Similar to most downtown districts, every few years, the Tenderloin Community Benefit District (TLCBD) is required to call on the property owners in their district to vote to renew and expand the TLCBD charter. As a Community Benefit District (CBD), Tenderloin is a formally recognized assessment district managed by a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in a defined region. They provide services like sidewalk cleaning, trash removal, safety ambassador patrols, beautification, and advocacy for policies and projects that will benefit the district, all of which are all supplemental to those provided by the city.
To maintain their charter, TLCBD must persuade at least 30 percent of the property owners in the district to vote Yes on the petition to renew the District, and then Yes on the official ballot. Managing the process included:
During previous renewal cycles, TLCBD used spreadsheets to organize and manage the process. It was an ongoing challenge to keep the same sheet updated, trying to figure out who had the most votes, ranking them in (estimated) order, and then divvying up the outreach and making calendar tasks to remember to reach out to individual property owners. The team lacked the ability to see who reached out to who, what their intended votes were, or any other feedback from stakeholders. Because only one person could edit the spreadsheet at a time the data was never quite up to date and occasionally edits were lost to application malfunctions, and keeping everyone on task was incredibly challenging as there was no easily accessible at-a-glance view of the progress.
Since the renewal timeframe is so condensed and intense, it was important that all data be easily accessible to anyone involved in the process at any time and that votes and campaign activity were all stored and visible in a single location. This meant migrating all of their district data - including all properties and ownership accounts - from spreadsheets into a single cloud-based platform – Salesforce District360. From there, we were able to create a custom campaign to enable the team to strategically organize and manage their renewal push. We created custom dashboards specifically for the renewal effort that displayed estimated and real vote totals in real time.
step 1: Bring TLCBD’s master spreadsheet of properties, ownership account and contacts, vote calculations, etc. into a relational cloud-based database, Salesforce District360.
step 2: Create a mechanism to sum votes allotted to each Property, and thereby Property Owner and create a way to aggregate and rank Property Owners by their number of votes.
step 3: Use the activity tracking functionality to organize and manage staff outreach and lobbying efforts.
step 4: Create a custom Renewal Campaign dashboard for an at-a-glance progress visual towards campaign milestones
TLCBD employed their custom District360 renewal module in 2020 and was able to accumulate enough votes to maintain their charter for another 10 years! They were pleased with the functionality of the feature and expressed their deep satisfaction for the incredibly streamlined way they were able to run their renewal campaign using their CRM.
Following the successful campaign, the fields associated with their renewal efforts were hidden inside the CRM to maintain a streamlined, uncluttered database. Later, when it’s time for the next campaign, these fields can easily be restored, plus all previous votes and campaign activity are immediately visible.
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If this feature sounds like something that would be useful to your district, reach out to us today and we’ll get you set up for your next renewal cycle!