Transforming Family Resource Centers Data-Informed Decisions & Streamlined Operations Through Salesforce’s Experience Cloud

FRCA Gains Data-Informed Decisions & Streamlined Operations Through Salesforce’s Experience Cloud

Family Resource Center Association

Since 1998, the Family Resource Center Association (FRCA) has provided resources, capacity building, advocacy, and partnership opportunities to strengthen Colorado’s statewide network of Family Resource Centers (FRCs). Today, the FRCA network provides thousands of families with safe, accessible places to connect with comprehensive, coordinated services in their communities. 

FRCA’s core service is Family Development, a program that allows case workers to work one-on-one with families to help them set and achieve transformative goals in their lives and guide them on a path to sustainability. The Family Pathways Framework focuses on assisting families in building from their strengths, taking charge of their lives, and accessing resources available in their community.

Solution for Colorado’s Family Resource Centers

FRCA and Provisio Partners met in January 2020 due to the need for a centralized data system that could be used to collect, manage, and collaborate with its 32 member Family Resource Centers. As a membership organization, FRCA supports FRCs serving families in  Colorado by providing technical assistance, validated tools, and centralized outcomes reporting database. Colorado’s FRCs benefit from the FRCA membership in a variety of ways, including utilizing a shared database platform to centralize records on families that engage with Member Centers and provide state-wide data on needs and services provided to families in Colorado. 

“We learned that our enterprise agreement, providing access to our legacy shared data system, was set to expire in July of 2020. The legacy system offered limitations in reporting functionality, customization of fields, interoperability, and the ability to create various user profiles needed by our diverse network members. Engaging a multi-disciplinary committee, including end-users, in an extensive product review and competitive solicitation process led us to Salesforce. Its affordability (with a non-profit discount), ease of customization, dynamic reporting, interoperability, and heightened security features solidified it for us.” Teri Haymond, Program Director at FRCA

With many Family Resource Centers part of the Association, FRCA needed a dynamic database that was able to complete complex calculations, eliminate duplicate reporting of families who receive services at multiple centers, and Referral, Assessment, and Service tracking.  FRCA also wanted the opportunity to reduce the need to reconcile data from the Office of Early Childhood’s (OEC) database, which was duplicated in FRCA’s system when Centers were participating in both FRCA’s and OEC’s programs. Creating FRCA’s system to match and integrate with OECs provided a centralized and unified data source.

Centralized Data Solution

Salesforce with Provisio’s customizable extensions was the solution FRCA was looking for to give a holistic view of its member Family Resource Centers. Salesforce provides a comprehensive solution of one source of data and provides instant access to constituent data across all data elements.

Automating Existing Reports

Additionally, Provisio developers worked to create a series of complex reports that would illustrate performance against benchmarks based on its validated tools. One of those reports, the Family Pathways Essential Requirements Checklist (FPERC) allows FRCA and individual Centers to measure their performance against the core components of the Family Pathways model using real time data from those Centers. Before Provisio and Salesforce, data had to be exported from their legacy system, re-formatted, and imported into Microsoft’s Power BI analytics software.  Provisio automated the creation of the report in Salesforce with a component that allows users to generate a series of scores for each program core component with a simple click of a button.  FPERC report components include a family-centered approach, screening, concrete/emergency services assessment/service matching and goal setting, and program evaluation.

Prior to Provisio supporting FRCA, the individual Family Resource Centers in the Association had to request FPERC reports from FRCA to know how they were measuring related to program components. With this new functionality, they can run the report themselves whenever they need to and make data collection modifications as needed. Provisio revamped the FPERC report with customized automation, saving FRCA team members valuable time they can now use to focus on their constituents. FRCA reduced staff time by 159 hours annually by automating once manual processes and improving reporting capabilities. Something that previously took two weeks twice a year now takes one hour to complete. 

Additionally, radar graphs were created to visualize the 18 different domain areas and their scores as part of the validated assessment tool, Colorado Family Support Assessment 2.0 (CFSA). With the radar graph, FRCs can visually compare two various assessments for the same FRCA client to understand which services a client may need or is benefiting from. In addition, the radar graphs gave them the ability to compare score changes across the domains over time; something FRCA was not able to do before Salesforce.

Radar graphs created by Provisio allowed FRC’s to visually compare two various assessments for the same FRCA client to understand which services a client may need or is benefitting from. These graphs also gave them the ability to compare score changes of their baseline assessment across domains over time.

Salesforce Experience Cloud

Provisio implemented Salesforce’s Experience Cloud (formerly known as Community Cloud) for the 32 Family Resource Centers to enter their program, assessment, and evaluation data. Salesforce Experience Cloud gave FRCA a web-based platform accessible via the internet from any location, enabling all Family Resource Centers access to easily input their data. In addition, Experience Cloud gave FRCA streamlined workflows and user-friendly reporting processes from this web portal.

Strong Partnership for Successful Implementation

The project went live on July 1, 2020, with the implementation being a big success. Due to the successful implementation and overlap in data collected by Colorado’s Office of Early Childhood (OEC) and FRCA, it was decided that integrating the two systems to eliminate duplicate data entry for FRCs would be a huge benefit. OEC worked with Provisio to build an API integration from the OEC system to FRCA’s Salesforce instance to push consented family Household Service and Assessment from one system to the other. This allows for further analysis of the data provided by Family Resource Centers. Colorado now has a holistic set of all early childhood data for the entire state. 

“Data is extremely valuable in today’s competing financial market, especially for nonprofits. That the data belongs to the individual Centers and should be at their immediate disposal, is one of FRCA’s foundational values. Prior to FRCAforce, a discrepancy between this value in theory and practice existed. Centers were reliant on FRCA staff capacity or external data manipulation processes to access their data in meaningful ways. Another major accomplishment regards the interplay of FRCAforce with other Salesforce systems. The idea that a family engaging in services across multiple programs only has to “tell their story” once through the strengths-based assessment reinforces the “human” in human services. It is saving families and staff time, allowing for deepened relationship building.” Teri Haymond, Program Director at FRCA

With the new Salesforce automation, FRCA’s member Family Resource Centers can generate reports, understand their impact on the community, and make data-driven decisions to support their programs and constituents. The centralized system and ease of Salesforce reporting give FRCA internal administrators the ability to visualize a 360 view of their data.


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