With a long-term digital infrastructure plan from Alice Hendricks of Jackson River and support from the Open Society Foundations, the team was ready to bring a Salesforce CRM partner on board. On a recommendation from Alice, PHR reached out to North Peak.

Our teams created a plan to produce a single, cohesive CRM solution, designed and built on Salesforce. PHR had previously implemented Springboard, a fundraising, advocacy, and email communications platform built on Salesforce, so they were familiar with the system.

They made the strategic choice to expand the team’s use of the CRM to meet the needs of program and fundraising personnel, which helped them achieve economies of scale in their technology investments and ensured consistency throughout the organization.

With 6+ teams to bring onto the CRM, the plan was designed in multiple phases. We began the project by migrating one of PHR’s program areas, the Asylum Program, to Salesforce.

Major Pain Points of the Existing Solution

Before their Salesforce migration, the Asylum Program was a high-functioning team that was realizing success in spite of their limited technology infrastructure.

The team identified three major pain points with their legacy database, Raiser’s Edge:

1. The data model didn’t reflect or enhance the way the team operated. What’s more, querying was near-impossible, so the Asylum team was hard-pressed to use analytics in defining program strategy.
2. The database didn’t support robust integration with online forms. This meant that paper-based processes ruled the day, with all asylum seekers’ applications to PHR being processed as PDFs. It was impossible to require questions or restrict answer formats, and staff had to manually enter all the information into the database– forensic evaluation requests from attorneys, membership applications from health professionals, lists of trained people, and case outcomes. The process required time-intensive back and forth communications between clients and staff, placing unnecessary burdens on both groups.
3. The team had difficulty collecting outcomes on cases. With a painfully manual process, the team spent many hours each month following up with attorneys to learn the result of each asylum seeker’s case– critical data the team needed to evaluate their effectiveness and impact.

The cost of this legacy infrastructure was clear: it was taking significant time and resources that could be used to help survivors of human rights violations gain asylum in the U.S. North Peak was eager to help the team recapture their time and leverage data to increase their impact.

Strategy and Process

North Peak and PHR created a plan to migrate the Asylum Program from Raiser’s Edge to a Salesforce-based solution that focused on their strategic goals:

• Decrease staff time spent on administration
• Reduce friction in processes and workflows
• Increase data quality and analytics for the team

To achieve these goals, the team focused on redesigning their case management process. Over the course of the next three months, North Peak prototyped a Salesforce solution for the team, migrated critical data from Raiser’s Edge, trained Asylum Program team members, and launched the solution. Key features included:

• Allowance for multiple forensic evaluation requests per case, which enables attorneys to request the appropriate combination of evaluations based on clients’ needs.
• Integration with Geopointe to enable location mapping for cases, which can be overlaid with volunteer physicians in PHR’s network for quick case placement.
• Integration with FormAssembly to digitize physicians’ applications for network membership and asylum seekers’ requests for evaluation, enabling data validation, field requirements, and direct feeds to the CRM.

Results

With the new system in place, the Asylum Program has realized efficiencies across their team, including huge amounts of staff time saved and new insights into their programs and impact.

The program has also seen upticks in constituent engagement.  “We’re getting a lot more requests from attorneys, probably because it is so easy to fill out these forms,” says Habbach. The team also increased its advocacy efforts with a campaign to promote key petitions, something they wouldn’t have had time or resources to manage under their previous administrative burdens.

Some of the biggest wins include:

According to DeDe, the effort to center the Asylum Program’s operations and strategy around a strong CRM enabled the team to prioritize impact at a critical time. “The right to asylum is under attack in the United States, so it’s critical that our staff have the right tools to address the threat and contribute to solutions. The work we did with North Peak made sure we were ready to address the current immigration crisis and focus on what we do best — forensic evaluations that can make all the difference for an asylum seeker.”

It was a pleasure to work with the PHR team on redesigning the Asylum Program case management process. Special thanks to DeDe and Hajar for their quotes and engagement throughout the process!