Christina Gremore, Social Venture Partners International Intern
I’m writing this blog post having just finished a check-in meeting with my supervisor. I was showing her my ideas about how SVP could adapt Salesforce.com’s powerful features and tools to foster a greater degree of collaboration between Partners, among staff, and across the network. For example: I’ve created a survey in Flow Designer that will automatically update the Partner’s record in our database with the kind of granular data around professional skills that helps SVP staff make a solid match between Partners and Investees. With more accurate and easily searchable information, SVP can more efficiently reach out to Partners and avoid letting those with valuable skills go untapped.
I’ve also been looking into Salesforce’s Self-Service Portal. Originally designed to let customers interact with service reps when trying to resolve a case, I’m recommending that SVP use it to allow SVP staff and Partners to communicate with each other about an Investee Project. Right now, such communications happen mainly via email. Keeping these conversations in the central database will allow others across the network to access the knowledge captured in the projects.
A lot of my work has basically been very exploratory. I’ve been poking around the Salesforce platform, user guides, implementation manuals, blog posts - investigating what features other people are excited about, and thinking about whether they could be useful to SVP. Some staff members seem excited about using new tools; others are not quite so enthusiastic. I’ll be leading a call next week to demo these tools. I plan to focus quite heavily on the benefits of using the new tools. Getting used to a new way of doing things is not always fun (I’m looking at you, people who whine every time Facebook changes its layout) and I think it’s important to let users know how much easier this will make their lives.
When I first arrived here, my colleagues referred to me as “the Salesforce guru,”
which always made me a little nervous. I was always tempted to correct them: “I’m really just an intern who’s never used Salesforce before.” But after a month of immersing myself in the platform, I’ve started to own my “guru” title - although as Socrates pointed out, that really only means that I’ve finally begun to learn how much I have yet to discover!
Tags: internship advantage, Social Venture Partners, Salesforce