The challenge
Advance Illinois works to build a public education system that prepares students for success in college, careers and civic life, with a focus on equity and support for the whole child. Achieving that mission at scale meant the organization needed operations that could keep pace with its ambitions.
The team had inherited Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, a platform with the potential to streamline operations, improve efficiency and strengthen stakeholder relationships. But disparate systems and a lack of centralized data kept that potential out of reach.
Advance Illinois' small but mighty team made a strategic choice: focus first on grant management. Without a unified platform behind it, the team had no single source of truth to support informed decision-making and strategic planning. TELUS Digital was engaged to refine grant management operations and help the organization unlock more value from the NPSP platform it already had.
The TELUS Digital solution
TELUS Digital started by taking the time to fully understand Advance Illinois' existing grant management workflow and the challenges behind it. From there, the team worked side-by-side with Advance Illinois to reshape how grant management operated inside NPSP, focusing on four key attributes:
- Building a process map: TELUS Digital helped Advance Illinois create a comprehensive process map outlining current workflows, identifying bottlenecks and highlighting where improvement was possible. The map became a visual guide for transitioning grant management workflows into NPSP.
- Transitioning into NPSP: TELUS Digital customized NPSP specifically for grantseeking, tailored to Advance Illinois' needs.
- Training for success: TELUS Digital delivered hands-on training covering both the technical side of Salesforce NPSP and how it applied to each user's day-to-day responsibilities.
- Driving user adoption: Recognizing that adoption was critical to realizing NPSP's value, TELUS Digital worked closely with the Advance Illinois team to build enthusiasm and help every member understand how the system could simplify their work and drive results.
The results
With a streamlined grant management process built on NPSP, Advance Illinois moved from disconnected systems and manual tracking to a unified, automated workflow. The organization is now positioned to elevate its grant management operations and demonstrate the impact of that work.
Other outcomes from the engagement included:
- A single source of truth now supports informed decision-making and strategic planning
- Manual, spreadsheet-based processes were replaced with automated workflows built for grantseeking
- Reporting is faster and more accurate for stakeholders
- Hands-on training and adoption support helped the team fully embrace the new system
- Advance Illinois can now track KPIs and clearly demonstrate return on investment
