Case Study Sneak Peek: Faith-based nonprofit improves pension plan through customizing Salesforce
The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) builds ministries to support individuals, congregations, and communities throughout North America, and since 2010, CRCNA has been using Salesforce to support their mission. When they went live on Salesforce, they did so with 10 users, and they’ve grown rapidly: six years later they’re up to 70. CRCNA’s use of Salesforce grew as the staff began to realize the value of seeing a clearer, more holistic picture of their congregations by capturing all of the ways they interacted with them. Recently, CRCNA decided to integrate their Minister’s Pension Plan with Salesforce so they could achieve a 360 degree view of this important program, its participants, and its internal management.
The challenge: incorporate a new program into an old Salesforce
CRCNA has been offering benefit plans to ordained clergy across North America through its Ministers’ Pension Plan (MPP) for decades, but needed a more secure way to track it. When CRCNA decided to facilitate the program in Salesforce, they had a complex process to consider both on the back end with administration and on the front end with user experience.
CRCNA had been using a combination of the programming languages .NET and SQL to manage their Ministers’ Pension Plan, but as the program became increasingly complex, these tools couldn’t stand up to new requirements surrounding security and data storage. CRCNA’s IT Director Shirley DeVries explained that they needed to commit to an update to secure the efficiency and security of their data:
“Our Ministers Pension Plan is so complicated that when it was all in .NET and SQL, we were constantly worried about caches and data security. We couldn’t let that system be unsecured, but to put in a patch or upgrade it for security, we would never know what might break.”
The information that had been housed in the programming languages .NET and SQL couldn’t simply be copied and pasted into their CRM, so Idealist Consulting created a custom integration that connected CRCNA’s .NET data with Salesforce. This way, none of the data was lost and all of the information from the program could be housed in a secure location. Shirley explained that “getting it into a Salesforce application took away at least 80% of the issues that had developed.”
Find out how careful planning, a custom integration, and a dedicated consultant saw CRCNA through their tricky technology upgrade. Go to the case study linked below:
