Written By:

Marisa Blanco  |  On Demand Salesforce Technician

An all-female non-profit organization, The Empowerment Effect, was founded in 2022 and centered around the sport of Hockey, to provide mentorship and opportunity to young girls in Southern California.

Each season, the all-female team of volunteers impacts 31 participants to provide lifelong skills and values, both on and off the ice, with opportunities to explore different career paths, learn new hobbies, and participate in field trips.

In a city that is home to the LA Lakers and the LA Dodgers, hockey is often the forgotten sport. This allows The Empowerment Effect to use hockey as a vehicle for pushing the girls in the program out of their comfort zone. For many of the girls, their first clinic with The Empowerment Effect is their first time stepping on the ice. Many girls initially feel hesitant or overwhelmed, but they are supported and celebrated by their coaches and mentors and quickly learn they can achieve anything they work hard toward.

Hockey, as a kid’s sport of choice, is not cheap. Parents and caregivers can expect to invest over $1,000 per season in gear and ice time expenses. For The Empowerment Effect participants, cost is not a burden the families have to bear. Through partnerships with The LA Kings and the NHLPA’s Goals and Dreams Foundation, as well as additional fundraising and equipment donations, ice time and equipment costs are completely covered by the program.

Getting these girls on the ice and opening them up to new experiences is such an important part of the program, but more importantly, The Empowerment Effect introduces powerful role models like Blake Bolden. Blake was the first black, female pro scout in the NHL as well as the first black, professional women’s hockey player. In addition to scouting, Blake is also a regular analyst for ESPN. In November 2023, The Empowerment Effect participants were able to skate with members of the USA Hockey Women’s National Team and later attend a matchup between Team USA and Team Canada at Crypto.com Arena.

Their experience with Blake Bolden and The Empowerment Effect allows these girls to dream big. Seeing people who look like them achieve their dreams and the highest level of success proves to these girls that no dream is too big.

But you don’t have to reach the highest level to make a difference, and The Empowerment Effect girls need to look no further than the organization’s Founder and mentors, to see the kind of difference they can make in their community.

Leveraging Salesforce

The Empowerment Effect is still a young organization and has already found themselves leveraging multiple, disjointed applications to track their enrollments, events, donations, sponsorships, and more. When they came to The CRM Firm, their wish list was not long nor complicated, but it was important.

Establishing a sound technology foundation before any substantial growth can save non-profit organizations countless hours and thousands of dollars and that’s exactly what The CRM Firm can do by leveraging the Power of Us donation, the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), and the dynamic Salesforce foundation.

Areas of importance for The Empowerment Effect include a platform for collecting online donations, tracking Program Enrollments, Enrollees, Parents/Guardians, allocating donation funds, and managing Volunteer Hours.

These are all out-of-box features with the NPSP and The CRM Firm knew exactly how to get started.

First, we evaluated a few different familiar donation platforms. Ultimately, based on cost, features, and time to market, GiveLively was selected as The Empowerment Effects donation platform. This will allow for a solid, reliable integration with Salesforce as well as an integration with their existing payment processor, Stripe.

Next, The CRM Firm mapped out data points relevant to the specific constituent types within the organization to ensure that the team had the ability to track appropriate data based on the constituent, along with identifying custom data points specific to their sport and program needs. For example, on a Parent’s record, they do not need to know Jersey Size, Hocket Stick Orientation, Skate Size, and other participant-specific information. These data points are only relevant for the Program Enrollees (minors) within the system.

Establishing a sound foundation for record-keeping is key to the longevity of any database. We tested the out-of-box Household Account model to ensure that it fit the reporting and constituency grouping needs of the organization. Once the Household Account model was established, we then determined the most effective ways to ensure that the data surrounding the minors in the database could be segmented in a way that they would preserve features to report on them for sizing needs, enrollment history, or participation while intentionally tagging the records of minors to allow for them to be easily excluded from any future marketing efforts targeted at donors or parents.

Lastly, in this first phase The CRM Firm applied standards and best practices to areas like Grant Management, General Accounting Units, Relationships and Affiliations, and more out-of-box NPSP features to ensure that The Empowerment Effect could see the possibilities of future states with the Salesforce platform.

The CRM Firm provides power-user and administrative training, as well as reports and dashboard training. This will enable The Empowerment Effect to easily see and understand their data to inform the future of their mission. We believe that, for organizations like The Empowerment Effect, their time is better spent on the ice with the youth they serve instead of behind a desk struggling to use technology.

For this reason and many others, The CRM Firm strives to provide white-glove, top tier Salesforce consulting and customization services to those working to make our world a better place.

________________

The CRM Firm is a women-owned Salesforce Consulting Firm. We strive to be the most innovative and creative partner in the ecosystem, challenging the norm and delivering unique Salesforce solutions that change our clients’ businesses for the better.

Integrity, Innovation, and Inclusion are the values core to our business, and with these principles, we’ve built a team of some of the top, senior-level Salesforce experts who work tirelessly to uphold these values.