The multicultural and interdisciplinary Family Nurturing Center staff team “works collaboratively with parents, professionals, community-based organizations, and private and public institutions to train, mentor, and support various community development and family support programs that strengthen neighborhoods and families.”
FNC partners with health centers to start nurturing programs for expectant parents; organizes neighborhood playgroups and support groups for parents and their young children; brings together unique groups like teen parents and dads to support each other in becoming more nurturing caregivers; trains community-based organizations on issues that affect family well-being; and promotes literacy through distributing children’s books through home visits to families with newborns. Standardizing the intake and tracking of program participants was crucial to successful growth of the organization.
Database Designs began by conducting a planning and assessment phase with appropriate FNC management and program staff. We took stock of current processes, bottlenecks and opportunities and explored what kinds of outcome measurement FNC would like to do and the tools they were currently utilizing for this purpose. We examined existing forms and spreadsheets as well as the state of the current databases employed for contact and donor management; we evaluated the robustness of the FNC’s network and infrastructure; and we got a feel for the existing range of skill sets among the staff and what would contribute to making their jobs easier.
Based on this work, we emerged with a clear road map of where the organization needed to go. We recommended that the FNC adopt a client and program tracking system based on the Salesforce Foundation’s Nonprofit Edition (“NPSF”) which provides 10 free licenses to qualified nonprofits. Through adoption of Salesforce, FNC’s database is now accessed using secure weblinks to hosted services. To keep costs down it was decided not to migrate the existing Access database to the new system; it remains available as an archive. Only new client data is entered into the new system.
FNC, like many nonprofits, faces challenging reporting requirements. The choice of Salesforce will make the process of creating reports for multiple funders and state agencies much easier for the client.
