CASE STUDY
How Global Fund for Women Leverages HiFi’s Salesforce Managed Services and Transformational Projects to Fight for Gender Justice Around the World
Global Fund for Women funds bold, ambitious, and expansive gender justice movements to create meaningful change that will last beyond our lifetimes across the globe, envisioning a world where movements for gender justice have transformed power and privilege for a few into equity & equality for all.
In this case study we’ll share how Global Fund for Women’s Information Management Team leverages HiFi’s advanced Salesforce skills for both managed services and project work to achieve its mission and vision.
Intro: A Perfect Long-Term Match
The relationship between Global Fund for Women (GFW) and HiFi began back in 2020. GFW had a couple of very specific projects that needed Salesforce data, architecture, and coding expertise, including a bulk email interface, gift processing migration, and putting together an unlocked, distributable package. This need was a perfect fit for HiFi’s advanced technical focus and post-implementation approach.
During those initial projects, it became clear that our teams were incredibly well aligned and that HiFi could offer consistent, long-term value for GFW’s team - which is exactly what we’ve done.
We’ve fine-tuned our partnership over the years and settled on a powerful pattern:
Hold a yearly planning session to budget a bucket of hours we’ll consume throughout the year
Earmark a portion of hours for managed services, including weekly support
Create estimates and delivery timeframes for specific projects
Create a monthly consumption plan for the year
The result: together we keep operational processes humming and innovation accelerating with an efficient plan that maximizes value and growth for GFW’s programs and team capacity.
“HiFi is truly unique in how they partner, support, and align with our values and work. They listen and meet us where we are, providing exactly what we need. Our relationship with HiFi has deepened over the years; their skills, knowledge, and expertise have become indispensable. They have raised the level of what we’re able to accomplish as an organization.”
- - Karen Ishimaru, Director, Process & Information Management
Managed Services
HiFi and GFW earmark a portion of our yearly contracted hours exclusively for managed services, with a dedicated resource from HiFi effectively joining the GFW team.
To meet GFW’s unique needs, this HiFi resource is focused mainly on providing support with code and architecture. With a variety of technology tasks, operational improvements, and maintenance going at any one time, we have found that a small amount of weekly Salesforce code and architecture expertise from HiFi unlocks puzzles quickly, and timely strategic advice & answers to key questions keeps the work queue moving forward efficiently.
Occasionally other members of the HiFi team will get involved as well, offering additional expertise in NPSP, UI/UX, and other strategic needs that complement GFW’s current work queue.
And the best part, as we’ll show below, is that when it comes time to implement transformative innovation, HiFi’s consistent engagement and long-term commitment to GFW gives us enough context to eliminate expensive overhead and accelerate project delivery. This allows GFW to get the most out of their HiFi hours, providing a tremendous return on investment.
HOW MANY HOURS ARE ENOUGH?
There’s no one right answer for a managed services engagement - it varies from org to org. We’ve found that an average of 30-60 hours per month for a single, fast-moving team is often a good number, dedicating a few hours per week to providing guidance & offering sage advice, and the rest towards a queue of deliverable work - occasionally adding or saving hours to spike for a larger, transformative project.
Once HiFi has done an extensive engagement with a client, we can often be more efficient with smaller groups of hours, even just 10 a month. It’s tough to start from such a low number, as it takes time and mileage to develop that intrinsic understanding of how to bring value fast.
Transformational Projects - FAST
In addition to our weekly support commitment, HiFi and GFW designate hours from the yearly pool to deliver large projects quickly, targeting technology investments across a variety of business areas to build capacity. Here are just a couple of the projects we’ve helped design and release in the past few years:
PROJECT SUMMARY 1: ASSESSOR’S COMMUNITY
We were challenged to reimagine a process hamstrung by an aging VF+tabs site that was both difficult to maintain and still did not fully support the needs of GFW’s worldwide assessor community. In this case we converted the existing Aura infrastructure into a community driven by Lightning Web Components, making the code accessible in both internal and external contexts, and delivering a process that crucially enables assessors to fully complete reviews of information without needing a Salesforce license and without requiring any training.
HiFi’s managed services + projects model enabled us to forgo a formal discovery process for this project. Since we had so much context and insider information already, we could jump into more of an efficient requirements phase immediately.
SITEMAP
We started with a sitemap and information architecture to clearly articulate the pages & data required, the data flow, and help set boundary conditions for the technical architecture & approach.
With confidence that we had a great grasp of the project’s definition of success, along with previously established knowledge of program values & outcomes from our support work, we moved quickly on to technical architecture, interface design, and build.
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TECHNICAL DESIGN
We constructed a site that uses the Aura Framework (an LWR Framework is now a great option as well) with a custom UI built entirely with Lightning Web Components and an Apex backend. This allowed us to use the Experience Cloud framework for login/identity verification, security, data access, and page structure, but gave us complete control over the UI and logic, so we could make a sophisticated app with an approachable and simple-to-understand interface.
