As the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence grows by leaps and bounds, keeping track of everyone involved is key. Now, after a cooperative effort with Yale ITS, the Center has a tailor-made customer relationship management system (CRM) up and running. And not a moment too soon: the Center is generating buzz as director Marc Brackett gives over 100 talks a year.
“The CRM is changing how we do business,” says Miriam Schroers, the Center’s director of communications. “It’s eliminating siloed tracking systems and bringing our organization together.”
A cloud-based system on the Salesforce.com platform, the CRM does a little of everything. It allows people interested in the Center to enter their own contact information via its WordPress site. The CRM captures training applicants applying through Qualtrics, and people emailing the Center are routed in as well. On the Center side, staff can now track contacts’ complex affiliations with multiple organizations—say, a school principal attending a summer institute on a third-party grant. The CRM can also generate reports, contracts, and invoices, and it can help the Center keep in touch with staff members in the field.
“This process will replace multiple manual processes within the Center and allow for a complete view of the districts, schools, organizations and related people they interact with on a daily basis,” says Dave DeMichele, application architect with the Campus Community Technologies team. “I am truly proud of the work the combined teams accomplished to make this project a success.”
Educators from all over the world make up the bulk of the Center’s customers and collaborators, so keeping track of them is central to its mission. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence conducts research and teaches people of all ages how to develop their emotional intelligence. The Center has developed a program, RULER, designed to teach the skills for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. RULER has helped more than 500 schools integrate emotional intelligence into their daily routines, from language-arts lessons to faculty meetings to the enforcement of behavior-management policies. RULER embeds best teaching practices and a shared language of emotions into everyday instruction across all grade levels. And, importantly, RULER provides professional and personal development for all adults in the learning community—school leaders, teachers, support staff, and families.
Next up: Phase 2, which will introduce a self-service community for educational coaches and trainers, as well as making it easier to launch marketing campaigns and track events.
