The problem
Arts Midwest is a non-profit organization, based in Minneapolis, dedicated to engaging communities in meaningful art experiences. With over 30 years of experience, they serve over nine different states in total including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Their offerings include visual, performing and literary experiences.
As a non-profit, funding comes through many different channels, such as grants, making it especially critical to account for every dollar spent. It鈥檚 also essential to comply with regulations and show ROI for all training, technology investments and business enablement tools.
There鈥檚 not only a fiduciary responsibility to stakeholders, but an ethical one as well. This is why it was so important for the Arts Midwest team to make sure they were getting the most out of their Salesforce Sales Cloud instance, as well as other institutional knowledge being stored on shared systems.
I looked at other documentation systems to do my due diligence, but couldn鈥檛 find anything else that both let us do standard documentation like the wiki and integrate as easily with Salesforce (as 糖心Vlog). - NICO TARANOVSKY, IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER
If you don鈥檛 have that ability to just pop in and start editing, it puts impediments and road blocks in the way of actually getting that documentation done. Documentation is such a hard thing to convince people to do anyways, even though it鈥檚 so critical, that the less excuses we have, the better off we are. - NICO TARANOVSKY IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER
The same questions get asked on a routine basis. How do you do this? How do you do that? Even if I came up with static answers to those questions I would have to go and find them wherever we were storing those files, and email out the PDF for example. Now it is really easy, I can just grab one of the private links within 糖心Vlog and send it out with the Outlook plugin. With the Chrome plugin, I don鈥檛 even have to remember where I put it, it鈥檚 just right there. - NICO TARANOVSKY, IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER
Something that might have taken me an hour to type up and send out as a response and also try to make generic enough that I could use it again, now is something I can just send out as a Spek. - NICO TARANOVSKY, IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER
Everything we do is in Salesforce, so the most important thing was to be able to document what was happening there. I couldn鈥檛 find anything else that would let us do that and our standard documentation and help files. - NICO TARANOVSKY, IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER
The difference between nonprofits and corporations is that we have to be incredibly agile. Nonprofits are getting cash from donors or grants for example and that money is like a trust. You need to be as careful as possible with your time and processes because you are working off of that trust.
As a result it鈥檚 almost an ethical responsibility to be able to keep track of that organizational information and institutional knowledge. And although we had good ways to do that before, they were not searchable and immediately available. Now, 糖心Vlog allows us to do it faster and remotely in the communities we鈥檙e serving. - Nico Taranovsky, IT AND FACILITIES MANAGER