Teach For All's Strategic Use of Salesforce for Goal Tracking
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Presentation on Teach For All's development of Salesforce for use by 22 of its national organizations. Presented at The Small & Mighty Organization session at Dreamforce 2013. Slides developed and presented by Kristi (Kleinfelter) Phillips, Director, Data Management at Teach For All.
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Teach For All's Strategic Use of Salesforce for Goal Tracking
- 1. The Small & Mighty Organization Teach For All’s Strategic use of Salesforce for Goal Tracking Kristi (Kleinfelter) Phillips Director, Data Management Teach For All
- 3. One day all children will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.
- 4. Kristi (Kleinfelter) Phillips Director, Data Management Teach For All kristi.phillips@teachforall.org
- 7. Roll-up summary formulas count progress to our goals.
- 9. University [Account] Candidate [Contact] Application Tracker [Custom Object] Annual Goals [Custom Object]
- 14. Workflows & formulas breakdown progress even further.
- 19. Joined reports analyze impact.
Editor's Notes
- Educational inequity is a pervasive and complicated problem worldwide. In order for me to best talk about our use of Salesforce to combat these complex challenges, I’ll do my best to boil down the work of Teach For All into a few seconds. Simply stated Teach For All runs a network that contains 31 independent organizations who are looking to bring young leaders and teachers into classrooms like these.
- Teach For All partners face significant challenges in developing their programs, generating support, and building their organizations. Teach For All’s role in these efforts is to help partners save time, climb learning curves more quickly and access additional resources they might otherwise not have. We want to help them grow as fast as possible so that they can impact the greatest number of students in the shortest amount of time. We help our partners do this by: Provide direct support Facilitate connections between partners 3. Contribute to leadership development 4. Provide access to global resources (e.g. technology, fundraising & public relations).
- One of these global resources is Salesforce. I work with 28 of our partners to design, build and implement solutions such as Salesforce. In essence I am standing here today representing not 1 but more than 28 small and mighty organizations who use Salesforce to power some of the most central aspects of their work.
- Today I want to talk about three ways our partners leverage Salesforce to add crucial capacity in the first phase of their work: teacher recruitment. We think about recruitment much like a marathon. We are competing against hundreds if not thousands of other firms, universities and organizations for top talent entering the job force. We want the smartest, brightest, most committed individuals standing in front of students. As such we need to set ambitious goals. In a marathon this may be finishing, not walking or perhaps even finishing within a certain time.
- For us, we set goals about the number of candidates we hope to recruit, candidates from specific universities, with specific degrees or experience, etc. that we believe will be become excellent teachers and fill the gaps we have in classrooms. Once we have goals, we need to frequently review our progress, recognize where we are lagging behind and then allocate our resources effectively so that we can still meet our goals. For example, are we attracting enough candidates who can possibly teach science? If not then we need adjust course, change our strategy and employ more tactics that will attract candidates with this skill and knowledge. Likewise, marathoners need to assess where they are, get water, get food or walk if necessary.
- To have this level of information, in real time or regular intervals can take a lot of time and a lot of number crunching. In the past we relied on excel to analyze our current progress against predetermined goals. This process of manual crunching was simply timely and inefficient. Our partners are small and operate with limited staff. They couldn’t afford to dedicate precious man-hours to number crunching no matter how important. As such my first tip I’d like to share is how we have leveraged roll-up summary formulas to count progress goals.
- For those of you who may be less familiar, roll-up summary formulas are a type of formula that only exist between two objects that have a master-detail relationship between each other. You can create a roll-up summary formula ON the parent object that will Count the total number of child records Calculate the SUM, MIN or MAX value of a specific field on the child object At first glance roll-up summaries could be a simple and easy way to count candidates or contact records.
- However, our schema looked this. We had a look-up relationship between candidates and the universities they attend; or contacts and accounts. Given the nature of this relationship, we were unable to leverage roll-up summary formulas since they are only available between objects with master detail relationships. So we built two more custom objects. The first was the annual goals. This is where each year our team enters their goals for that university. How many applications they want to receive, applications by certain degree, etc. Below this object is a child we called application tracker. When a contact record is created, a tracker record is also created. 1 tracker record represents 1 candidate. Because of the relationship between annual goals and tracker reports, we could now use roll-up summary formulas. Because 1 tracker represented 1 candidate, we were now able to see goals & progress to those goals.