VISUAL DESIGN
We designed a landing page with task-summary cards, articulating a clear delineation of complicated details and data to help the assessor understand and complete each task. We designed the action page with a side-by-side interface that is intuitive and customized to the particular materials being reviewed and data collected; knowing that many assessors will have spotty internet access, the feedback component is constantly auto-saving user input to ensure that users don’t lose work as they go.
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BUILD & DELIVER
While the interface itself is a custom LWC app, we utilized the Base Lightning Web Component library and the Salesforce Lightning Design System to take advantage of the many design patterns and functional components that are available to leverage and extend. Using these libraries enables us to build highly-custom software far more quickly and easily than would be possible otherwise, and helps us understand where to invest in custom logic & interactions.
With additional elements from the GFW brand book, we created a clean interface that met this diverse group of international users with clear interactions & intelligible, actionable data. We rolled the site out in a matter of months to positive reviews with a dramatically improved experience, building important capacity for GFW’s global assessor community.
THE POWER OF LONG-TERM ENGAGEMENTS
Having a thorough understanding of an organization’s goals, values, and desired outcomes enables HiFi to customize our approach and strategies in a way that aligns with both short-term needs and long-term vision. And when combined with empathetic relationships, a comprehensive grasp of language, and hard-earned trust, HiFi can help manifest those strategies with precision and alacrity. Good stuff, delivered fast - that’s our sweet spot.
PROJECT SUMMARY 2: GRANTMAKING ASSIGNMENTS
This project addressed internal staff who labored during grantmaking season to identify and assign appropriate international advisors to relevant grant proposals; they particularly struggled to find and evaluate all the context and background information required to create a good match. This new architecture + user experience enabled a complex process through a logical and time-saving interface, from identification to matching to letter sending all the way through to status tracking.
Having worked with GFW for a couple of years was such a boon to this project. HiFi already understood the language, the myriad acronyms, and the desired high-level outcomes & output - AND - we had enough distance to come with fresh eyes, we weren’t stuck so deep in the process that we were hamstrung by “but we’ve always done it this way”. It gave us a unique opportunity and unfair advantage to dramatically improve the process through creative destruction, trusted partnership, and iterating design solutions.
WIREFRAMES
We experimented with a few structures before settling on a pattern of distributing work across three distinct process-oriented work tabs, with key interactions to facilitate data understanding and action. We started by blocking out rules on a wireframe.
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ARCHITECTURE
With wireframes in place and excitement growing with the user base, we followed our frequent pattern of building a custom LWC app, relying on Base Lightning Components and the Salesforce Lightning Design System to guide the styling and standard functionality, then extending those components or building custom ones as needed. This gave us a great deal of flexibility and allowed us to move quickly. Additionally, since this app is accessed from within Lightning Experience, we kept the look and feel consistent with the overall Salesforce UI by layering in design patterns from the GFW instance, including familiar iconography.
DETAILED VISUAL COMPS
The data model behind this tool is extremely complex. One of the challenges here was to provide an interface that hid that complexity from the user, while acknowledging that these users were experts and wanted more sophisticated interactions and data density than the assessor solution above. A drag-and-drop interface was the key to unlocking this challenge, along with rapid filtering made possible with the JavaScript LWC controller. On the Apex side, we made extensive use of wrapper classes which do the heavy lifting of pulling together large amounts of interconnected SObject data, and putting them into a simplified structure that is much easier to pass back and forth between the Apex backend and the LWC frontend.
Each of the three tabs provide a large amount of information and functionality and are designed to work in line with GFW business processes, giving users the tools and data they need only as they become useful.
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RESULTS:
During grantmaking season the work is exponentially faster to complete with more clarity and less rework; it’s also now easier to distribute work internally and requires a much-less specialized role. The added capacity translates directly to GFW’s ability to distribute funds globally to groups that are making a huge difference in their communities - perfect!
Summary
We’re thrilled to show up to work each day when it means we get to enable and accelerate the important work that incredible organizations like GFW are doing to make the world a better place, especially in service of those who don’t historically have a voice or access to important resources.
We are so glad that our model and expertise provides GFW with the power they need to leverage Salesforce effectively and deliver on the promise of their mission and vision.
“At Global Fund for Women, we are especially appreciative of the way HiFi staff relate to those of us on staff with Salesforce expertise whether developers, administrators, or “accidental techies”. Melissa and Rich intend their project work to fit into our structures and processes rather than pushing us toward theirs. They acknowledge, respect, and draw on the expertise of each of our staff, following a true participatory design and development process. When we ask for advice on improving our developer/admin infrastructure they’re quick to help, drawing on rich knowledge and experience, while always following our lead. In short, HiFi is a perfect match for both our needs and our values.”
- - Randy Trigg, Director, Information Management
How To Support Global Fund for Women
Learn more about Global Fund for Women and the vital work they do for communities around the world by following their social media channels linked below; you’ll be impressed with how they generate measurable change in such a thoughtful, effective way.
LEARN MORE! ENGAGE!
Engage with GFW on your favorite social channel:
DONATE!
Please consider financially supporting GFW’s important work: