H&S CRM

Are you tired of your contact data being stored across multiple unorganized spreadsheets with duplicate entries, confused about how to access and efficiently use that data, and worried about where sensitive contact information is stored? Do you have time to address any of these needs and concerns on an ongoing basis? H&S IT is offering the H&S Community Relationship Management (CRM) service with an aim to meet these community and constituent engagement needs of H&S units.

The H&S CRM service is offered via the Salesforce CRM platform, and is used for multiple business purposes by H&S departments, programs, and dean's office functional groups. The most common use is to collect information about the community, including contact information, familial relationships, employment history, and their relationship(s) with the particular department/program. This may include faculty, student, alumni, staff, partners, and event attendees. Some uses of the information in the H&S CRM include:

  • Easily finding contacts in a specific field of interest (work history)
  • Communicating with specific groups of contacts (eg. alumni from 2009)
  • Tracking specific interests in your department (or a particular division/field)
  • Communication interests (eg. monthly newsletters)
  • Event registration and RSVP tracking

Offerings of the service:

The offerings that comprise the H&S CRM service seek to ease the burden on individual H&S units managing a CRM system on their own, including complicated data maintenance, funding, analysis and project management resources required for implementation, and ongoing systems governance. The service offerings include:

  • Consulting - Leadership through initial consultation, implementation, onboarding, and training.
  • Governance — Programming and prioritization of system changes and enhancements via H&S CRM Steering Committee, cost sharing, business analysis and project management, and procurement of software licenses
  • Systems Management — Integrations with third-party toolsets and Stanford CRM systems, ensuring data is secure, and providing ongoing maintenance and support.
  • Data Support — tools and processes to support ongoing data maintenance

Benefits of the service:

The H&S CRM has an easy-to-use interface where data can be shared across H&S, and is supported by H&S IT from the initial consultation, through implementation and ongoing support of the service. Moving your contacts out of siloed spreadsheets and into the H&S CRM will result in cleaner data, better tracking of historical contact interactions, and an overall improved community engagement process. Benefits include:

  • Ability to see information for contacts shared by other departments/programs.
  • Multiple integrations that feed directly to the H&S CRM, including: online forms, email communication tool, event registration tool (coming soon), location intelligence
  • Development and ongoing support managed by H&S IT
  • Ongoing data maintenance

Project Description:

H&S IT has developed a standardized service offering and project plan that allows us to meet the broad needs of a variety of H&S units, while maintaining a sustainable development and support operation. We are focused on features and functionality that meet the common needs across the majority of H&S departments/programs.

Time

An implementation of the H&S Salesforce CRM can span approximately 8-10 weeks, and will depend largely on the time commitment that can be made by the department/program.

The initial data cleaning and preparation of data for import into Salesforce is a particularly important step in the process, and the most time consuming. Additional project activities for department/program stakeholders includes meetings with H&S IT to discuss requirements and analyze current data, testing and validating the setup and data import once it’s complete, and training.

Costs

There are one time and ongoing yearly costs associated with implementing the H&S CRM for your department/program.

One-time Implementation Cost

One-time costs for implementing the H&S CRM are determined by the department/program's needs and capabilities. This may include support with data cleanup/prep, new fields or tables that may need to be created, and the inclusion of business processes that are not currently supported by the H&S CRM. Until a full analysis is performed, it is difficult to estimate the precise one-time implementation costs that will be incurred by the department/program. Typically, one-time costs are in the range of $1,000-$2,500.

Ongoing Yearly License

Ongoing yearly costs are more straightforward and involve Salesforce software license subscriptions. There are two types of licenses available for Salesforce: Platform and Full. The difference between the two depends on the type of business processes we need H&S CRM to support. Both licenses support common 'view' and 'update' activities performed on CRM contacts. The Full license may be required for those who work with the Campaign object, need to use the email communication, or event marketing tools. The license cost for a Platform subscription is currently in the range of $76/year, and the Full license subscription is currently about $430/year.

Each person in a department/program can obtain a different license according to their role. Licenses are maintained by H&S IT and the cost of the license will be charged back to each department accordingly.

If you are interested in using the H&S CRM service please contact Sean Brandt seanbra [at] stanford.edu (seanbra[at]stanford[dot]edu). Please be prepared to talk about your current processes, a sample data set, what is currently done with the data you have, and what problems you are experiencing with the current system that you hope to solve with the H&S CRM.