Blue Hub’s work is supported by a variety of investors, including individuals, religious organizations, civic organizations, businesses, foundations and financial institutions. They’re invested in projects and organizations that make a difference—creating affordable housing, educating children and providing access to healthcare, healthy food and vital community services.

A key element of the investor experience is the investor portal deployed more than five years ago using custom VisualForce code. The portal allows investors to monitor their investments and make renewal elections. Craftsman was engaged to renovate the portal and streamline the investor experience. The current portal technology was problematic for a few reasons:

• Maintenance burden. The existing portal required programming skills for even minor maintenance tasks. Staff were unable to make incremental changes without costly outside programming resources. Every change required code.

• Limits to user experience. The technology in place then did not provide readily accessible metrics. Were those metrics available, changes to the portal would have required a significant investment of programming resources.

• Inadequate portal functionality. Common processes such as managing interest payments for investor relations or generating reports were cumbersome and required a significant amount of staff time.

It would fall to the Craftsman and Blue Hub teams to renovate the existing solution. It needed to be a better experience, easier to maintain and include new features that had been in demand for some time.

Craftsman built a new Salesforce Experience Cloud site to provide easy, dynamic access for investors to view investment amounts, status, tax forms, and documents. With the elimination of legacy VisualForce code in favor of reusable Lightning components and improved permission structure and enhanced file navigation, the new “Lightning Community” enables more admin-friendly updates, dynamic content, better user analytics and more accessible data including custom investor reports.

On-demand reports include general documents such as BlueHub’s Annual and Quarterly Reports, as well as more personalized documents such as an investor’s 1099 tax from or an EQ2 report. The solution also streamlined and automated the EQ2 report generation and distribution process as well the interest payment/schedule generation process, thereby freeing up staff time.

Craftsman had already been retained for Salesforce administration with a Managed Services (MS) agreement. The need to improve the Investor Portal surfaced during the MS engagement as an enhancement request, and post-deployment the MS team is now tasked with the job of supporting, maintaining and implementing incremental enhancements to the portal.

Next up: Craftsman is working with BlueHub Capital to improve its compliance and impact measurement processes.

Craftsman deployed Salesforce Experience Cloud as the core solution. We leveraged Lightning Components to replace the existing VisualForce customization. We streamlined code and generally cleared the technical debt, or legacy solution, that was otherwise limiting the work of the organization.