About Foundation Partners

Foundation Partners is a Salesforce Consulting Partner specialized in providing tailored solutions, configuration services, and training for community foundations, colleges and universities, and nonprofits. Their offerings include comprehensive modules for fund accounting, donor relations, donor portals, grant management, student recruitment, and integrated marketing solutions. In addition, they provide Salesforce configuration services, code development, integrations, and staff user training. Through these innovative solutions, Foundation Partners empowers organizations to enhance their operations and drive positive community impact.

To further enhance their end-to-end services, Foundation Partners has adopted Apsona to streamline document generation and data management tools for their clients. Prior to joining Foundation Partners, Judy Otto found success using Apsona as a community foundation system administrator and has carried that experience into her role as a consultant. By leveraging Apsona’s functionality, they help their clients simplify the production of essential documents and customized communications all within Salesforce.

Using Apsona’s Document and Email Merge, Button-Merge, and Multi-Step Reporting features, Foundation Partners automated document generation processes, allowing end users to generate personalized documents with a few clicks. This transformed workflows and made complex document assembly tasks far more efficient and less error prone.

Setting up Apsona in Salesforce was seamless with easy installation. Apsona’s documentation and office hours provided ongoing support for complex queries, making it easier for the Foundation Partners team to train clients.

Key Clients Supported:

• Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego

• Maine Community Foundation

• Distance Minnesota

• Augustine Institute

• New York General Consulting

• Edmonton Community Foundation

• Catholic Foundation of Eastern Washington 

The Challenge

The primary challenge Foundation Partners faced involved manual processes for document generation. Clients were heavily reliant on Microsoft Word and manual efforts, resulting in inefficient, time-consuming workflows. For example, generating hundreds of letters required countless manual steps, which was both tedious and resource intensive.

Objectives

Foundation Partners’ main objectives included:

1. Automating Document Generation for:

• Gift Acknowledgment Tax Receipts
• Grant and Scholarship Award Letters
• Grant and Accounts Payable Checks
• Fund Statements
• Acceptance Letters

1. Reducing manual labor and time requirements through automation within Salesforce
2. Streamline template complexity and consolidate versions for easier maintenance

Solution Approach

Foundation Partners chose Apsona as the ideal solution because it was:

1. Cost-effective and well-suited to nonprofit budgets
2. Easy to learn and maintain for clients as system administrators and non-technical users
3. Development and configuration saving ~20% of budgeted hours per client project
4. Flexible pricing with options to scale user licenses based on client needs
5. Customer-focused with Apsona’s responsiveness and support resources

Implementation

Foundation Partners’ implementation process included:

• • Discovery: Gathered client needs, business requirements, and staff users
  • Templates: Redesigned and consolidated clients’ existing templates using unique language, custom Salesforce fields, and IF/THEN statements 

• Merge Actions: Configured custom merge actions with conditional templates, field updates, and file logging 
• Salesforce Configuration: Added merge buttons to page layouts and custom apps to simplify user experience
• User Training: Provided end-user training with step-by-step instruction guides and ongoing maintenance support for system administrators 

Results

Foundation Partners used Apsona to help their clients achieve these key outcomes:

1. Time Savings: Reduced document generation requirements from a full week of manual work to the same day with a few clicks.
2. Template Consolidation: For example, 1 client started with approximately twenty-four templates, which were streamlined into 4 templates using Apsona’s conditional statements and merge actions that improved manageability and consistency. 
3. User Wins: Clients reported an easier, more intuitive user experience with the “click-to-generate” solution, which increased accuracy and eliminated manual efforts.

Unexpected Wins and Lessons Learned

Foundation Partners discovered additional benefits that offered greater value to their clients:

• Efficiency through Automation: Apsona enabled Foundation Partners to significantly reduce the time required for document generation and manual effort, reinforcing the impact of automation on productivity. This was a crucial advantage, particularly for clients with unique and varied requirements, like scholarship funds that needed custom messaging.
• Adaptability for Unique Needs and Requirements: The ability to create complex templates with conditional logic helped meet unique client needs without requiring extensive manual input.
• Invaluable for Data Cleanup: Apsona’s Drill-Down and Mass Update features empowered system administrators to make bulk updates quickly and accurately
• Customer Support as a Key Enabler: Foundation Partners found Apsona’s customer service team responsive and helpful with office hours and self-service resources enabling self-sufficiency

Conclusion

Apsona has empowered Foundation Partners to elevate their service to their clients, providing robust solutions for data management and document generation that save time, reduce errors, and improve user satisfaction. Unexpected wins, combined with Apsona’s ease of use, scalability, and strong customer support, have proven instrumental for Foundation Partners in delivering value to their clients.

To learn more about how Apsona can streamline your workflows and deliver measurable results, contact us today. For additional insights into Foundation Partners’ work with community foundations, colleges and universities, and nonprofits, visit Foundation Partners’ website.