Harness member data, generate useful and actionable reports, and inform communications.
As part of FUNcon ’20. Fonteva partner Fíonta shared two case studies (United Soccer Coaches and the Air Force Association) and discussed best practices for data structure and utilization.
Transcript
Karin Tracy
Hi, welcome to FUNcon. Today, we’re presenting from soccer coaches to members of the air force, connecting data to real-world experiences. I’d like to talk a little bit about who we are. My name is Karin Tracy, I’m here with a company called Fíonta. We were founded in 2001, headquartered in DC We have staff across the United States. We were founded with the express intent of bringing technology services to associations and nonprofits, and we’ve served over 1000 of them in almost 20 years. We’re a salesforce.org Premium Partner, and a Fonteva Services Partner. Which means, we work on plenty of implementations, and then we are really excited to be able to provide ongoing support and Salesforce services to Fonteva clients, and others across myriad clouds.
Here’s just a quick slide of several of, somewhat recent, our association clients. Perhaps some of you today are sitting in the audience. Lastly, a quick intro. I’m so excited to be here today with my colleague, Katie Jones. She’s a senior Salesforce consultant here at Fíonta. She lives and works out of Bristow, Virginia. Again, my name is Karin Tracy. I’m the VP of marketing here at Fíonta. I also run our marketing automation practice, and I’m a Pardot consultant. I live and work in Downtown Los Angeles. Then, I’m really excited to have just a wonderful client of ours, Aaron Weatherford, with us today. He’s from the United Soccer Coaches out of Kansas City, Missouri, and he works as their website and database manager.
Katie Jones
Hi, I’m Katie Jones with Fíonta, and I’m going to tell you a little bit about just a really neat project that we did for the Air Force Association. A little bit about the Air Force Association. As you might think, they work with current members of the air force, retired members of the air force, people in the National Guard to help educate the public about the aerospace industry and workforce. They advocate for the industry, and then they really also support readiness for Total Air and Space Forces. They want to provide whatever support they can for any member of the air force.
A little quick project background. The AFA, they’re an enormous organization, they have hundreds of thousands of members. They work very closely with their local chapters. They offer recruitment incentives to their chapters. Members can join and be assigned directly to their local chapter, or they can be directly recruited by a different chapter and assigned there, or they can select there during the joint process. For example, if I’m in Northern Virginia and I really think I might be landing in Maryland at some point, I can when I’m joining say, “You know what? Please, assign me to the Maryland Chapter.” I can also be recruited by any given chapter.
They have a lot going on with chapter assignments and recruitment. They give the chapters awards based on the number of members they recruit, and then the chapters compete to see who wins in each category each year. One of the key issues they were facing is that, members can change their chapter assignments mid year, which makes sense. If you think about it, air force service members can be reassigned at any time, they have to change their location, they want to make sure that their members can switch to a different chapter mid year. They don’t want to say, “Gosh, you can’t change your chapter assignment for another 10 months.” They want people to get that local support.
Then, the other key thing is that they group these chapters for the purpose of this competition. They group the chapters by size, right? So the smaller chapters are being measured in their recruitment efforts against other small chapters, and medium chapters, and larger chapters. The AFA had some pain points with their current process. They were exporting information from their system at the end of every month, and parking it over to the side that we’re capturing it, and parking it to the side. That data had to be cleaned every time they did that. On a monthly basis, they were exporting reports and scrubbing data.
They were dependent on one, very overwhelmed staff member, to produce these reports. That, we know is an issue. Because what happens if that person wins the lottery, and they run out the door? If they haven’t documented everything they do at the end of the month, those reports could be lost for months before anybody realized, right? What was going on. That was a big one. Another issue they had was that, Salesforce doesn’t really generate pretty reports. I’m a big fan of Salesforce reports, but it’s the best if you’re getting a graph, or a chart type report.
They had this beautiful Word template, and they liked to put it in the Word template, and distribute that Word document to all the chapters and post it on their website. They weren’t really thrilled with just the base options, just getting the data out of Salesforce. Because this other independent team was actually generating their data for them, the membership team really didn’t have any way to validate the results that they were given at the end of the year. They just had to accept it. That membership team really wanted to understand their data better. They wanted to know so that when somebody asks them a question, they want to be able to give a good answer.
Okay. Our challenge was to take this series of membership recruitment reports that take months and months of staff time to manually prepare, and automate it. We came up with a combination of different tools that are all available to anybody who’s working with Fonteva and the Salesforce platform. We used some Salesforce formula fields. We used a tool called DLRS, which is a roll-up summary tool. We used base Salesforce reports, and we used another tool called Conga solutions, and I’m going to go through it right now. I’m just going to explain how each one of those things factored into the process.
