INTRODUCTION

The Prisoner Reentry Institute (PRI) seeks a vendor to design and implement a dynamic Salesforce data management system that will centrally store and integrate programmatic, student, and academic data for two of its direct-service higher education programs. By adopting Salesforce, our objectives are to more easily: 1) monitor daily management of these two programs, allowing us to identify successes and challenges so that we can better serve our students, 2) track ongoing contact with students and document their academic and social service needs, 3) track academic achievement over the course of their entire higher education journey, and 4) aggregate information for grant reports, proposals, and publications.

PRI’s mission is to better understand what it takes for people to live successfully in their communities after involvement with the criminal justice system. We are located at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Central to PRI’s work is a commitment to creating access to higher education for people who have been involved in the criminal justice system, including incarceration. This goal is pursued through PRI’s Educational Initiatives, which operate two distinct, but increasingly overlapping, direct-service higher education programs: Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) and College Initiative (CI).  Below is a description of the two programs for which we seek to adopt a centralized and dynamic Salesforce system.

PRI’S PRISON-TO-COLLEGE PIPELINE AND COLLEGE INITIATIVE

Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) provides a variety of higher-education services for students who are incarcerated at six New York State correctional facilities. Among the higher education services inside these facilities, we provide:

• Introductory-level college courses for students who are incarcerated at one correctional facility; (These credits are transferrable to any CUNY campus upon release.)
• Student academic advisement through bi-weekly workshops;
• Developmental (remedial) education and college information sessions at five correctional facilities; and
• Credit-bearing monthly learning exchanges where John Jay College students travel to one prison and learn alongside their incarcerated peers.

This program currently operates with a staff of approximately two FTEs, but is expecting to expand in the near future. To date, P2CP has served 62 incarcerated students taking college classes, 53 learning exchange John Jay College students, and hundreds of individuals who have participated in developmental education courses and college information sessions inside five correctional facilities.

College Initiative (CI) provides a suite of community-based services assisting people who have been involved in the criminal justice system to enroll in and graduate from college. CI’s services operate in two phases: college pre-enrollment and college enrollment and retention. During the college pre-enrollment phase, CI staff:

• Organize outreach sessions in the community to raise college awareness among people who have a history of criminal justice involvement;
• Conduct one-on-one consultation sessions with prospective students to discuss academic and career goals;
• Lead group orientation sessions to provide information about local colleges, types of academic degrees, financial aid options; and
• Assign an academic counselor to each prospective student to finalize enrollment plans, provide necessary referrals for academic and social service needs (housing, employment), complete financial aid forms, obtain documentation (immunization, selective service), and submit their college application.

After students are accepted into college, CI staff maintain their relationship with them during the enrollment and retention phase of our services by:

• Providing ongoing one-on-one check-ins with students, as needed, during the semester, and providing any necessary referrals;
• Offering peer mentoring services for first-year students who are interested in being paired with senior CI college students; and
• Conducting skills-based workshops and hosting community networking events.

At least five FTEs comprise the CI program, yet this program also anticipates hiring additional staff in the near future. To date, the CI program has helped more than 1,300 New Yorkers enroll in college. While PRI is located at John Jay College, CI serves students interested in enrolling in any college in New York State; yet the overwhelming majority of CI students are enrolled within one of the 24 City University of New York (CUNY) colleges across the five boroughs of New York City. The majority of CI students begin their academic journey earning an associate’s degree.

Between P2CP and CI, we are beginning to see overlap in the students we serve, where some students start with P2CP while incarcerated and then turn to CI after they are released from prison for assistance with enrolling in college to continue their academic studies. This is just one segment of our larger student body that we are interested in identifying in a more efficient manner and meeting their specific needs.

SCOPE OF SERVICES AND DELIVERABLES

We are looking to adopt Salesforce as our new data management system and seek a vendor to design and implement a Salesforce system, allowing us to store P2CP and CI programmatic, student, and academic data into a centralized location, yet provide us with the flexibility to capture additional data in moving forward. Our objectives are to more easily: 1) monitor daily management of these two programs, allowing us to identify successes and challenges so that we can better serve our students, 2) track ongoing contact with students and document their academic and social service needs, 3) track academic achievement over the course of their entire higher education journey, and 4) aggregate information for grant reports, proposals, and publications.

Currently P2CP and CI use a variety of different data storage systems (including multiple Excel spreadsheets and a static online data management system), thereby making it challenging and time-consuming to record and retrieve critical information that we use on a daily basis to serve our students and to aggregate information for grant reports and proposals. This is especially challenging for CI’s academic counselors who have multiple contacts with their students and need to quickly query their case management notes when meeting with students.

Key priorities for this process include:

• Meeting with PRI staff to learn more about the P2CP and CI programs, the data we currently collect and want to college in the future, the reports we would like to generate, etc.;
• Reviewing our inventory of P2CP and CI programmatic, student, and academic data elements already collected and which will need to be migrated into Salesforce;
• Building a Salesforce system that is customized to our needs;
• Migrating P2CP and CI programmatic, student, and academic data into Salesforce and training PRI staff to continue this process in the future; and
• Training PRI staff on using Salesforce—i.e., entering data, creating new data fields, migrating data, etc.

 

SUBMISSION PROCESS

We offer you the opportunity to be considered for these services.  The process is as follows:

1.  Please complete the required registration page to inform us of your interest in applying for this opportunity.  Your registration will ensure that you receive any updates or notifications throughout the submission process.
2. Submissions are due on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 and should be uploaded in the form below.
3. Clarifying questions can be emailed to Nicole Dreisbach by 5:00PM (Eastern) Tuesday, June 6, 2017. Emailed responses will be provided by Thursday, June 8, 2017.
4. Submissions of qualifications should include the following:
   1. A description of the approach you would take to meeting our key priorities, including designing and implementing a Salesforce data management system. Based on the information provided in this announcement, please indicate whether you would recommend we adopt Salesforce’s Non-profit Success Package or the Higher Education Data Architecture.
   2. Resume/CV of the key personnel who will be assigned to the project.
   3. W-9 form.
   4. Estimates for the cost and time needed for designing and implementing Salesforce and training PRI staff.
   5. List of organizational clients with whom you have worked; if possible, please include organizations that are similar in the type of services we deliver (i.e., direct service, case management, and/or higher education), similar types of populations served, similar number of people served, and/or similar organizational staff size.
   6. Reference list of at least three previous clients (name, title, organization, email address, and phone number). Please include at least one contact from an organization who has been using Salesforce for at least two years, if possible.