Coastal Cloud is a platinum Salesforce consulting partner, with a Nonprofit Solutions team focused on delivering Salesforce solutions that meet the unique needs of nonprofit organizations. Coastal Cloud has worked with Habitat for Humanity affiliates, including Lexington Habitat and Dallas Habitat, and has multiple Coastal staff members with over 15 combined years of experience working at Habitat affiliates. Coastal Cloud’s work with Habitat includes customizing and extending HomeKeeper to support processes specific to affiliates’ work with homeowner families.
Coastal Cloud has developed solutions for sweat equity, warranty documentation and warranty issues, referral tracking, action plans, client budgets, and templated task lists. As Coastal Cloud has worked with Habitat affiliates, they have found that these customizations extend the robust feature set in the HomeKeeper application, and meet affiliate-specific processes in Homeowner Services. This results in significant efficiencies for staff: they can do their jobs faster, and they can easily share critical information across other departments (such as fundraising, marketing, etc) who are also using Salesforce.
What are the main features of the product that help track critical homeowner information?
Habitat staff can track sweat equity hours and connect the hours with the homeowner family’s client file (Service File). At a glance, staff can identify the homeowner’s sweat equity due date, total number of required hours, and a total of all hours earned so far. They can also see a record-by-record view of each sweat equity entry. When homeowners attend certain types of education classes, associated sweat equity records can be automatically generated to reflect the homeowner’s attendance.
Habitat staff can establish action plans with a set of action plan tasks. The action plan may be a set of steps a homeowner family needs to take in order to move to the next part of the housing counseling or homebuying process to become “mortgage-ready.”
Habitat staff can create one or more budget records to help homeowners understand their current and future household budget. The budgets can reflect a homeowner’s current spending, or they can be used to create a goal budget for the homeowner family to work toward.
What are the main features of the product that help with staff efficiency and information sharing?
Habitat staff can record and track referrals to third parties, such as lenders or realtors. The referral status can be updated as needed so that staff can understand the outcome of a referral. Each referral record is connected to the homeowner’s file, the referred company, and a specific contact associated with that company. This enables Habitat affiliates to understand which companies and contacts have the most successful referral rates. This information can also help affiliates demonstrate the overall impact a company may have at the affiliate (for example, a bank that provides loans for homeowners may also sponsor a house, and may encourage their employees to donate or volunteer through employee giving or volunteerism programs). Affiliates can start to gain a fuller understanding of key contacts and companies’ influence across different departments.
Habitat staff can also leverage templated task lists, which can be created, connected to a homeowner’s file, and assigned to staff member(s) with just a few clicks. For example, staff may need to take the same five steps to secure down payment assistance for a family, or the same ten steps during the closing process. These templated task lists can be assigned to any staff members who use Salesforce, and staff can even collaborate and reassign tasks as needed. This increases efficiency by creating repeatable, assigned tasks instead of relying on staff members to remember complicated multi-step processes.
A Habitat affiliate may also choose to incorporate warranty and issue tracking as well. Staff can record warranty information for a property, including details about the materials or products used and the length of the warranty. Staff can even link specific warranty items to subcontractors. When a homeowner calls to report a problem, staff can quickly identify if the item in question is still under warranty, and can easily determine whether the affiliate or a subcontractor is responsible. These calls from homeowners, as well as the results of the warranty inquiry, can be tracked in Salesforce as well.
Is there anything Coastal Cloud wants Habitat affiliates to know before pursuing affiliate-specific customizations with Coastal Cloud?
Each of the solutions listed above can be implemented and customized for an affiliate as needed. Affiliates do not need to take an “all or nothing” approach. For example, if an affiliate only wants action plans and budgets, we can configure HomeKeeper just for those two features. Coastal Cloud can work with your affiliate staff to determine the configurations that best meet your needs.
Additionally, Coastal Cloud provides Salesforce implementation services for any of an affiliate’s needs, including fundraising and home sponsorships, grants management, volunteer management, and more. The Habitat affiliate customizations for HomeKeeper can either stand alone, or be a part of a larger implementation project.
Coastal Cloud is a Salesforce platinum consulting partner and a Salesforce.org Premium consulting partner. Learn more about their other customization work with homeowner portals here. Coastal Cloud has partnered with over 600 companies and nonprofit organizations to complete over 2,000 Salesforce implementation projects. Our Nonprofit Solutions team has direct industry experience in the nonprofit sector, as well as deep consulting experience working specifically with nonprofit organizations. You can reach the Coastal Cloud Nonprofit Solutions team at kathy.brown@coastalcloud.us.