, which helped keep project costs down and enabled us to complete the work within budget, even as the scope continued to evolve, or the project was temporarily paused due to client schedule conflicts. When the FGHR team needed to take some time to focus on addressing GDPR requirements, we were prepared to jump back in when they were ready to move forward.
From Reaction Mode to Roadmap
As our team peeled back layers of complexity within the organization’s Salesforce, addressing changing priorities along the way, we worked with the FGHR team to sketch out a plan both for their short term solutions and long term goals.
For instance, our team recognized that in order to ensure a smooth migration of constituent data from Salsa to Engaging Networks, we needed to first tackle data quality issues. We also worked out a planned and systematic approach with FGHR to set up Engaging Networks to work with multiple currencies and incorporate a bi-directional sync with Salesforce.
Today, the FGHR team has a roadmap which outlines the tools they’re planning to use and what they’re trying to accomplish with them. They have a defined system administrator and understand the value of documenting decisions. And they know that we will always be right by their side as they continue forward.
Want to learn more? Contact DaizyLogik to learn more about how we can support you with specialized consulting and custom development and help you get the most out of Salesforce.
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