Asher Student Foundation, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is a nonprofit organization, providing housing that’s cost effective and unique in spirit.  Asher Houses are open to Christian Science students of all ages who are enrolled in accredited colleges, universities and certificate programs across the United States, including individuals taking Christian Science class instruction, Christian Science nurses training, and student interns.

Asher Houses are currently located in six cities around the country. Each house offers an inviting, comfortable, safe, home-like base while student-residents pursue academic and career goals.

Executive director, Sherry Mitchell, was hired to manage and grow the organization. She wanted to upgrade their systems and processes to enable growth and manage their donor base more effectively. The Asher team used to manage their student, houses, house manager, and donor data in spreadsheets and needed a better way of accessing and analyzing their data, which they had collected over the past 20 years. Sherry had known about West Coast Consulting from the time she had worked with another large nonprofit organization.

West Coast Consulting deployed a team of certified Salesforce consultants to implement a new Cloud CRM system. Based on the business requirements gathered during requirements meetings and process workflows, the team spent four months implementing a system that matched the business needs of Asher Student Foundation.

Our consultants customized Salesforce, and created a structure that supports different account types such as business and person accounts.  They created detailed profiles, based on affiliations with house, church, grantee, student/resident, volunteer, staff, donor and others. Information on the board of trustees was also incorporated. They proceeded to load person- and business account data with corresponding contact information into the system.

West Coast Consulting team members then cleaned up donor data, analyzed the results  and placed donors into different categories.  Donor information included donor type, detail information about the donor, amount pledged, amount received, donor restriction, donation date received.

Asher Student Foundation is now able to track the student information at their various houses more efficiently.  Asher employees can communicate more effectively with house managers and volunteers running their houses from the new CRM system. The organization has improved their effectiveness in terms of data quality, data updates, and being in sync with the six houses located throughout the country. The new system provides weekly snapshots of student resident information to the individual houses.

The donor management system created by West Coast Consulting has allowed the foundation to get a 360 degree view of donor data. It allows for better analysis of their top donors and the periods and frequency of donations made to Asher Student Foundation. Asher management is now able to relate donation amounts tied to various development campaigns, and lifetime donation amounts associated with individuals and business organizations.