New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits
The New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits is a member-driven nonprofit that provides programs and resources to other nonprofits in the state. Through leadership, collaboration, and learning opportunities, the Center seeks to strengthen the nonprofit sector in New Hampshire to enable more organizations to make an even bigger impact.
With staff managing memberships, various event types and event registration, job postings, and more, the Center’s business needs required complex functionality that allowed them to automate business processes and streamline data management. They came to Message Agency during a period of evaluation: Their Drupal 7 CMS was nearing its end of life, and their CiviCRM instance wasn’t sophisticated enough to meet their growing needs. Also, they needed a partner to bring their new brand to life.
The Challenge
Create a System to Manage the Center’s Complexities … and Make Life Easier for Staff
The Center was interested in pursuing Salesforce as their new CRM and suspected they could integrate it with their updated Drupal site as tightly as their CiviCRM integration had been. To help determine feasibility and scope, Message Agency proposed to conduct a discovery engagement to fully define their business process, data management, integration, and end user needs. Because both their CMS and CRM needed to be replaced at the same time, it was critical that we helped them develop a comprehensive plan for implementation.
Our discovery engagement uncovered a substantial amount of complexity that their very small staff had been managing for years with the current system; we were able to architect a Drupal 9 - Salesforce integration that streamlined business processes, automated many functions that were once manual, and normalized data in ways that made it far more reportable. Some of the complexity included:
- Registration for event series, multi-session events
- Affiliations between users and organizations
- Addressing needs for both a B2B and B2C business model
- Migrating copious content and multiple content types, including job listings, consultant listings, member listings, member portal content, event listings, and a cohort portal
- Migrating CiviCRM data into Salesforce
- E-commerce for event registration, job postings, donations, and other transactions
Our Approach
Member-centered Design for a Member-driven Nonprofit
The Center asked us to customize Salesforce for them, design and implement an integration with a new website, and design and develop a new public facing website with a robust member portal. Since we already engaged the Center in a robust discovery process, our team had a deep understanding of what they needed, which enabled us to complete all of the work with in-house talent and provide significant improvements in their back office processes and their end user experience, including:
- Enhanced personalization around navigation and suggested content, including My Membership, My Programs, and other customized displays, drawing on data stored in Salesforce
- Ability for a member organization’s administrator to be assigned in the system and to manage their own users and user roles
- Members only and exclusive content
- Enhanced job posting displays, search, and featuring
- Surfacing metadata to better inform users and improve organic navigation
Learning Moments
Evolve with the Work
This project was a true combination of nearly everything we do here at Message Agency, and a project of this size gives us an opportunity to think about how we do things and how we can do them differently to best serve our clients.
Since we utilized so many of our services, we were able to optimize some workflows between our design and development teams and create new documentation for quality assurance and user acceptance testing that will support other projects moving forward.
