Salesforce Employees Provide Pro Bono Support to New York Public Radio

As soon as she started at Salesforce Carolina Oria, Success Manager, Director was looking for a meaningful way to put our 1-1-1 integrated philanthropy model into action. Leveraging years of experience with Salesforce products, Carolina sought a nonprofit that was in need of her expertise.

Her search for the right organization led her to one close to her heart, New York Public Radio (NYPR). Carolina says “For several years, I listened to programming produced by NYPR during my commute to work enjoying their high quality journalism and enlightening content. This pro bono engagement afforded me the opportunity to give a little back to the radio.”

Over the last year Carolina reached out to NYPR and engaged them in a discovery process to identify all the areas where Salesforce could build their capacity. Together with the NYPR leadership team, they confirmed they would focus their efforts on the NYPR Underwriting Sales team. Underwriting spots are the type of advertisement you hear in Public Radio for corporate brands. In addition to grants and donations from listeners, underwriting sales is an increasing source of revenue to support Radio programs. NYPR set a goal to increase Underwriting Sales by 20% in 2016.

Once goals of the project were established Carolina outlined a full Salesforce implementation plan and even broke the plan into 17 separate projects with tasks, priority level and estimated hours of work so as to engage her colleagues. Carolina also enlisted Sharda Kumari, Application Developer/QE at Salesforce, as partner and project manager. Carolina and Sharda worked together to automate the entire sales process, improve reporting and sales forecasting, automate other processes including trade inventory management and editorial copy process, integrate Salesforce with outlook, migrate legacy data and train their staff.

All this and now NYPR will be able to hit their very aggressive goals for the year! Salesforce helps NYPR manage their sales process and understand the conversion of opportunities to closing revenue. Gone are the excel spreadsheets and silioed communications that made managing these efforts tedious. With Carolina and Sharda’s assistance, NYPR has a centralized database so everyone at NYPR can access the same information and more efficiently manage all their sales, relationships and inventory. “Their hard work and efforts in the short run, will help the success of NYPR and it’s initiative for developing quality programming to the community in the long run” says Madeliene Sumera, Business Manager at NYPR.

For Carolina this project was a win-win- win helping her to improve her industry knowledge, allowing her the opportunity to work with a colleagues she may not come across in her day job and give back to an organization she cares about.

Thank you Carolina and all the Salesforce pro bono pros that champion customer success!