Back to top
Back to top

A Mid-Year Update on the KM Initiative

Wednesday, August 13, 2014
While not every regional participates in KM, it is one of the longest running and fastest growing programs in the Forum Network with 24 regional association participating. The platform developed through KM provides the technological backbone for many of the services the Forum offers—and now most regionals as well.
 
Over the last two years, our project has grown in both capacity and sophistication. Since moving to adopt an open source Drupal-Salesforce platform to replace our previous proprietary systems, the number of regional associations participating in KM has more than doubled.  We’ve launched 13 new integrated systems (website and member database) and 6 stand-alone Salesforce instances to date, with the remaining handful of sites launching in the next few months. Through trust, collaboration, co-investment, and a lot of hard work, we’ve been able to build and implement a modern technology platform that, in case of many RAs, amounted to nearly 90% savings over individual deployment. That is a great accomplishment that we couldn’t have achieved without the dedicated participation and assistance of KM Partners, especially members of the KM Advisory Group that includes representatives from the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, Council of Michigan Foundations, Indiana Philanthropy Alliance, Philanthropy Northwest, Philanthropy New York, Philanthropy Southwest, and Southern California Grantmakers. 
 
At the start of 2014, Forum staff reached out to all non-KM Partners in a series of informative one-on-one conversations. The newly formed KM Committee, the board-level committee staffed by RA CEOs and senior level staff who oversee the project, also conducted peer-to-peer outreach calls to all non-KM Partners and RAs that currently only use Salesforce, the CRM component of our platform. Through these conversations, we found that many RAs are increasingly interested in learning more about the new platform and many expressed interest in joining the initiative. 
 
When RAs consider the key requirements for a successful technology project, they’re looking for comprehensive member management tools, easy event registration, integrated systems, and the ability to connect members with each other, all of which are offered by our platform. Some RAs expressed concern about joining the collaborative due to limitations and constraints to individual customizations. While this had been an issue with our legacy system (Syscom-IMPak), we’ve designed the current platform in a way that specifically addresses this issue. Each participating RA can now customize their Drupal and Salesforce instances, and decide whether to contribute these customizations to the collective. In most cases, sharing customizations with other RAs makes sound financial sense to offset some of the initial investment (most of it if all RAs opt in.)
 
In addition to the platform itself, the Forum offers a launch assistance service to help build the capacity and skills needed for a successful launch. This includes regular coaching, customized training, and hands-on assistance as regionals configure and stage their sites for launch. Other Forum membership benefits that fall under the KM banner include ReadyTalk conferencing software and listserve services, just to name a few.
 
Our work is not going unnoticed. We continue to generate interest not only from RAs, but also from colleague organizations that are interested in learning about what we’ve built and possibly joining our collaborative. The Salesforce Suite developed for our platform now has over 15,000 downloads on Drupal.org and has even been adopted by many organizations, including United Way. Our platform has been featured as a case study in the e-book 8 Amazing Drupal Launches on Pantheon and at Dreamforce, the world’s largest technology conference (Salesforce).
 
If you’d like to learn more about the Drupal-Salesforce Platform or the work of the KM Partners, contact Val Rozansky at (202) 888-7430.
Find More By:
News type: