Whether you are new to the Collaborative or have been an employee for a long time, you will undoubtedly hear the word Salesforce used at some point during the day or mentioned in an email.
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short, application that CES uses to record relationships we have with our different customers. These could be day to day contacts, students attending our Licensure programs, contracts with a school district, etc. A CRM allows us to enter in specific types of data related to our interaction and in turn report out to staff or the public.
Most CES members will have a Salesforce account assigned to them when they are first hired. Their account will initially grant them access to the most basic version of Salesforce, known as Chatter.
Chatter
Think of Chatter as an enterprise Facebook. It’s an internal social network that allows the user to post updates, comment on others, like posts, have a detailed profile, and follow others/posts/topics that they are interested in. We use Chatter as a way to let others know what we are working on, ask questions or ask for help, and share resources or other important tools so others at CES can benefit from them.
Interested in learning more about Chatter? Visit the Chatter page for training videos and example posts.
All other aspects of Salesforce
Beyond Chatter, Salesforce is primarily comprised of relational objects or record types with their own sets of fields and functionality. Here is an example of the most common use case:
Let’s say you you spoke today with a Special Education director that works for the Northampton Public School district. In Salesforce you have a “Contact” record that holds their name, address, contact information such as email and phone, and any additional notes or activities that you would like to record. Since you want to make sure to include that they work for Northampton, the “Contact” record can be related to an “Account”. Accounts are organizations, schools, companies, or other institutions that have a location, activities taking place, and a list of related contacts that either work there or represent the Account in some form. So in this case we will edit the contact record and set their primary affiliation to the Northampton Public School district. This creates a relationship between the two which can be used when creating reports.
While this is the simplest form, Salesforce records a lot of more complicated activities CES handles such as Contracts and Online Registration.
Event Management
Our complex event management needs have been built into a series of objects (Events, Sections, Sessions, Presenters, Registrations, Attendance) which allows each department to manage the life cycle of an event, from the planning to generating certificates for attendees.
Licensure Enrollment
Our Enrollment system allows us to track people as they progress through the various courses and graduate requirements in order to be endorsed. Outside of tracking their performance, tuition schedule and payments are automaticall setup to allow closer monitoring of someones balance.
Attendance Tracking
Using a custom built screen, registrars can quickly record who attended each session of an event.
Credits & Certificates
Upon completing the required work or attending a session, credits can be award in the form of PDPs, CEUs, Training Hours, and more. After being awarded, the registrar can bulk generate and send out certficates of completion or attendances to the registrants.
Contract Management
Information coming soon
Grants Development
Information coming soon
Invoicing
Due to the complexity of our invoicing needs, IV is not capable of providing customizable templates which has required a lot of manual copy and pasting between Salesforce and IV to create a passable invoice. Now with the help of a custom invoicing system, the invoices can be created directly out of a Contract which pulls all the necessary fields and formats them perfectly for our various needs.
Contract Work Entry
Contract Members can now track their work directly into the contract using a custom build Contract Work Entry app. This allows you to select the contract you are working on, the deliverable, see how much time you have left available, and enter your hours and notes. You can see a log of your previous entries as well.
Private Billing
Utilizing the Contract Work Entry app, speciliasts can record their work with their clients which each entry is split into different Costs with medical codes and units assigned. These can then be properly added to the private billing invoice for insurance reimbursement.
Itinerant Tracking
Utilizing the Contract Work Entry app, speciliasts can record their client work directly into the Contract quickly and without the need of uzing complex spreadsheets or being inidated by extra screens/steps.
Donation Portal
People can easily send CES donations using our custom donation portal, allowing easily selection of the fund they want to donate to and payment details are mapped with Salesforce Orders.
OTC Payment Portal
Often parents need to pay for services provided by OTC and have need to do so in person. Now parents can easily pay for services using our custom secure payment portal which connects to Salesforce to create Orders.
Event Registration Portal
Our customers can now use an intuitive registration portal to sign up for events, manage their account, prefill information, and sync all their data directly with Salesforce. The portal also allows the ability to pay for graduate credits and register other people for events safely.
District Referral Portal
Districts used to have to fill out a series of paper forms and communicate back and forth with our SPED department in order to process a referral. Now using a custom portal, districts can log in and submit HEC Academy and Related Service referrals which create Contract records and Deliverables in Salesforce.
Website Events Sync
Our new CES Website integrates with Salesforce to pull in Events, Sections, and Presenters – saving tons of time manually adjusting the website for changes that take place with event details. This allows us to maintain a single source for event data.
Needs
As we interact with districts there are times when we hear about different needs and opportunities that someone in our agency may be able to help with. Needs allow us to quickly record that information, who it was with and what they needed, and either assign it directly to someone or categorize it so it can be found the by the right professional within CES.
