Last week, The CRM Firm team gathered in person in Denver for our annual Summit to learn, grow, co-work, strengthen relationships, and more.
With much to do and only four days to do it, we kicked off the week with a day of team-building exercises that, according to team input, ended up being an all-time favorite Summit activity.
The CRM Firm has a long-standing relationship with Love for Lily, a nonprofit organization providing support to parents and families of babies in the NICU to help them thrive during their hospital stay and at home through facilitated support groups, Essentials Bags, grants, NICU programs and resources, bereavement programs and resources, and more.
The afternoon began with a presentation from Love for Lily’s Founder, Sahra Cahoon, and Development Director, Theresa Joseph, where they shared a raw glimpse of their early motherhood journeys and personal experiences in the NICU and what eventually resulted in the conception of this incredible organization.
Needless to say, tissues were passed around the room.
As part of their efforts to provide adequate resources to parents thrust into the unexpected reality of a NICU stay, Love for Lily assembles and delivers Essentials Bags to hospitals around the Denver area.
Essentials Bags are reusable branded totes containing the bare minimum essentials that a parent might need during a longer-than-expected hospital stay, such as a toothbrush and toothpaste, snacks, chapstick, and a journal to document a particularly difficult season.
As part of our team building exercise, The CRM Firm assembled 250 Essentials Bags to be passed along to area hospitals. In true CRM Firm fashion, the team enjoyed a little bit of friendly competition as they raced through the assembly line and thought of creative ways to assemble more bags faster than their counterparts.
At another station, the Love for Lily team set up a bracelet-making center where team members sat together beading bracelets and adding words of encouragement to be placed in Essentials Bags as another means of support.
Finally, the team also participated in handwriting notes of encouragement for vulnerable moms and dads who might benefit from a little bit of uplifting from a stranger during this trying time.
Salesforce Impact
When The CRM Firm’s Founder and CEO, Stephanie Hagan, first met Love for Lily, they sought ways to leverage their existing Salesforce database to create operational efficiency as a growing organization. Salesforce was a tool they acquired after receiving their ten donated licenses through the Power of Us Program, but they struggled to hit the ground running.
After understanding the mission, constituents the organization supported, their programs, and desired operational support, The CRM Firm got to work within their existing environment to make structural changes, reporting improvements, new integration points, and automation using Flow and Zapier.
Immediate changes The CRM Firm configured included the ability to collect donations, track more detailed information about the parents and children in the NICU, track virtual and in-person support group attendance, and their multi-step grant-making operations.
The CRM Firm leveraged Formstack Forms to create a custom Grant Application through the Making experience. Now, families can easily access public Forms to apply for grant funds through Love for Lily.
Grant funds are crucial to deploy quickly to families in need. Through Formstack features like Dynamic Prefill, Flow, Salesforce Approval Processes, and Document Merge capabilities, we deployed a Grant-making process that centralized a 10+ step process for simple application validation and fund deployment.
The CRM Firm built customizations on top of the standard Campaign and Campaign Member schema to support the ability to quickly register parents for support groups, easily identifying which support group was their first, last, consecutive attendance, and reporting attendance statistics back to the hospital they are present in.
As their next phase, The CRM Firm will tackle an SMS automation integration to provide Love for Lily with a new method of reaching parents in need, and we are thrilled to continue supporting this organization’s growth for years to come!
From Sahra, Love for Lily’s Founder—
“There are no words. [The CRM Firm] is a light in this world and I am so grateful to know you and have the opportunity to learn and grow with you [all]. Thank you for sharing your team with us, the bags they made will carry us into the end of the year. Your team has incredible hearts and their willingness to jump in and lend a hand speaks to the heart of your company.”
It was incredibly powerful for the team to see the impact of a long-standing client and why we have chosen to devote time and resources to this cause. We are grateful and humbled to be fortunate enough to be able to include all of our Salesforce services to Love for Lily at no cost as one of our many passion projects.
