MK Partners Archive for October, 2008

MK Partners is a proud sponsor of Dreamforce ’08, happening in San Francisco November 2nd-5th. There, we’ll be introducing some of our exciting new products, and continuing our education on how to take advantage of the latest salesforce.com innovations for you.

We hope to see you there! Stop by and say hi, we’ll be at booth #353.

This year we’re happy to announce our charity giveaway. When you visit our booth, leave us your business card and you are eligible to win a $1,000 donation to the charity of your choice, on behalf of MK Partners.

As a leader in the nonprofit community, we are pleased to make this donation and show our support.

You may have noticed that we’ve been silent for a while here at the MK Partners blog.  We’ve been busy making a lot of changes, but now we’re back.  The most obvious change is our new website.  We’d like to extend a special thanks to the amazing staff at our partner Spark3 for their patience, insight, and excellent design skills in creating our new design.

When we speak with our prospects and clients, there is often a hesitency to start a change.  Even though their current systems are not perfect, there is some comfort in the knowledge and understanding of how they work.  To make the decision even harder, it’s almost impossible to accurately measure the cost of not changing until you have made the change.

We like to embrace change, it’s one of the values that enables us to be an agile organization.  In business it’s hard to get ahead by staying still.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be introducting some new products, some new faces, and other changes we hope will benefit our clients and make us even better.

The Governor’s EnCorps Teachers Program is an innovative public-private partnership dedicated to increasing the number of much needed math and science teachers in California’s public middle and high schools. They recruit retiring math and science professionals who are ready to transition from the corporate sector into teaching for CA public schools.
http://www.encorpsteachers.org/

When CEO Jennifer Anastasoff first came on-board EnCorps, she faced the monumental challenge of recruiting thousands of baby-boomers to bring them into the world of teaching. With a staff of only two people, this was a tall order for the program’s pilot year.

Knowing that roughly 33,000 math and science teachers are needed in California in the next 7-10 years, Jennifer had to reach thousands, getting enough people engaged and contacted just to form an initial pool in order to pick those who would be a good fit for a classroom setting.  Jennifer sought a new way to track all of this data, hoping technology like salesforce.com would be the most efficient form of program management.

Still, EnCorps was unsure of how to handle the capacity of information. “I had used salesforce.com in the past” says Jennifer, “but we had to do so much more this time, and I wasn’t sure if it was possible.” EnCorps also needed assistance putting their application online and altering salesforce.com to automatically process the results in as little time as possible.

Luckily, Jennifer placed a call to salesforce.com, who put her in touch with Matt Kaufman of MK Partners. “After talking with Matt, he got it! He was clear about what our needs were, and he understood the strategy and processes that would be taken.” Jennifer was most grateful that MK Partners pushed them to get as much information down in advance. “MK Partners encouraged us to do enough work in the beginning so that any changes we make to our configuration now are small ones.”

Currently, EnCorps relies on their salesforce.com customization to not only track applications but to also track donors and connect them directly with applicants and current teachers. Jennifer is so encouraged with the results that she finds herself on the salesforce.com site every day to take advantage of a wide array of features including reports, the dashboard, calendar, email tracking and more. “I’m staring at the application page every day, drawing metrics from it and making updates.”

“I appreciate MK Partners flexibility and the knowledge that is there to support us to this day. They’ve maintained a fun attitude and sense of humor throughout the entire process,” says Jennifer. “We wouldn’t be able to review and manage all of these applications that are coming in daily without the help of MK Partners.”

The Volunteer Center is a Nonprofit organization serving San Francisco and San Mateo County which assists individuals in community involvement. United by the overarching goal of improving local communities, The Volunteer Center fosters a strong network among nonprofit, public, and business sector organizations and ordinary citizens.
http://www.thevolunteercenter.net

Before utilizing the expertise of MK Partners, Damien Chacona and the staff at The Volunteer Center were using a decade-old database hosted on only one computer. This busy organization which recruits, trains and leads thousands of volunteers had resorted to splitting time on the sole computer, with 10 employees scheduling out their database usage.

Seeking out a more effective and efficient solution to track volunteers and donors, The Volunteer Center turned to salesforce.com, who put them in touch with MK Partners. Provided for free to many nonprofits through the salesforce.com foundation, The Volunteer Center already had Salesforce licenses. However, they turned to the expert consultants at MK Partners to figure out exactly how to use these licenses and tailor their usage specifically for this organization.

“My questions and concerns were all handled with prompt, courteous service, and in terms that were easy for me to understand”, remembers Damien. “Matt Kaufman and his staff impressed me by providing expedient, professional service at all points of contact. They streamlined the effectiveness of a Salesforce database and now it is considerably easier to compile and sort through information on a day-to-day basis.”

MK Partners sought to do more than just data migration for the Volunteer Center. “MK Partners was always available within half-an-hour if we had a question. Whether it was about how the roll-out would proceed, or helping to weed out what was or wasn’t needed to get rid of duplicate information, MK Partners massaged our unique information to fit into the constraints. They were most effective in figuring out how to integrate client and contact organizations given the variety of sectors we work with.”

In his role as Volunteer Services manager, Damien is thrilled that all employees are now able to work on this new database at the same time. He was most impressed by its ease-of-use, especially in comparison to the Filemaker database used previously. “We are now able to make additions at the same time, and it is considerably easier to compile information from out of the database. Just to be able to do a quick search and have everything come up so quickly makes my job so much easier.”