This Statewide Nonprofit Streamlined Data Between 8 Agencies Using Salesforce and Workato

Supporting Families Together Association (SFTA) is a statewide association of child care resource agencies and family resources agencies throughout the state of Wisconsin. SFTA helps these agencies by providing program management, organizational development, systems building, and professional development services. Each child care resource agency is independent, but the resource agencies have a few core functions in common including providing referrals for childcare in their areas. When their legacy tool no longer could meet their needs, SFTA began to work with Bigger Boat Consulting to create a tool for the eight participating child care resource agencies. This tool needed to provide aggregated statewide data to SFTA and bring together information from all 8 agencies.

Creating A Central Hub with Salesforce

Bigger Boat created a Salesforce system that allows SFTA to manage referrals, providers (including provider listings and tracking providers licensing and pre-licensing status), trainings and reporting. Clients could now either call their local agency for a referral or access childcare referrals online with no login necessary. To keep each agency autonomous but still connected with a central hub, Bigger Boat created one core system and then deployed it to individual Salesforce instances for each agency. This allows the agencies to easily make their own changes and modifications to meet their local needs. However, SFTA also needed to track detailed statistics on referrals and providers so they could report to various funders from this database. This meant integrating between multiple Salesforce instances.

Integrating the Agencies with Workato

Bigger Boat knew that a key requirement for SFTA, as the statewide organization, was to see aggregated data across all eight local agencies. They chose to use Workato to connect the eight agency Salesforce systems to the statewide system. Workato recipes were built for each primary object that needed to sync, such as Accounts and Referrals. The recipes trigger when records are created or updated, and the appropriate fields and records are synced between the agencies and SFTA. This synchronization has enabled SFTA to have a holistic view of critical data from across the state, while each regional agency sees only its own data in its own instance.

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