Latest News
12/18/24 - BASECAMP ADVANCEMENT CRM: Early Adopters Workshop
Secure your spot among the trailblazers! On Friday, January 17, closing out our Week of Learning, immerse yourself in the future of our Advancement CRM with this exclusive post-conference workshop.
12/12/24 - Advancement CRM: What’s New and Next
As 2024 comes to a close, University Advancement embarks on the final year of the Honor the Future Campaign and the Advancement CRM Transformation Project. The University Advancement Technology Steering Committee (UATSC) has provided updates and shared plans for Winter Week of Learning.
What This Is
This is a OneUVA project, envisioned by our executive sponsor Julie Featherstone, recommended by the University Advancement Technology Steering Committee, and approved by Mark Luellen. The project will serve the entire UVA Advancement Community.
A CRM is a constituent (or customer) relationship management system. We have chosen Salesforce as our CRM platform. To meet the specific needs of advancement professionals, we selected Kindsight’s ascend product; it is built on Salesforce specifically for advancement work.
Our existing database of record, Advance, will be obsolete by 2026; its underlying technology is old and creates additional work for everyone. Moving to a modern CRM allows us to improve and streamline business processes and work within a modular technology ecosystem and provide stability and flexibility into the future. Our goal is to have advancement staff from all functional areas following simpler business processes and our new CRM will allow us to access more accurate, complete, and timely data.
Our new CRM will function as a Salesforce application specific to advancement work. Salesforce has many applications, including Marketing Cloud and Tableau. A helpful analogy is to think of Salesforce as a mobile phone and our new CRM as an app on that phone.
Who’s Working on It
The CRM Leadership Team collaborates closely with Kindsight (the vendor and product owner of ascend), Zuri Group (our implementation partner), and hundreds of subject matter experts (SMEs) from across the UVA Advancement Community who help inform decisions about the future state. Individuals from more than 30 fundraising units have engaged with the project contributing through various means such as functional sprint meetings, validating test data, providing input and feedback, and participating in related communities of practice, standing committees, or task forces. We value your involvement and know engaging stakeholders early and often leads to the best outcome.
Our Plan
We will go live with Phase 1, replacing Advance with our new CRM, in 2025 after the close of our capital campaign.
Our project plan includes a series of sprints, each focusing on specific aspects of the CRM transformation (e.g., how it functions for end users, how data from Advance is converted into our new CRM, how it integrates data from other technology tools, how you can pull out data, etc.).
As of January 2025, we are focused on CRM permissions & security. Soon we will begin user acceptance testing to ensure the system performs the way we expected. Concurrently with this work on the CRM itself, we are also building a new data warehouse, new information delivery methods, and new reporting tools. Those efforts, critical to a successful go-live, are well under way.
How We Work
Our project is executed iteratively, learning the new features, discussing our business needs, and building as we go. Decision-making is guided by the vision of OneUVA. We are donor-centric where possible and always consider end users' perspectives and requirements. Trust and transparency are crucial in our collaborative efforts. The CRM Leadership Team, along with other SMEs from the Advancement Community, guide this work. We operate in subgroups, holding regular meetings for brainstorming, discussion, learning, and decision-making. We maintain a focus on our end goal and these guiding principles throughout the decision-making process.
Join us on this exciting journey as we shape the future of advancement technology together. Your participation is vital, and we look forward to achieving success with you!
Get Involved
This transformation will impact everyone in the Advancement Community, and we are committed to insuring you successfully navigate these changes before and after we go live. There are many ways to get involved, including data validation and user testing, CoP meetings to learn about new best practices, and training that you can begin doing today. You can also begin getting ready by cleaning up your Advance data.
CRM Training Resources
Training will come in many forms, including a sandbox environment where you can play around before we go live. But you don’t have to wait, you can begin to learn Salesforce and ascend today!
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Contact Us
Feedback and questions are welcome at any time. Contact us at AdvancementCRM@virginia.edu.