The first step was to create the formula fields. In Fonteva, they are tracking chapter membership using the community group record, and the community group member record. We were able to create these formula fields here on the community group member record that established the point in time that they want to measure somebody’s active status, and then capture if that member is active, in this timeframe. They can change these fields from year to year. They have a list of instructions, there’s a very few instructions they have to do to turn the system over to the next year.
We can capture, if the person is active as of their awards qualification date, and we can also capture, if the person is still a current member. That was a little bit of a bonus that we were able to give them to help them look at churn in different chapters over time. Once we established that at the community group member level, we were able to use the roll-up tool, that I mentioned, to roll it all up and do summaries on the community group level, right? Now we can tell, what their prior year membership total was, what their chapter recruited member total is, their active current membership year total.
Then, we have these fields that give them percentages at any time. These are updated nightly. They don’t even have to generate the reports anymore. If a single chapter calls up and says, “Hey, what are my stats looking like?” They just have to pull up the Altus chapter, and they can give them their stats. We use the DLRS tool to do that. What that does is, it allows us to get around some restrictions that Salesforce has on the types of relationships between two objects. For Salesforce roll-up fields to work, you have to have what’s called a master detail relationship between the parent and the child object. DLRS allows us, really, to do these roll-ups to any object. Because we’re working with Fonteva, we’re working with their data model, and it helps us really supercharge the roll-up tool.
The next step, which is really critical when you’re automating any process, right? The next step was to validate your data. We sat down with the membership staff and we used the Salesforce report tool to identify all the fields they wanted, pull them in, and really start validating. We could choose a certain chapter, and see what their numbers looked like. With the ability to drill down into each grouping in the report tool, they were able to say, “Okay, well, I’m going to go right into the Mel Harmon Chapter and I’m going to see the exact 139 people that make up this list.” They could really dive into their data, for the first time, to validate it.
What we found when we validated their data was that, their data was really dirty. Over time, we all use our systems, and one of the great flexibilities of Fonteva is that, you can update your picklist values over time and change things. You don’t have to have a programmer to do that. But what we found is that, over a couple of years, they had done that quite often, right? They had deactivated a picklist value, but there were still 50 people who had that picklist value in their record.
So we realized we had a lot of data cleanup to do so. Again, we went back to our Salesforce report tool and we were able to just pull the records, and figure out what fields needed to be updated, and do that mapping, right? We want to get rid of this deactivated option, what active options should they be assigned? We used data loader, and a tool called workbench to update that data as they needed to. At the end, we ended up with these beautiful reports that showed all these really nice clean data. Once we had that done, we were really able to finalize it and bring Conga solutions into the mix.
Really, what that does is, it creates your data to that pretty Word merge template. When we did that, we got beautiful data in a very nice printable format at the touch of a button. The first step with Conga is, you create your query. That’s why their report tool was so important to get those reports exactly how we wanted them first. Because as you can see, this is a little more complicated, and it’s a SOQL query. We wanted to make sure everything was right before we wrote this. But it is changeable over time, if you need it.
The second part of Conga is you create your template. It’s just a Word document, it can have whatever formatting you want on it, and we insert the merge table and we connect it to the results from the query. Once we’ve done that… Okay, here’s the actual Conga solution. We’re literally linking the query that we wrote to the template that we have on file. Once you’ve made that connection, it is literally pushing a button. There is a button, you select your template right here, and then you come down here and you click merge and download. When you click that, you are presented with this lovely final output. It has their logo, it has their header, it has their descriptive paragraph right here, and then it just brings in the live data. They were really excited to get to this point.
Our big wins, right? It may seem like that was a lot of work, but the winds were tremendous, right? First of all, we ended up with clean, really usable data. Our second big win was, we saved so much staff time. Their membership team is now not dependent on the IT staffer. That staffer is a lot happier to have that off his plate. The membership team was really able to take this and give it to their C-suite as quantifiable value of their Fonteva and Salesforce system. They were just really excited that they could take what just took months of time every year, and they can do it really in a day and a half. Now, I’d like to turn it over to United Soccer Coaches.
Aaron Weatherford
All right. Thank you, Katie. Yes, as Aaron Weatherford, I am with the United Soccer Coaches. A little bit about us, we are the largest soccer coaches’ organization in the world. We have roughly 16,000 paid members, currently, contact database pushing roughly 80,000. Some of the things that we do that you might recognize would be, college rankings, high school rankings, so the coaches poll for college soccer. That comes from us and our members. The All-America program for high school soccer players comes from us as well as our education for coaches, in general.
