Written By:
Sarah Burt | Director of Consulting
Heart Galleries have the life changing responsibility of connecting forever families to children in foster care, making it essential that their efforts are focused on spreading the word, creating partnerships, and educating their communities. For these reasons and more, it’s crucial that their time and energy be spent as effectively as possible.
One Accord for Kids (One Accord), located in West Texas, is one of approximately 120 organizations with a Heart Gallery program, a mission dedicated to providing healing, permanency, and stability to the youth within their community. To do this, One Accord’s program aims to increase the adoption placement of children from foster care, ensuring these children find safe, loving, and local homes within their connected community.
Time is Everything
With close to 600 children in the West Texas foster care system and limited resources, One Accord faced significant challenges in their data management, reporting, and communication. They spent countless hours managing data via Excel, communicating with separate vendors to maintain their virtual Heart Gallery, and attempting to produce pooled metrics.
As they aimed for growth and expansion, they reached a threshold where leveraging technology became essential to continuing their mission. Referred to The CRM Firm (CRMF) by another Texas-based Heart Gallery organization, One Accord embarked on a journey to find a more efficient, effective, and empowering way to manage their operations and get time on their side.
Virtual Is Vital
A virtual Heart Gallery is an online platform that showcases professional portraits taken by volunteer photographers and biographies of children in foster care available for adoption, aiming to connect them with potential adoptive families. This digital medium increases visibility and outreach, making it easier for prospective parents to learn about and express interest in adopting these children. It is also the most cost-effective and expansive means of outreach for an organization like One Accord.
Previously, One Accord’s virtual Heart Gallery was an extension of their website, managed by a third-party vendor. This dependency often caused delays in even the simplest tasks including regular updates and maintenance tasks. Recognizing the need for timely and effective updates online, One Accord transitioned to Salesforce, enabling them to manage and update their online gallery in real-time, making accurate information instantly available to those open to adoption opportunities.
CRMF also designed and implemented a dynamically embedded online inquiry form on each Heart Gallery landing page. This form allows online visitors to easily submit adoption inquiries, triggering alerts to the One Accord team, ensuring no adoption opportunities are lost. With Salesforce, One Accord can now add a child to their virtual Heart Gallery in 10 minutes or less once the required approvals, details, and their professional portrait are entered.
Physical Heart Gallery
In addition to the virtual gallery, One Accord promotes and educates communities about Heart Gallery children through a traveling, physical Heart Gallery (similar to the one pictured below). These galleries are displayed in large public spaces like airports, libraries, and shopping malls, featuring professional portraits of each child along with a QR code linking to the child’s information. Managing these operations requires a well-organized infrastructure to track locations, dates, contacts, and featured children.
CRMF streamlined this process by designing a system leveraging Campaigns. This setup requires less than two minutes per event and allows the association of children’s portraits for reporting needs. This feature helps One Accord track and analyze where and for how long a child’s portrait was displayed, ensuring equal exposure for each child.
Getting Time Back
Time is crucial when it comes to these children, and One Accord needed to implement efficiencies within the Salesforce ecosystem to ensure their time was spent effectively. CRMF identified and developed several automation points. For instance, automation for upcoming birthdays and children aging out of the system (turning 18) allowed for routine data management to be handled by Salesforce, freeing up staff to act only when necessary.
Additionally, CRMF developed an automation that alerts staff when an adoption takes place, notifying all Heart Gallery events where the child’s portrait is displayed so it can be removed promptly. These seemingly small processes add up to significant amounts of time that can be reallocated to focusing on creating adoption opportunities for these children.
Making a Real Difference
One Accord for Kids, with the support of The CRM Firm, has significantly enhanced its operations through the strategic use of technology. By implementing real-time updates, dynamic inquiry forms, streamlined processes for physical galleries, and various automations, One Accord can now focus more on their mission of providing healing, permanency, and stability to the youth in their community. Their story is a testament to how technology can empower organizations to make a profound impact on the lives of children in foster care.
