Local Investment Creates a National Impact

OPAL Community Land Trust works to maintain the character, vibrancy and diversity of the Orcas Island community by acquiring land and creating permanently affordable homes. A few years ago, OPAL staff saw a need to create a customized database to track their clients and properties. After taking a Salesforce.com database class, they discussed this idea with other community land trusts (CLTs) in the region and found that the dream of a CLT-specific CRM was shared by other organizations. They began the process, along with two other organizations and the help of NPower, to develop a database that would meet the common needs of CLTs. The idea stalled temporarily but was picked back up several years later when the need was even more pressing. The CLTs involved approached the Northwest CLT Coalition for financial support to help develop a system. The Coalition secured the initial funding to make it happen and HomeKeeper was born.

Not long after work began on HomeKeeper, The Cornerstone Partnership, (a program of NCB Capital Impact and a peer network for homeownership programs that preserve long-term affordability and community stability) was conducting a study on affordable homeownership programs with the Urban Institute, and were faced with a challenging problem: since data was tracked differently among the seven organizations involved, it was difficult to piece together conclusions and define success. They decided to create a shared measurement system that would enable them to compare hundreds of organizations at a national level. Cornerstone was impressed with the work being done on HomeKeeper, and invested significant funding to expand the HomeKeeper system to work on a national level. NPower's database consulting team stepped up to the challenge.

"Working with NPower has been highly beneficial. The database team has been flexible in adapting new requirements and ultimately developed HomeKeeper into a tool that reflects the real-time needs of these organizations."

-Tiffany Eng, Consultant, Cornerstone Partnership, NCB Capital Impact

The Challenge

• OPAL and other CLTs were in need of a tool to effectively manage their programs as significant time was being wasted tracking data in spreadsheets and manually generating complicated reports.
• Affordable homeownership organizations across the country were tracking their programs differently, making their overall impact unclear.
• It became clear that a shared measurement system would help organizations not only run their programs more efficiently, but also collect data that could be used to generate more effective programs nationwide.

The Solution

• OPAL and two other Northwest CLTs turned to NPower to begin designing a CRM database built on the highly-customizable Salesforce platform.
• The new system, HomeKeeper, was built to meet the specific needs of affordable homeownership programs with an emphasis on consistent tracking of multiple data points, enabling organizations to compare themselves to their peers and adjust their programming to increase impact.
• Homekeeper was designed to facilitate the day–to-day work of implementing permanently affordable homeownership programs and to promote the use of best practices in that implementation. Additional “data entry” is not need to collect the information for reporting and tracking.
• The Cornerstone Partnership saw first-hand the need for management tool that also allowed for shared measurement, and granted money to those CLTs to work with NPower to develop a system that could be implemented nationwide.
• Cornerstone has developed HomeKeeper into a managed package with the help of NPower and built a pilot program of 14 organizations that are helping to shape the product in advance of a broader launch.
• HomeKeeper was built to meet the needs of a broad range of organizations and simultaneously encourage best practices by training participating organizations to track the same critical data points.

The Impact

• The initial launch of HomeKeeper has been a great success, with organizations praising its ease of use and lauding the CRM's ability to generate reports in a fraction of the time that staff was accustomed to.
• Organizations are embracing HomeKeeper as a management tool and have seen internal communication and communication to homeowners improve since the system was implemented.
• Staff appreciate that important data is being tracked without staff needing to do additional work.
• The system has changed how organizations define success as they can compare themselves to each other and improve programming based on proven results.
• Staff at OPAL say that HomeKeeper is even better than they imagined it could be because of the additional resources provided by The Cornerstone Partnership and the larger national scope of the project.
• The Cornerstone Partnership is looking for 20 more “early adopters” in the next year to help finalize the system and ready it for nationwide use.