We’ve been around since 1941. We’re based in Kansas City, Missouri. All right. A little bit about where we’re at currently with Fonteva and Salesforce. In April, 2019, we switched from iMIS. We had been with iMIS for off and on over 20 years. There was a bunch of bad data that had been built up over the time, we were constantly struggling connecting with third parties, everything that we needed to do was a customization. The CMS built in, iMIS never really met what we needed. We ended up with a custom CMS that never fully connected.
One of our big goals in switching to Salesforce and iMIS was, one, an easier solution for our staff, our CMS, ability to connect to third party systems much easier. We went ahead and were able to hook up with WordPress for our CMS. Our data import, as Katie had talked about, with data loader, we were able to streamline a lot of our data and get it put in there cleanly. We had created custom objects for all items that we are able to utilize, come back to.
Go to our next slide here. One of the things we want to talk about is our CMS integration. One of the nice things about Salesforce and Fonteva is the ability to connect to third parties seamlessly, easily, less customizations, and also staff buy-in. First, I’d like to talk about our website integration, and personalization. We’re currently using WordPress, as I mentioned earlier, for our CMS. One of the nice things about using WordPress is, our staff know how to use it, it’s relatively cheap, and we can get help cheaply, plugins are cheap. It’s easy for our staff to use it. I don’t have to help and support, and we can always find help when we need it.
The other nice thing about it, and Fonteva is, we even found a simple plugin called miniOrange that allowed us to do single sign-on between the Fonteva platform, and our WordPress. This allows us to do member-only content within our WordPress site. We built a robust resource library. Let me go ahead and show some of those here real quick, give you an idea of what I’m talking about. Okay. You should now see our website here. I’m showing currently a online resource library we’ve built out in WordPress.
As you can see, I’m currently logged in. I’m logged in as a member. I have this nice plugin here where I can search for different documents. I can open them up. This one’s a PDF lesson plan for a coach that he would use on the field. This is a nice members-only content type piece, that we’ve displayed. Now, if I was not currently logged in as a member, instead of seeing the links there, I can still see those same content items. But because I’m currently not logged in, we display a little message saying, “Hey, you’re not a member, would you like to join today?” Great way to get more membership recruits.
If I was an expired member, we could change the message up. I can also tease and say, “Here’s the content that’s available in this resource library.” If I see something I want to see like, “Oh, they got this video field session option,” I’d love to see that. I know that, if I joined, I would get access to that. I can get a preview of what I’m getting. A couple more things here would be, our online Soccer Journal, our publication. I have it right now, I’m not logged in. They would load up as a member-only benefit. Whereas if I currently was logged in, let me…
Here, you can see our Soccer Journal pages though I’m logged in as a member. Our digital additions are all available here for me to click on access. A little bit about how we do this. Here, in the backend of our miniOrange plugin, we’re basically mapping direct items from the login. When they log into Salesforce, Fonteva, it sends back to our WordPress site that they’re logged in. We can put in a flag, or they’re an active member. We have a flag for, they are a college head coach of a college program. We can give unique display names, we can give first name, last name, email. We can push over as much data as we want, I believe.
I mean, there is a limitation to how… It’s about 20 fields, or so, I believe. But we can always push over enough to dynamically change the content on our CMS site, WordPress site. This slide here represents what I was just talking about, changing content based on membership status. Again, same thing, how we were able to show content based on the membership status to specific people. Another nice thing about it was, we were not reliant on using Salesforce as data storage solutions to hold our content. It’s a lot cheaper for us to open up a Amazon Web Services storage solution. Third-party solutions are a lot cheaper for storage, and we can move all of that outside of the Salesforce infrastructure, which was nice.
Again, we can also change content displayed based off of badges, custom data such as, are you a head coach or not of college service program? Do you have any of our diplomas? It doesn’t just have to be tied to member, non-member. There’s a lot of flexibility in what we can do with that, which is very helpful for us. Another thing would be, navigation displays in our WordPress site. For instance, if somebody is not logged in as a member, we can show a join now under the membership menu. If they are logged in as a member, we can point them directly to their member benefits. If they’re an expired member, we can show, renew your membership. There’s lots of different things that we can do there.
