For just under 5 years I worked on the HomeKeeper app, built on the Salesforce platform., a product of Grounded Solutions Network (formerly Cornerstone Partnership, a program of Capital Impact Partners).
HomeKeeper is an app built by and for professionals working on long term affordable housing and housing counseling, and originally emerged from conversations among three community land trusts about whether they could define a data management system that would work for all of them.
HomeKeeper allows organizations to track whatever combination of properties, grants, loans, financing, purchase, closing, counseling and impact measures they need, all in one place. In this role, I originally started working on customer success and knowledge management, but eventually my responsibilities expanded to include maintaining the HomeKeeper National Data Hub, as well as leading product development on new versions of the HomeKeeper package. By the end of my time working on HomeKeeper I had worked on all of the following:
User Training
In my time working on HomeKeeper I trained more than 40 organizations and hundreds of staff as they got started with HomeKeeper. I led both in person and webinar trainings, sometimes also in collaboration with my Grounded Solutions Network colleagues working on capacity building.
Customer Support
A large core of my job In my time at HomeKeeper involved helping our customers achieve an ongoing level of success using HomeKeeper, I provided responsive support that allowed frontline staff to answer their questions quickly, and triaged user “tickets” using ZenDesk
Knowledge Management
Supporting customers also meant learning which questions came up more than once, noting this, I designed (and re-designed) the HomeKeeper Support Forums, a knowledge base built on Screensteps and Zendesk, where we built learning pathways so our users could self train on their own time. This involved creating “roadmap” as well as “road-block” documentation, as well as using graphic design and CSS to customize our customer journey.
Impact Measurement
I worked collaboratively with our HomeKeeper users to enter clear data and to generate new data definitions into their instances of HomeKeeper. This data anonymously rolled up into the HomeKeeper National Data Hub, a platform that allowed those organizations and our organization to do performance benchmarking on a national level. This served as a springboard for conversations about program management, as well as a source of background data in advocacy efforts for policy outreach.
Product Development
I managed our relationship with consultants who did research and development on HomeKeeper. i led three releases of our product, including the addition of Housing Counseling features, which made us the first HUD Certified Housing Counseling Management System (CMS) on the Salesforce Platform.
