Plan Your Programs and Services

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Work with your team to define your programs and services.
• Understand how program and service records can be used by different types of organizations.

Get Ready

Like so much in Salesforce—and life, really—preparation makes all the difference. Before you start to use Program Management Module (PMM), map your programs and services to translate them into the objects in PMM.

Let’s visit our fictional nonprofit, No More Homelessness (NMH), to learn how its team plans to use PMM to manage programs and services.

Do It Yourself

The example in this module shows how one organization might map its programs and services to PMM. To follow the same process at your organization, download the guide linked in Resources.

Define Programs and Services

Like a lot of organizations, NMH grew and expanded in response to its communities’ needs. To start, the nonprofit offered only emergency housing services, but now it provides a full suite of programs for transitional housing, food security, job readiness, and more.

When NMH first decides to track its programs in Salesforce, the group’s program staff all clamors to get their data in the system. But knowing how their programs are always evolving, Gordon Chu, the program director at NMH, approaches setup thoughtfully. 

Gordon meets with his program managers—Anthony Hall and Gia Mason—and the group’s Salesforce admin to decide how they will define the PMM record values for NMH.

The team’s first instinct is to group everything in Salesforce into two big programs: emergency and housing programs, which Anthony manages; and hunger, health, and career programs, which Gia manages. But they take a step back to ask how they want to track their work:

• How do they measure it?
• What do they need to report to grantmakers and other donors?
• What process improvements would make them more effective?

After a friendly-but-rigorous debate, the team decides to structure their data in Salesforce in six programs: emergency services, the housing assistance hotline, the food pantry, transitional housing, the women’s program, and career counseling. 

Each program and service is a little different. The team starts by sketching out a plan for organizing data for the food pantry.

Services Example: Three for the Food Pantry

The NMH team identifies three services in the food pantry program, one for each kind of item it distributes: produce and fresh food, dry goods, and personal care items. Each service can have a distinct unit of measurement, but they decide to keep things simple and measure all these services by the number of items distributed.

Program Cohorts Example: Monthly for the Food Pantry

Gia also wants to report on groups of clients who visit the pantry based on the date of their first visit, allowing her to see how many return and how their participation in the program evolves. This seems like a perfect way to use the program cohort functionality, so the team decides to create a new cohort each month to track the program engagements for the program.

Note

When you’re planning program cohorts, remember that a program engagement can only belong to one program cohort. You may have to make a choice between what’s most important to track.

Programs and Services for Other Causes

Let’s step away from NMH to consider other causes. If you don’t work at a human services group, the PMM data model still applies to your organization, you just need to organize your programs and services differently.

Here are examples from different causes.

How you set up programs and services in PMM is totally up to you. Just keep in mind that you need to add a unit of measurement with each service to track deliveries and report on your program activities.

Now that you’ve learned more about planning programs, services, and program cohorts, let’s look at how to enter them into PMM in the next unit.

Resources 

• Salesforce Help: Create Programs
• Guide: Mapping Programs & Services to Program Management Module (Downloadable slide deck)