The next component I’d like to talk about is, what we are using Fonteva for, that is, our complete membership package. So our store, online renewals, joins, their profile data. Anything that somebody would purchase, or update their record, or anything with us, we want to send them back into Fonteva for that purpose. Currently, we are in the Visualforce member profile set up. We are moving to a lightning community currently. It is taking a little bit of time for us to get fully built out with that.
I’m going to go through some of the things that we’ve actually done with our custom data within our profile, in our membership backend with Fonteva, to show why some of that’s taken a little bit longer, and also the power of being able to use Fonteva. Okay. I’m currently showing my profile screen here from Fonteva. If I come in from our website here, I’m logged in, to show you I’m in WordPress. If I click my name up here, where it says, account, slowly but surely, it will take me into our Fonteva set up here, right into my Fonteva profile.
If I come in here, I can see my payment methods, my past transactions. Custom objects here we have set up, for instance, these would be diplomas that I would have taken and completed. This is not an out of the box Fonteva solution, this is just a custom object we built and added in as a component to the Fonteva profile. I can click a button, and have a PDF of my diploma loaded right there.
Another thing we do is our store. In our store, almost everything we would sell in our store is a digital content. If I purchase a downloadable PDF manual, a coaching manual, I would have that appear in my digital download section, and I’d be able to download this full color manual, printed off. All of that is secure and based on my login, and have I purchased it? Again, we’re using the online store from Fonteva. All of our products are set up and built into Fonteva, we’re using Fonteva as our source of truth. So all of our GL accounts, everything is in there. We can set pricing rules. It’s much easier to have Fonteva, and Salesforce be the house of all items.
We can have member pricing show up, we can have special price rules based on coupon codes, or if they are part of an active college services program. College services programs, speaking of those, this is our big, big item here. Every association seems to have that one item, that one business critical piece that does not fit any other association model, or does not ever have that out of the box solution. For us, that is our college services program.
We needed a way to have anybody who is associated with a college program, so in this case, we’ll be using the Hardknocks University Women’s Soccer team. We needed anybody who was a coach on that team, maybe a sports information director for that team, to be able to see that record for that account, manipulate that record to limited manipulation, and also pay any dues associated with that record. Here, I’m logged in. I am currently listed as a head coach for the University of Hardknocks Women’s Soccer program. I have the ability to register currently for our 2020 college services program.
I can come into the team profile. I can update, again, whatever information we want them to be able to update. We don’t want them changing their regions, or their conferences, or divisions they are. But we would like them to be able to give us, “Hey, update your athletics website, update your team Twitter, or your address.” Also, part of this custom build out we did was a manage roster tool. This manage roster tool allows us or me or anybody associated, any one of these staff members who are on this list right here, would have the ability to come in here and update this roster.
We thought about limiting that, but for our purposes, it’s such a high turnover with coaches that, if we have anybody who’s willing to come in here and update this roster for us, that’s better for everybody. We do have it set up to where, if they come in and edit a roster, or add a new coaching staff, it will do a search, check to see if there’s already a contact based off of name, email. And then assign that contact, and add them to this field, or to this team. If there is not a contact, it will create a new contact and assign them to this team. The nice thing is it does not put them on the account. They still have their own individual account, but they will now also be associated with this school.
Why that roster is so important for us is, when they do register for the college services program, this is where it got really tricky for us. During our registration process, once again, we provide them like, “Hey, update your information,” and then we put in special price rules. For instance, anybody who’s a head coach gets a free individual membership included with their college services program fee. Assistant coaches and grad assistants, or any of the other roles have the ability where they can add a $90 membership for that person, or that coach.
The nice thing about this is, as we go to the checkout page, when they pay, it will actually put the subscription on the individual contacts record. Even though that person’s not associated with that account, it’s nice, clean, one checkout. They end up with the subscription on their contact. The account ends up with the college services item. Everything’s nice, it’s clean, and completely custom, but also completely works within the framework of Fonteva. With that, I’m going to turn it back over to Karin, who’s going to talk about our Pardot integration and membership data.
Karin Tracy
Thanks, Aaron. Yeah. I’m excited to talk about how United Soccer Coaches was able to integrate their membership data from Fonteva with Pardot. Now, as we said, at the top of the United Soccer Coaches section, the United Soccer Coaches switched, migrated to part from Informz after they had done all of their Salesforce and Fonteva work. At this point in Pardot, they actually have 80,000 mailable individuals. Mailable individuals means, individual prospects who have an email address, and that email address is valid.
