TEGV
TEGV centralises processes and boosts volunteer collaboration using Salesforce
Educational Volunteers Foundation of Turkey (TEGV) is an organisation that creates and implements educational programs and extracurricular activities for children between the ages of 7-16 years throughout Turkey. Founded in 1995, today TEGV is the most widespread NGO in the field of education in Turkey and operates 43 Learning Units, 24 Firefly Mobile Learning Units, 10 Education Parks and 4 City Representative Offices serving 150.000 children with the help of its 10000 volunteers annually. Using Salesforce, the organisations manages a wide network of volunteers, partners, processes and systems, providing instant access to up to date information for its users.
Prior to implementing Salesforce, TEGV had been using a fragmented system made up of more than ten individual applications, which meant a lot of maintenance and administration effort and left users moving from one application to another to access information. In 2012 they began assessing their IT strategy and knew specifically that mobility, Big Data, SaaS, cloud systems, and continuity would play a key role for the organisation in the coming years. In TEGV’s IT Strategy vision statement it states: ‘Using Information, Communication, Education Technologies based on the criteria of cost, convenience, efficiency, security, sustainability and following the green IT principles for all the activities of Foundation’. Ayşegül Kınacı, TEGV IT Manager adds, “ Salesforce platforms and solutions have met all these expectations and we gladly chose Salesforce as our core Information Management and Collaboration Platform. Also, Salesforce.org’s NGO policy has played a very important role in our decision.”
“Flexibility was an important factor for us,” said Yeşim Demirek, IT IM and Projects Coordinator, TEGV. “We wanted a system that would allow us to scale as an organisation and would ensure business continuity – with Salesforce, there’s no downtime so this was a great selling point for us.”
TEGV now uses Chatter to facilitate collaboration, communication and document sharing for volunteers, master trainers and TEGV professionals, Sales Cloud to manage donors and volunteer activities, Force.com to process and manage Core Information Management and power their Learning Assessment System, Data.com for Data Conversion and Loading Processes and an app from the Salesforce AppExchange to manage integrations between Salesforce and their Learning Management System.
“Working with a very capable Salesforce partner in Turkey, we developed a system that would allow us to combine all processes into one central application so that our users could easily access information, quickly publish their own reports, and have a clear sight of personal goals,” said Mert Mekik, Systems and Operations Coordinator, TEGV. “For IT, the new Salesforce system means easy administration and maintenance, good business continuity, and streamlined support for users. All our systems integrate seamlessly which means a lot less manual processes for the team, which has been very beneficial.”
With a large network of volunteers, TEGV also needed a system that would allow them not only to effectively coordinate and manage their volunteers, but also that would make it easy for volunteers to collaborate, share best practices, access teaching materials and generate a sense of belonging.
“Using Salesforce Chatter, volunteers can easily access information, build relationships and exchange ideas, on any device, on the move, wherever they are,” said Yeşim. “Change management is hard, but with Salesforce, it’s easier.”
Volunteers are sharing photos, stories and best practices through Chatter – the best part of this is that the volunteers feel so connected to each other and the organisation. We hope this will help with volunteer loyalty and retention.