BioNexus KC: Building a Salesforce Foundation for Mission-Driven Work
BioNexus KC is a Kansas City-based nonprofit with 25 years of history advancing the region as a global leader at the intersection of human and animal health. The organization connects academia, industry, government, and community partners to accelerate healthcare innovation, with programs spanning cancer research, health equity, bioinformatics, rare diseases, and digital health.
At the center of that work is the KC BioHub, a consortium of more than 100 nonprofits, universities, startups, and government partners. Together, these members are building the region’s biologics and biomanufacturing capabilities, from research and workforce development to the infrastructure that brings new therapies to market.
The Challenge
The KC BioHub had been using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for some time, but the system had grown organically and wasn’t keeping pace with the organization’s needs. When the team issued an RFP for a Salesforce consulting partner, they described a platform that needed attention across several fronts:
- Program activity was fragmented. Tracking participation across programs like Venture Education, Workforce Development, working groups, committees, and events required manual effort and left staff without a clear picture of engagement.
- Consortium management lacked depth. The BioHub had no structured way to monitor consortium member commitments, track employment growth in the region, log partner interactions, or measure indicators of short- and long-term impact.
- Data quality and usability were holding the team back. Fields, page layouts, and workflows hadn’t been optimized for ease of use, contributing to low adoption and inconsistent data entry among staff.
- There was no single source of truth. With all ten staff members expected to work in Salesforce, the absence of standardized processes and training meant the system wasn’t fulfilling its potential as a central hub for organizational visibility.
What We Did Together
Fíonta began with a structured discovery process, reviewing KC BioHub’s existing NPSP setup, surfacing quick wins, identifying gaps, and mapping the current system against how staff actually worked. Three discovery sessions with stakeholders across programs, operations, and marketing followed. A fuller picture of need emerged, particularly in consortium management, including requirements for custom development and a potential document generation integration. The final build addressed four areas:
KC BioHub Program Management
Fíónta configured Salesforce to centralize program activity, giving KC BioHub structured tracking for its Venture Education program, Workforce Development initiatives, working groups, committees, and events, including attendee management. Rather than building from scratch, the team prioritized using standard Salesforce features and NPSP capabilities wherever possible, keeping the system sustainable for a small staff.
Consortium Management
The most complex workstream, consortium management, required custom development to meet KC BioHub’s needs. Fíónta built infrastructure to track consortium organizations and individuals, standardize the onboarding process for new members, log commitments and interactions, monitor employment growth in the region, and measure impact indicators across short- and long-term timeframes. A partner engagement summary view was also developed, giving staff a unified look at how key partners are engaging with the organization.
Training and Adoption Support
Recognizing that system quality alone doesn’t drive adoption, Fíónta incorporated up to three training sessions into the project and provided self-paced Trailhead resources tailored to the organization’s context. User Acceptance Testing was conducted collaboratively through Jira, with KC BioHub staff testing functionality directly and documenting results.
Outcomes
By the close of the engagement, KC BioHub had a meaningfully different Salesforce environment than the one they started with, built around how the organization actually operates. Key outcomes include:
- A unified view of constituent and partner engagement. For the first time, KC BioHub can see how organizations move through their programs, events, and consortium relationships from a single platform.
- Structured consortium tracking. The organization now has the infrastructure to manage member commitments, track regional employment growth, and report on impact indicators. These capabilities didn’t exist in the prior system.
- Improved data practices and adoption. With cleaner page layouts, standardized workflows, and targeted training, staff have a more usable system and a clearer path to consistent data entry.
- A roadmap for continued growth. The project was deliberately scoped as a minimum viable product, with the solution design and UAT process generating a clear backlog of phase 2 opportunities for KC BioHub to pursue as their needs evolve.
With the foundation now in place, the next and most important step is adoption. Ensuring KC BioHub’s staff fully embrace the new workflows and data practices day-to-day will determine how much value the organization ultimately realizes from this investment.
For more information on how Fíonta can help your association reach its data and workflow goals, reach out today through our contact form.