"It's abundantly clear that we have a true partnership where OpenTent understands our big picture and overarching agency needs and priorities" - Cynthia
Boulder JCC has a strong and growing community, but they needed better tools to communicate with constituents. The systems they were using to send emails and track data didn’t "talk to each other", so staff were not able to connect the dots between constituent actions and the communications sent. This created significant overhead in operations and ineffective communication with community members.
Their goals were: integrate their systems into a single source of truth, customize and segment emails for donation campaigns, and use technology to help deepen relationships with their constituents.
Based on Boulder JCC's goals, we knew we needed to pick the right tool and make sure their staff received the right training and support to use it effectively. Here's how we did it:
In our experience, the best solutions start with deep listening. To kick this project off, we held detailed requirements gathering meetings with their marketing team to source the root causes of their challenges. Hearing the issues internal users were experiencing and the desired outcomes they wanted to solve for helped us to identify and prioritize what matters most.
Boulder JCC wanted highly customized communications for their donation and outreach programs. This was critical to make sure messages to constituents are personal, meaningful, and timely. In order to capture all of the data needed for that customization, we needed an email marketing tool which offered robust integration with their Salesforce org, and had features to support advanced group segmentation and personalization. We researched many different options and proposed Campaign Monitor as the solution that met their needs with the desired functionality.
Our team designed a unique coaching program for Boulder JCC's Salesforce Admin and their Director of Marketing to ensure that the team would be ready to use Campaign Monitor once it was in place. It doesn't matter how great a system is if folks don't know how to use it or what it has the potential to do! We made sure their team was trained on the important details of Campaign Monitor functionality first and foremost. We also provided training on email journey building as well as how to use the data in salesforce to make those journeys customized for different constituent segments. This training was designed to help Boulder JCC get the most out of Campaign Monitor based on our experience using it for community centers and other nonprofit orgs.
The solution here is a simple one, but the impact was massive.
The first thing we did was set up Campaign Monitor and set up the Salesforce integration. Next, we needed to migrate data from their previous email marketing system, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't lose any information in the move. It was a large data migration and data cleaning project! Successful migrations are an essential part of a big switch like this, and we dedicated the necessary time to ensure data integrity carried through. We then provided training to their team on how to use the new functionality. The "big win" here is that this created a single system which contains all of their engagement data. Users can set up and send email campaigns directly from Salesforce, and constituent journeys and segmentation can happen easily in the system without any data manipulation or extra overhead.
Using the See it, Do it, Teach it model, we instructed their team to create unique marketing journeys for subsets of their membership in order to more effectively communicate and build relationships with everyone.
Post coaching, the team has significantly increased autonomy in managing their Salesforce org and correlated marketing campaigns. They saw a significant reduction in required system maintenance hours and shortened the time from campaign planning to launch. It's easy to find and act on the info they need directly in a single system.
The personalized email journeys allowed for communications to be more specific and targeted and encouraged program participation and growth.
Now, all information is easily accessible via Salesforce. Our goal is always to help clients maintain a single source of truth, and with all information in the same place, it's much easier for different teams to see what is happening across the organization.
