CHN Housing Partners: Organizational Decisions Guided by Strategy
CHN Housing Partners is an affordable housing developer, housing services provider and residential lender. Their work fosters partnerships with utility companies, financial institutions and public agencies to deliver affordable housing solutions to those who need it most.
With more than 7,100 homes built, 3,200 new homeowners and 60,000 clients served annually, CHN Housing Partners is a leader in the affordable housing sector.
CHN’s work is guided by a strong and visionary 5 year strategic plan that focuses on understanding client barriers, improving program and service delivery, increasing the supply of affordable housing, and long-term organizational sustainability with a focus on staffing and investment in technical systems.
At CHN we operate within a “whole home” and “One CHN” framework with a focus on removing barriers for clients, streamlining internal workflows and service handoffs, and capturing our impact data in a way that allows us to tell our story – what we were able to invest into a client, a home, and our staff.
Investing in Systems to Support Work in the Affordable Housing Sector
CHN has been using Salesforce with the HomeKeeper app to manage their housing stability programs for close to 10 years. Although the platform was working fairly well, the complexity of their work and the need to make the system as user-friendly as possible necessitated a big overhaul. There were a lot of questions still to be answered about what this would entail, but the team knew they wanted to stick with Salesforce due to its flexibility and customization.
On any given day, CHN delivers multiple programs and services, and their legacy system utilized a data model and process where each program required separate tools (forms, etc) and a new client application.
As CHN grew both in size and sophistication, this model became burdensome on the program team. Staff were experiencing difficulty with cross departmental collaboration, and the data model created a barrier for clients because they had to apply separately for each service, which often required submission of duplicative application information.
After performing a thorough Discovery that included a complete audit of all systems and processes, the team at North Peak recommended a new data model with a universal intake and common data structure between programs.
With the new data model, clients can fill out one form to start the process for multiple services, and CHN staff now have a streamlined system for managing service engagement that is consistent between programs.
Building the Universal Intake Solution for CHN’s Affordable Housing Programs
With the new universal intake solution, CHN can now offer a single application with conditional questions or additional supplementary forms based on the services an applicant is applying for.
Submission of the universal intake form creates a single application file along with child service files for the specific programs that the applicant is interested in. The intake file does not expire and becomes the applicant’s source of truth over their entire relationship with CHN. The child service files then belong to the program teams and are their resource for application processing.
In addition to the universal intake solution and common data structure, North Peak worked with CHN to develop an applicant portal built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and a customized partner referral portal.
The applicant portal enables applicants and clients to login to review their application status, update information and apply for programs. The referral portal provides an easy-to-navigate site where partners can access client information, perform updates, report outcome data, and more.
Another important, time-saving feature that North Peak developed is an eligibility checker that helps prevent applicants from applying for programs they are not eligible for. Instead of staff spending time reviewing and declining applications, the eligibility checker automatically alerts applicants of the programs they are eligible for.
Impact of the new Solution on CHN’s Affordable Housing Programs
- Better Access to Data: With the launch of a common data structure and a universal intake application, data and reporting has become much easier to manage, allowing CHN to easily share details of their impact with funders and key stakeholders. The client portal has a huge impact on the overall user experience, allowing clients more autonomy when it comes to applications, and reducing the amount of time staff spend fielding phone calls and questions about the system.
- Streamlined Administration: The overhaul project transformed CHN’s platform to support future growth without accumulating more technical debt. Additionally, the use of declarative tools has given program leadership more control over their programs on the platform.
- Reduced Barriers, Improved Access to Services: The universal intake solution combined with the eligibility checker has increased application submissions across programs, as clients can more easily apply for multiple programs at once. Some of CHN’s programs require annual recertification. Moving forward, clients will need to update minimal information to recertify, rather than submit an entirely new application.
- Improved Reporting and Access to Insights: Now that CHN’s program files are all attached to a universal intake service file, it’s much easier to identify which clients are accessing multiple programs. Additionally, CHN can now quantify its leveraged impact across programs for one client and/or property.
A central focus of CHN’s is to deepen our impact by improving access to our programs and services. The new system supports streamlined access for our clients, reduces administrative burden for our staff, and will support our storytelling and fundraising through data.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Prioritizing a healthy, maintainable system that can evolve over time was an important factor for the CHN team. For the system to be flexible and responsive to user needs, North Peak and CHN determined that it should be simple and consistent, while keeping in mind that each enhancement has an ongoing ‘cost’ associated with training and maintenance.
By aligning the way programs operate, there are fewer ways of doing things which means less customization, training and maintenance in the long term. In order to keep the system simple and user friendly, North Peak made sure there were as many standard, declarative tools being used as possible. For example, storing CHN’s program eligibility fields within the CHN program object makes it easy for staff to perform updates, without engaging the help of a developer.
I think we underestimated the amount of change management that would be involved during and after the new system launched. Since the launch, we have focused a lot of resources into trainings and one-on-one working sessions and have seen an immense amount of growth across our Salesforce staff and users.
As CHN continues to evolve, they are focused on growing their team and the external collaborations network. On the technical side of things they will continue to prioritize enhancements to their Salesforce instance, and are exploring other working groups that could benefit from a well-designed Salesforce system, including the fundraising and development team.
About North Peak
North Peak provides Salesforce-based services for nonprofits, foundations and the affordable housing sector who want to utilize the power of high-functioning CRM and GMS platforms. We achieve this through a holistic set of services, tailored to the needs of our clients.
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