Growing FSHD Society’s Impact
Through Canvas Cloud Managed Services
The FSHD Society is the world’s largest grassroots network of individuals with Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy (FSHD), their families, and research activists. Founded by patients Daniel Perez and Steve Jacobsen, the FSHD Society helps people affected by FSHD through education and outreach, accelerating scientific and medical research, and advocacy efforts to increase government and industry investment.
The FSHD Society partnered with Canvas Cloud after a serendipitous meeting at the Peer 2 Peer Professional Forum in 2023. During that meeting, Canvas Cloud’s President Daniel Dibble had a chance to learn about the great work the FSHD Society is doing and the hurdles they were trying to overcome after self-implementing Salesforce a few years prior. The team at the FSHD Society wanted Salesforce to evolve with them while responding to their changing needs in a sustainable way, instead of forcing them to change processes to fit the software.
While Daniel and Canvas Cloud recognized the FSHD Society's ambitious vision and intention for leveraging an innovative CRM, a critical question remained, one that is familiar to most nonprofit organizations: How can the FSHD Society find a balance between their urgent mission - finding treatments by 2025 and ultimately a cure - and the resource investment required to continuously improve a sophisticated technology on their own? Here's where Canvas Cloud Managed Services entered the scene.
How Managed Services by Canvas Cloud Helps
“This is not like a help desk support relationship; Canvas Cloud is able to look at the big picture and provide strategies for moving forward. We are a collaborative team and work together in partnership towards a common goal.”
The FSHD Society had a combination of urgent needs, which included providing backfill for some team members on extended leave, as well as empowering current team members to increase their capabilities with both Salesforce and Pardot, now known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Their Marketing Cloud Account Engagement administrator was going on leave and they needed someone to quickly learn and assume some of their responsibilities. Thanks to a combination of the Canvas Cloud Managed Services methodology, our team of Subject Matter Experts, and collaboration from the FSHD Society team, Canvas Cloud was able to seamlessly step in and support the FSHD Society team during their Marketing Cloud Account Engagement admin’s leave. As Liz Westner, one of the FSHD Society’s Salesforce System Administrators shared, “Canvas Cloud is very responsive when we need help. Even if something comes up that wasn’t planned for, the team at Canvas Cloud is always there to help work things out.”
That turned out to be just the beginning - the FSHD Society also wanted their Salesforce to do more, growing and evolving with them. As advocates for creating sustainable and intentional improvements to Salesforce, this vision resonated deeply with the Canvas Cloud team. Shortly after the partnership started, Canvas Cloud was able to incorporate our Managed Services approach to create impacts in a few important areas:
Salesforce Enhancements
Through our partnership, Canvas Cloud helped enhance various aspects of Salesforce and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to meet the needs of the FSHD Society team. This included enhancing their Marketing Cloud Account Engagement setup, configuring their integration with Classy to increase the impact and effectiveness of data captured from their events, and improving data quality through system updates and process changes.User Empowerment
Through our Managed Services program, a partnership isn’t limited to just system maintenance and enhancements, as we prioritize making teams better too. Initially, our focus was enabling some of the FSHD Society’s end users to become power users on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement by providing them with tailored enablement based on their current knowledge and specific business roles. Over time, it evolved into providing ongoing guidance surrounding multiple areas of focus as the FSHD Society continues to identify new initiatives.Business Process Improvement
As our partnership has progressed over time, the FSHD Society has increasingly looked to Canvas Cloud as a strategic thought partner to help improve their business processes, as we have helped refine how their system is updated, how users are onboarded, how data is captured and entered into the system, and how new features are identified, refined, and implemented, creating an environment where innovation and user feedback are encouraged and outcomes are intentional and strategic.
“Canvas Cloud is very responsive when we need help. Even if something comes up that wasn’t planned for, the team at Canvas Cloud is always there to help work things out.”
The Next Chapter
What started as a short-term engagement to help backfill resources and make urgent changes evolved into a long-term partnership that elevated the impact that Salesforce has within the FSHD Society and created an environment for continued success. Through our strong partnership/alignment with the FSHD Society, innovation thrives, allowing them to position their resources to the highest areas of the cause, knowing that Canvas Cloud is guiding them towards a manageable, scalable, Salesforce solution. As Liz herself said, “This is not like a help desk support relationship; Canvas Cloud is able to look at the big picture and provide strategies for moving forward. We are a collaborative team and work together in partnership towards a common goal.”
