Better communications with constituencies lead to better results and more effective ways of working. While at First Graduate, during the time when I also took over the Development Director duties, I discovered inefficiencies in our data systems. The program side of the organization used a different data collection system than the development side, which created certain difficulties in grant reporting and writing, as program staff would be needed to complete certain elements of a grant.
I looked for a remedy and decided to write for a service grant to the Taproot Foundation. We received the grant and Taproot put together a team of 8 professionals who I worked with to migrate all of our data to a Salesforce, cloud-based system. This allowed for better segmentation and e-communication integration, easier contact with any of the organization’s constituencies and quicker access to critical data that continues to make for better, more efficient grant writing as well as other benefits associated with staff having better access to data.
A final report I wrote to the May and Stanley Smith Charitable Foundation, and also provided the design for the cover.