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How HDA Quickly Supported Flood Victims With Improved Salesforce Infrastructure

How HDA Quickly Supported Flood Victims With Improved Salesforce Infrastructure

Housing Development Alliance, Inc. (HDA) is a nonprofit affordable housing developer located in East Kentucky. With fewer than 50 employees, their mission is to use the power of housing to transform lives and build a brighter future for their community. To date, they have helped roughly 3,000 low-income people in rural Southeastern Kentucky become homeowners, and make essential home repairs.

HDA uses Salesforce for everyday operations (e.g., tracking normal home repairs), but in late July 2022, flash floods tore through Eastern Kentucky and there was an entirely new community need to solve for. Two thousand homes and local businesses were destroyed, and 10,000 sustained damages, displacing thousands of residents. HDA immediately went into disaster recovery mode, finding temporary housing for people in need and assessing the damage to affected homes in the area.

Urgent support for flood survivors and unscalable Excel Sheets

Initially, HDA was using Excel to track flood-specific fixes, but quickly found the process difficult to maintain. For one thing, tracking flood repairs proved more complex than traditional repairs, which require customization in Salesforce. HDA partnered with Atrium to help address specific needs, namely:

  • Creating an assessment stage in Salesforce
  • Collaboration and tracking where FEMA assistance was relevant

A more seamless solution with Sales Cloud

Together, HDA and Atrium worked together to build out a flood tracking app to better track flood support opportunities, allowing for more transparency into the different stages and timely next steps.

The majority of the work done was based on a new Flood Tracking record type, which had its own sales process, custom fields, and page layout.

Intelligent tracking and visibility into opportunity ownership — and all in a flood tracking app

Opportunity ownership had been complicated because a different member of the HDA team was responsible for next steps depending on the stage; they had no reports or lists allowing them to see all of the opportunities they were responsible for at a given time. As a solution, the Atrium team built list views specific to each Flood Tracking stage, allowing HDA team members to see the opportunities they were currently responsible for with ease.

“Flood work is different and the handling of the data required a different approach. HDA staff did not have the time (or expertise) to solve the problem,” said Chris Doll, Assistant Director at HDA. “That’s why we partnered with Atrium. Their team was able to expand our Salesforce capacity such that we can seamlessly capture, track, and act on requests for flood repairs, helping us in turn better support our community in a time of great need.”

With more intelligent means of tracking repairs and viewing opportunity ownership at different stages in Salesforce, HDA was better able to meet the collective need and quickly step up to support more flood survivors.

Learn more about our Salesforce consulting services and get to know Cultivate, Atrium’s social good program.