The Minnesota Homeownership Center promotes and advances successful homeownership in Minnesota, with an emphasis on serving those facing the greatest barriers to homeownership — namely, lower income households and communities of color.

Challenges:

The Minnesota Homeownership Center wanted to elevate how processes and data were managed across the network of 36 Agencies providing housing counseling services, as well as for the Center’s role as an Intermediary. The Center was using CounselorMax, an outdated system that did not support streamlined workflows, was not extendable for tracking key impact and outcome metrics, and did not have flexibility when it came to reporting.

Solution: Implementation of Central Salesforce and Homekeeper, with distributed Salesforce instances

Our initial goal was to evaluate what a Homekeeper-based Salesforce solution would look like given the many requirements across the network of service providers. We ultimately determined that a Central Salesforce system with Homekeeper was the best solution. This allowed all 36 network agencies access to the same database, ensured that data processes would be standardized across agencies, and reduced the burden of training new users on the system.

In addition to a Salesforce with Homekeeper implementation, we also advised that a full time Salesforce Administrator be hired to fill the role of technical expert, capable of performing both advanced work and regular administration to ensure the system is trustworthy and being used appropriately. As part that process we provided onboarding and guidance to the new Admin to help ensure their success in the position.