Building a Foundation
Client Business
Building a Foundation Through the Product of My Environment, or in short, Building a Foundation (BAF) is a non-profit organization provide public charity and social services to individuals in need. BAF has a motto to never turn anyone who needs help away and in doing so, helps woman and men of all ages, races, locations, religions, backgrounds, etc.
BAF works closely with housing coalitions, various government agencies, churches, food kitchens, counselors, etc. in order to provide resources for social service needs. BAF helps single mothers find employment. They assist veterans in gaining housing and stable work. They help battered woman find shelter and counseling. They help the homeless by feeding them. There’s very little that BAF won’t do when it comes to lending a hand, an ear and a heart to their community.
BAF first developed a relationship with Extensitech after meeting Business Development Director, Crystal Smith at a local Chamber function. For more details, read our blog Proud Supporter of Building A Foundation.
Business Challenge
BAF was using Outlook to communicate and a paper calendar to schedule meetings with new clients. They would complete data on Word and/or Excel and print it, attaching it to the paper form they completed by hand and would file them away in large file folders. Each time they revisited with the client, they’d have to search through Outlook folders to obtain the email thread and find the client’s paper file and read through all the notes. BAF was in need of government funding and without the proper documentation and reporting, had no chance to place a bid for it. Each board member of BAF has a full time day job, so time was critical as their wasn’t enough to manage their documents, plus meet with clients. BAF estimated that their existing methods of reporting and filing took 10 or more hours a week and was preventing them from placing a bid for government funding.
Solution Provided
Extensitech immediately addressed the needs of BAF by providing xBase, their extensible and robust CRM base solution, to them for free. The base platform addressed basic CRM functionality like contact management where BAF could categorize their contacts such as their Clients, Board Members, Participants and Providers, Donors, Volunteers, etc. Additionally, BAF can track all Activities that occur with each Contact such as emails, phone calls, text messages, faxes, etc. BAF administrators can assign Objectives for Volunteers and Board Members to meet with clients, right from the database, eliminating the paper trail and simplifying the process. The database also tracked the Relationships of each Contact capturing relatives, employers, counselors, consultant, etc.
Extensitech provided some pro bono development to allow BAF to capture the data on their intake forms from the database capturing information like race, DOB, sex, languages, relationships, employers (and previous employers) address, numbers, email, children, etc. BAF can then easily and quickly search for any Contact by Category, race, sex, language, etc. allowing them to provide the documentation and statistics required for government funding consideration.
The solution for BAF also gave them the flexibility to set reminders so that Board Members, Consultants and Volunteers wouldn’t forget to perform the necessary follow ups with Contacts, Providers, etc. ensuring their audit trail and stats would be consistent and accurate, helping their bid for government funding. BAF is now able to quickly retrieve information about the client, their intake form, consultant, providers, follow ups, etc. from one page in their solution. They no longer spend time searching for paper files and catching up on previous communication. The board members no longer walk around with stacks of manila folders stuffed with paper, but instead, a laptop.
BAF is now spending more time fundraising, helping clients and participating in the community, thanks to the time saved by the implementation of the solution provided by Extensitech.
More recently, BAF returned to Extensitech with their statistician to collect more data needed for funding and reporting. Extensitech added additional functionality to help them capture more details on ethnicity, background (such as veteran, disabled, battered, etc.) special needs, etc. and created a series of reports, intake forms and pie charts to make reporting data easier for BAF. Now details about what types of identification, if any, these individuals have is now easy to capture, track and access from the system. Extensitech also added a Constituents table to that BAF can easily separate the Contacts to know who’s in the database and who’s actually being served by BAF.
