Automating Applications and Programs for Quality Care for Children
Automating Applications and Programs for Quality Care for Children.
For more than 40 years, Quality Care for Children has been supporting parents and childcare providers with knowledge and resources to nurture and educate infants and young children in the state of Georgia.
The Atlanta-based nonprofit provides various services to children, families and childcare providers, including a childcare scholarship program that helps families pay for childcare throughout the state by paying childcare providers directly on behalf of the family.
Employees at QCC were using complex repetitive manual processes to support their work, such as documents, spreadsheets and emails to manage their constituents and donors. For parent applications, they were using a combination of Microsoft Word documents, Submittable and Survey Monkey forms that weren’t integrated with their Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud platform.
As this program grew, QCC received more funding from various sources who all had different criteria for their funding — which added more complexity and manual work to their operations.
Keeping track of program expenditures was also a challenge. Employees had to gather data from several different sources and spend hours of time generating reports.
QCC’s leadership knew that there had to be a better and more effective way to automate tasks and free up staff time so they could focus on higher payback activities to advance QCC’s mission.
QCC needed to implement Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, which offers 10 free seats to qualifying nonprofits so they can advance their mission.
Tapping Into the Power of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
Inovi Solutions led a discovery call with QCC leadership to learn more about their pain points and what was holding them back operationally.
Then our Salesforce Consultants and Salesforce Developers worked to consolidate and streamline QCC’s application intake process. We replaced Survey Money and Submittable with Salesforce Sites, which saved the organization licensing fees.
We created several custom application forms for different programs that are highly functional, interactive, and dynamic — and unique to the data that QCC needs to manage each program efficiently. For example, some of the questions are dynamic and change based on what the applicant answered in previous questions.
Because QCC needs to gather specific data from each applicant, the forms are long. The custom Salesforce Sites we created allows applicants to save their work in draft form so they can complete at their own pace as they gather and enter their information. Users can securely access the draft version of their application and continue working on it until they are ready to complete and submit it.
Applicants must also upload their photo identification and other sensitive personal and financial documentation with their application form. Inovi built a file compression mechanism so that large files are compressed and uploaded quickly to Salesforce without timing out.
All application data and attachments are stored securely in Salesforce.
To create a more transparent and user-friendly experience, Inovi also created auto-notification alerts for applicants that update them as their applications go through the various phases of the review and approval process.
Inovi developed an application management and approval process, and several different customized workflows for managing QCC’s different types of programs.
We also set up customized reports and dashboards so that QCC employees can accurately report grants provided at the program level, and down to the granular level for each individual grantee.
QCC previously emailed a PDF attendance form to childcare providers for the more than 100 children enrolled in the program. Providers would complete this by hand and send it back via email or fax each week in order to receive payment. QCC employees would manually track receipt of those forms, print and organize all forms, and submit them to accounting, where employees would then manually enter all the data required for payment.
Inovi created unique links for each childcare provider that QCC pays so they can easily submit attendance records for each child. Depending on the program, the provider will either submit the days the child attended or the hours, which improves data integrity and reduces errors. This new process takes QCC about 30 minutes total, whereas before it took almost an entire day.
“The way we were gathering attendance records before was unsustainable. Now we’re more organized and can provide financial information to our funders more easily, and it reduces the risk of errors,” said Sarah Bello, Family Resource & Scholarship Manager. “It saves us tons and tons of time, and it saves our childcare providers tons of time too and reduces the burden of accepting our scholarships because the administrative paperwork is a lot easier now.”
QCC can also better track how much money is spent per child, and which provider the funds are going to which, which improves and shortens its auditing process.
The Impact:
- QCC’s leadership team and support staff are more efficient and effective in how they run operations and manage the nonprofit now.
- Intake applications are streamlined and automated, and feed directly into the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud platform.
- Automatic reports can be generated in just a few clicks, saving staff many hours each month.
- Managing each of the nonprofit’s programs is easier, and communications with donors and program participants are more customized and personal.
“Instead of spending my time on administrative tasks and data tracking, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud lets me focus more time on our families to assist them with applying for our scholarships or other needs they may have,” Bello said. “It allows us to obtain more grants because I can easily provide statistics and reporting, and show the need for childcare assistance in a specific county or zip code based on the cumulative data Salesforce tracks with our applicants. It’s taken away a lot of headaches.”