In just almost 11 months now, not even quite 11 months, soccer coaches have actually sent 6.5 million emails to this group of 80,000 mailable individuals. They’re currently maintaining 380 lists in Pardot, and 88 of those are criteria-driven. That means, they are dynamic, they are based on matching, or not matching criteria. All of the lists, all of their prospects are synced with Salesforce and Fonteva every two minutes. So there’s a constant loop between the two, a checking in to see if things have changed. Which means that, within every two minutes, a dynamic list of lists that’s looking out to Fonteva will be up-to-date, which gives marketers a real confidence when they’re selecting a dynamic list that they truly are sending to people who meet that criteria at that given time.
Examples of criteria, or excuse me, examples of fields within Fonteva that United Soccer Coaches is able to leverage include badges, those are current members. Coaches by game level. They work with coaches in youth soccer, high school, college, and professional. Those are four very different types of audience members. Diplomas, which is part of their continuing education. And constantly being able to look and check as to how close a member, say for instance, is to their membership lapsing, and be able to take action on that.
I want to talk a little bit about the power of dynamic lists. Let’s think about a business case here. United Soccer Coaches needs to create a list, it has to be up-to-date at all times, which means, it needs to be a dynamic list, it needs to sync with Fonteva, of current high school girls’ coaches in the States of Washington or Oregon. The team at United Soccer Coaches now is completely empowered and enabled to create these lists on their own within Pardot without having a marketing staff member. Does not have to go back to a Salesforce admin and say, “Hey, can you create a report for me of people who match this,” I’m then going to take that report, and download it and upload it somewhere, because Fonteva and Pardot are constantly talking to each other. We can put all the power and the team of the marketer.
I’m going to hop out to Chrome now, and show how quick and easy it is to leverage that data. Here, I’m in Pardot’s dynamic list building tool. If you recall, I said, I wanted coaches who teach or coach females in high school, and I want to target those coaches in the state of Oregon or Washington. I’d like to show you how easy it is to be able to use this data here. I’m saying that, I want to look for a custom field. I know the field that I’m looking at is primary level, and you can see, this automatically becomes a picklist. Because the field that this is mapped to in Fonteva is a single select list, or… I’m sorry, is a picklist here. So I’m saying, the primary level is high school.
I want to narrow this even further by saying that the custom field of gender, genders coached, primary genders coached is female. I know here, because I have an and, that when I run this list, when I run this role, the list that will be created will look out to Fonteva to find individual members who are a high school girls’ coaches. I also want to add in my location information here, and now I’m just acting on default data. If I look at prospect default field, state is Oregon. Then, I want to say, because I’m really looking for coaches in Oregon or Washington, I’ll do the same thing here.
You’ll notice that I have an and here, so they have to be this and that, and they have to be this or that. If I went ahead and previewed, if I clicked the preview button, Pardot would churn through 80,000 prospects. It would look for those particular fields in Pardot, which are synced with fields in Fonteva, and the end result would be, automagically, this list. I got this list of 80,000 prospects down to 28 prospects who match this criteria. Only 26 of them, I should say, two of them are not mailable. That means, they have unsubscribed, or they’ve hard bounced.
If I look at my details here, I can see that, yes, this is a dynamic list. So this means that every two minutes, Pardot is looking back out to Fonteva to validate that the individuals on this list belong on this list, and here’s a reminder of the rules associated with this list. What this means is, if a soccer coach in Fonteva’s record changes from, say coaching high school to coaching university level, or the coach is still a high school girls’ soccer coach, but moves to California, that individual will fall off of that list.
That’s very intentional because United Soccer Coaches may be talking about an in-person event, obviously in 2021 or beyond in Northern Oregon, say for instance, which is basically Oregon or Washington, and wants to be very specific about who they invite to this event. Another feature within Pardot that soccer coaches is able to utilize is what’s called variable tags. Variable texts are also very field-driven. Let’s collect as much data and information about our members as possible and store it in Fonteva and Salesforce, in a single source of truth, and then let’s leverage that data to create more personalized and targeted communications.
With variable tags, individuals, marketers setting up emails within Pardot are able to inject content from within either default or custom fields. So remember that custom field that we looked at previously. Primary genders coached, that was a custom field. Variable tags can be used in Pardot in a subject line and, or the body of an email itself. You may customize a subject line by using, say, the default field of the first name. Instead of sending an email that just says, your membership is due to lapse on such and such a date, such and such a date, you could say, “Karin, don’t let your membership lapse,” right? Because I’ve used a variable tag of the first name.
