The Minnesota Homeownership Center has been working with Minnesotans for over 30 years to help them achieve their goals for long-term, sustainable homeownership. With a variety of programs that support both homebuyers and homeowners, their work centers on serving those who often face the biggest barriers to homeownership, namely lower income households and communities of color. As a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Intermediary, the Minnesota Homeownership Center provides homebuyer education counseling services via a network of homeownership advisors embedded in 36 community-based organizations across the state.
Implementing Salesforce + HomeKeeper
The Minnesota Homeownership Center reached out to North Peak to discuss options for moving from CounselorMax to a new CRM platform that would provide a more streamlined workflow experience to Center staff and their network of 36 agencies. After a thorough discovery to review the current technology and a deep dive into requirements for the new system, North Peak recommended that the Center implement Salesforce + the HomeKeeper app.
The Center works with a network of 36 agencies that vary widely in their volume of housing counseling work and their ability to maintain and implement a strategic and data-driven approach to their services. When the discovery was launched, there was an assumption that Salesforce would be implemented with distributed instances available to each agency in the network. After careful review and discussion, it was determined that many of the counseling agencies were not prepared to take on the maintenance of their own Salesforce instance.
To minimize the administrative burden, while still providing counselors with an improved system, it was decided that a core solution of a single Salesforce, centrally administered by the Center, was the best approach to start out with. With this route, individual users within agencies have their own logins and are able to customize some elements of the system, like dashboards and reporting.
The goal of the initiative was to explore options for technology that could manage the workflow and reporting needs of housing counseling and other programs. We thought the solution would be one thing, but we ultimately chose a truer route thanks to our Discovery engagement with North Peak.
Goals of the Implementation
Center leadership worked with North Peak to identify the priority goals for the implementation. These goals included:
- Implement a streamlined Counseling Management System that would make reporting on housing counseling clients and their activities more accessible and overall easier. As a HUD Intermediary, this was especially important as it would simplify HUD 9902 reporting.
- Move from paper to online intake forms with digital upload options. The Center and their network were relying on time consuming manual processes. With online forms, the client intake process would be streamlined for all agencies, and all data from the forms gets automatically added to Salesforce for the housing counselor to work from.
- Run Credit Checks from Salesforce with the resulting reports added to the clients file in Salesforce.
- Easily send client satisfaction surveys to clients at various times during the year, with all survey responses automatically being stored in Salesforce.
- Ensure that security & data sharing remains a top priority. With the new system, agencies are only able to access information from clients associated with their agency, as opposed to other agencies. With this structure the Center would be able to access network-wide analytics to help guide strategic decisionmaking and meet funding requirements.
- Facilitate easier reporting on outcomes and impact will ensure that agencies can benefit from being able to report on the detailed outcomes and impacts of their work.
We needed Salesforce to collect client data from 36 nonprofit organizations that’s required for all sorts of grants that we (the Center) pass through to them. As an intermediary the best way we can support them is to fundraise, which relies on us having access to outcomes and data, and being able to use that data to tell the story of their important work.
Outcomes of the Salesforce Implementation
Now that the new solution has been up and running, the positive outcomes of the implementation are clear.
- Counselors across the network are better supported with improved technology, and the Center can quickly access data from the entire network to use for fundraising efforts, reporting to funders and measuring results.
- The Center is better positioned to operationalize new programs and opportunities as they arise, and the system is such that it can grow and change as the Center and network agency needs evolve over time.
- The new system now empowers the Center and network agencies to serve their constituents in a modern, efficient and effective manner.
- The solution allowed the Center to distribute $5 million through Covid Emergency Assistance programs, something that would not have been possible with the old system.
We could never have distributed the Covid Emergency Assistance funds without the new Salesforce + HomeKeeper tools in place. With the new solution up and running we were nimble and able to get funding out to the families in our community who were in need of assistance.
What’s Next for the Minnesota Homeownership Center
With the initial Salesforce + HomeKeeper implementation now complete, the Center has moved on to several other projects with North Peak. Their work in the sector continues to be of the utmost importance, and North Peak is glad to be part of their team, helping to ensure that Minnesotans are empowered to achieve their goals of long-term, sustainable homeownership.
My advice for someone planning a big implementation like ours is to find a trusted partner that is familiar with the industry and who has connections with other vendors in the space. With North Peak, we knew we could rely on them to ask the questions that maybe we hadn’t thought of. The way they scoped the project ensured we could make decisions that were critical for the Center’s success. With North Peak’s help we now have a flexible system that can grow and evolve over time.
If you’re considering a move to Salesforce, or want more information on how a high-functioning database platform can streamline workflows while improving data management and service delivery, please reach out to schedule a call.
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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