Tutoring Chicago - Fundraising & Program Management With Salesforce

Tutoring Chicago's mission is to empower economically disadvantaged children through education, offering free one-to-one tutoring services to students in 1st through 6th grade. This year alone, Tutoring Chicago will serve 900 students from low-income families all around the Chicago area for tutoring and high-quality programming that is not only academic, but developmental and reflective.

In 2019, Tutoring Chicago reached out to OneTenth Consulting to evaluate their current CRM system. This evaluation was designed to identify ways of optimizing their CRM usage and to look at alternative solutions that will better align with Tutoring Chicago’s future strategy.

The Challenges

Tutoring Chicago had been using NeonCRM to manage student and tutor profiles, to facilitate the registration process for volunteers, and to coordinate tutor orientations. While NeonCRM had been a suitable solution up to this point, it was unable to scale and evolve to the organization’s growing needs. Specifically, Tutoring Chicago needed:

• A centralized platform that serves all key fundraising needs, including one-time giving, recurring giving, in-kind gifts, and peer-to-peer fundraising

• The same platform to track student and tutor biographical and demographic data, student/tutor matches, program logistics, and weekly attendance

• A flexible and intuitive forms solution that supported conditional and skip logic

• An integrated and intuitive email tool that exchanges relevant information with the CRM 

A thorough analysis concluded that Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud would be a better fit to support Tutoring Chicago’s fundraising and program management needs. 

The Implementation

Following OneTenth’s recommendation of small yet impactful phases, Tutoring Chicago first focused on fundraising, which included:

• Installing the Salesforce Platform and the Nonprofit Success Pack

• Configuring the system to support Tutoring Chicago’s terminology and development strategy

• Configuring the online donation tool and peer-to-peer platform

• Migrating relevant data from NeonCRM

• Developing reports and dashboards

• End-User Training and Post-Deployment Support

After a few months of using the system and collecting our learnings, the second phase began with a focus on program management 

The implementation included…

• Customizing the salesforce platform to support Tutoring Chicago’s programmatic needs

• Configuration and knowledge transfer for the online forms tool

• Configuration and knowledge transfer for the email marketing tool

• Migrating relevant data from NeonCRM

• Developing reports and dashboards

• End-User Training and Post-Deployment Support

• Technical administrative training including ongoing maintenance and data uploads

Technology and Tools

Tutoring Chicago chose Salesforce for several reasons:

• Ability to leverage Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) application that provides best-in-class features to support nonprofits such as complex gift processing, grant management, and high-touch fundraising

• Access to the Power Of Us Hub community to exchange ideas and best practices with thousands of nonprofits with similar needs as Tutoring Chicago

• Access to the AppExchange, a marketplace of new and innovative tools readily available to extend Salesforce’s functionality and enhance the user’s experience

• Ability to create custom modules to support non-fundraising tasks, such as program management, event registration, and impact measurement

To complement the Salesforce solution, Tutoring Chicago and OneTenth implemented the following tools:

• Rallybound to support online donation and peer-to-peer fundraising

• Form Assembly to support student enrollment and tutor/volunteer registration

• ConstantContact, which was already in place at Tutoring Chicago, was integrated with Salesforce to support email marketing and communications

• EventBrite, using the integration through Zapier, was used for orientation registration

What’s Next

Tutoring Chicago now has a centralized platform for fundraising and program management that is scalable and flexible to evolve with their growing needs. Adhering to OneTenth’s “crawl, walk, run” approach to CRM, OneTenth and Tutoring Chicago aim to enhance the platform further in 2020 to support surveys, data visualization, and impact measurement.

“We are inspired by Tutoring Chicago’s work, serving thousands of economically disadvantaged students through their weekly tutoring program, at no cost to students and their families. Their programs allow students to grow both personally and academically and ensures each and every student receives the individualized attention they deserve. We are very fortunate for our partnership with Tutoring Chicago and are grateful to play a small role in moving their mission forward”  - Rubin Singh, OneTenth Founder & CEO

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To learn more about Tutoring Chicago’s volunteer programs, including remote e-tutoring, please click here. And to support their amazing work, please consider making a donation.

OneTenth Consulting has a full range of services exclusively for nonprofits - from fundraising strategy to CRM selection, to CRM implementation and change management.  OneTenth empowers nonprofits by aligning their organizational, fundraising, and technology strategies - providing the tools and insight they need to meet their goals and achieve their mission.  Check out OneTenth’s services and schedule a “no pressure” phone consultation today!