Variable tags can also be used as the variable, or the variant I guess I should say, in A/B testing in that particular subject line. Example, do more people open the email if I use their first name in the subject line, or do fewer people? After the set number of hours or days that I let that test run, Pardot will automatically send the winner, I’m sorry, will send the winning email out to the rest of that group. Here’s an example of down here in the bottom, and the left image, you see a % % first name, and then a line of copy that says, your membership will end on % %, active membership date.
In over here on the right, you’ll see what this email would look like. If it was sent out to Aaron, his first name would be injected here where first name was, and his membership renewal date will automatically be added here. Now, if this email were to come to me and my membership renewal date was on September 1st, United Soccer Coaches doesn’t have to hard code any of that. It’s looking to my prospect record, my membership lapses on 9-1, mine would say, 2020-9-1.
Building on the idea of personalizing email based on what you know about a prospect, another strong feature set within Pardot is dynamic content. If you think of variable tags as, injecting a word or perhaps a phrase from a field, dynamic content is actually the ability to display wholesale different content based on whether or not that prospect matches criteria or doesn’t. Aaron showed a great example of this, not actually using Pardot, but using WordPress integrated with Fonteva, earlier. Where that, he could display different prices for the journal for resources, for members versus non-members.
Similarly here, using Pardot, a marketer can add content to a newsletter, say for instance, at a first paragraph default content. Say, the rest of the newsletter is the same, but that first paragraph is dynamic content. If the recipient of that email is not a member, they will receive content that is about the benefits of becoming a member. If the recipient is a member, that’s, you’re sending it to a list of individuals. If one of the individuals is a member, meets the criteria for that dynamic content, their first paragraph would be some special tidbit that’s for members only.
Dynamic content in Pardot can be used in emails, on Pardot landing pages, and actually injected onto websites as well, not in United Soccer Coaches’ case, because they’re already doing such a fantastic job integrated with their Fonteva WordPress integration. But other Fíonta clients have used dynamic content on their website. So say, on the membership benefit page, the language on that page can be different, if you are currently a member. One might speak to a non-member in a completely different way, the language might be very different.
Just by tying the website and Pardot together with the information that you already know about the prospect, you can really customize that prospect, that potential member, that potential volunteer’s experience. Another example for, relevant to say, soccer coaches or other associations, is the idea to be able to sell suggestively based on previous purchases. I know what this prospect… I know they bought this journal, and this resource, and the next most likely thing they should buy is, this. I could use dynamic content to serve unique experiences to individuals based on their previous buying record.
We talked about how United Soccer Coaches has several distinct levels of coaching. Youth, high school, college, oh, and professionals, not on this slide. Sending one email newsletter about coaching drills, marketing only has to put together one newsletter. They do all their testing around one experience. But when they send it out, that dynamic content is actually going to load a training video, very specific for your seven year old who’s learning how to kick a ball, which is going to be very different than your college level training drill. I’m going to switch it back to Aaron now, who is rightly going to take ownership of project wins for United Soccer Coaches.
Aaron Weatherford
All right. Thank you, Karin. Yeah, project wins. For us, the big key things were staff ownership, will staff use it? By utilizing WordPress, by getting into Fonteva. We took some of the more complex-looking aspects of Salesforce and made it easier for our staff. Staff are using it, staff did buy-in, which then makes this a successful product. Without staff buy-in, without staff using it or ownership, then it becomes only as good as the few people that can make it work. That is very important, and it’s been a lifesaver for us.
Data control. Maintaining good data so that we can keep using automated emails, or dynamic lists. It’s very important that we maintain that. Salesforce, Fonteva allows that, especially, with the joint processes informed. That’s been a huge win for us. We can create that one single dropdown, I believe. Katie talked about that as well. We talked about genders coached. That was one. We had boys, girls, male, female, both. We had M/F, we had a bunch of different pieces there. We got that all changed. Now, there’s only three options. Male, female, both. Being able to maintain that has been great for us, and a win.
Then, the big win is cost savings. With Fonteva and Salesforce behind it, we have had fewer and less expensive customizations. When we were with iMIS, out of the box, any change request was an automatic 10 hours with an iMIS developer. The default rate, you’re pushing over $200 an hour. By the time it’s all said and done, you’re pushing 40 hours, or whatever, what you would think as a small customization. With Fonteva sitting on top of Salesforce, we’ve been able to have a $100 plugin from WordPress that handles single sign-on quick and easy with Fonteva for us, or pieces like that. It has allowed us to save a ton of money and staff time, and able to do the same things that we were doing for much, much more with other systems. That has been a huge win for us.