- In the end, it looks like this. Each university or account has a custom object related list for annual goals that is created at the beginning of each season.
- Looking down on the annual goals record- which varies by account (or university), we can see the goals we set in one column. These are simply number custom fields. On the right column is our progress to date that is updated in real time as each candidate or TRACKER record is created. This is calculated by roll-up summary formulas.
- In the end, partners can create reports like this that allow them to monitor progress to date and also compare it against different universities. No manual excel manipulating involved. No more Sunday number crunching for Monday morning team progress updates. This has been revolutionary in how our partner staff allocate their time.
- Returning to my marathon metaphor, its important to keep pace so that we don’t burn out too early. Setting benchmarks are key. If a runner is serious about finishing in under 4:15, then they need to track themselves along the way so they can adjust for unforeseen conditions, performance, etc. Similarly We can’t wait until the end of the season to see if we have achieved our goals. We need to have information along the way to know if we are on track. Because if we are wrong, this could be the difference in attracting or not attracting the best possible teachers to the highest need classrooms.
- The second take-away I want highlight is our use of workflows and formulas to track benchmarks. Partners not only want to measure end of year goals but measure progress to weekly goals, monthly goals, goals based on degree and/or other priority groups. Some partners had more than 25 different types of goals they wanted to monitor in order to ensure they were on track to meeting their end of year targets. Unfortunately we couldn’t just use more roll-up summary formulas. Custom objects are limited to 10 PER OBJECT. So this is where workflows and formulas come in.
- Here is how we tracked progress- or the number of applications within a time window. First, we created two custom fields on our annual goals object- Start date and end date. In this case, it is the start and end dates of week 1 of recruiting Second, we created a workflow that will run every time the record is updated AND TODAY falls within the start and end date for the week.
- Next we created a workflow action. Our action would update a field called Week 1 applications received. The value inserted by the workflow is based on a formula: In week 1 its easy. # of week 1 apps received is also our total. In week 2, our total number of applications received is equal to the TOTAL- which continues to grow because of our rollup- MINUS whatever the count was from week 1. And I know my week 1 number will stop growing too because today’ s date is no longer within the start/end date window.
- This type of formula repeats itself for each week of my recruitment season. Through workflows and formulas, we are able to calculate progress to more than 20 weekly goals using only 1 roll-up summary formulas. I am well within my limits of 10.
- Finally the win. For a marathoner it’s the finish line. For us it’s the end of the recruiting season when hopefully the most talented, smart and driven future teachers have applied for roles in the classroom.
- Once we have tracked progress to our goals (or finished the race), we want to analyze how effective we were in our strategies. What are the passing rates (conversion rates) for candidates? How does this compare against university? Recruiter? My third take away is related to joined reports. Joined reports have been incredibly helpful in analyzing impact or effectiveness of strategies. On metric we track is conversion rate. How many people from one phase move onto the next phase.
- The field ‘Status’ tracks where candidates are in our pipeline. Essentially we want to compare how many people in one status as compared to people in a different status. This movement are impact indicators for our staff. Using we summary reports we could filter and organize by status but were unable to compare two groups of contacts with different status. For example what % of our entire pool of candidates recruited actually completed the application. Before we would need to export two summary reports and conduct the calculation offline.
- Instead we used joined reports. Joined reports is an enabled report type that allows you to create up to 5 different blocks within one report. In block one we filtered everyone by a status. In block 2 we filtered everyone by a different status.
- Then we created a cross block formula that compared the record count of block 1 against the record count of block 2. this custom formula represents the passing rate of candidates from one phase to the next. By using a formula, the passing rate updates automatically as candidates move through the process. The formula could also be evaluated at multiple levels of the report. Here we not only calculated the total passing rate but also at a staff level and university level in order to identify trends.
- To recap 1. Roll-up summary formulas count progress to our goals. 2. Workflows & formulas breakdown progress even further. 3. Joined reports analyze impact. These 3 tactics have allowed us to better leverage Salesforce to recruit the best possible teachers for classrooms around the world.