The Challenge
Builders Vision was operating across multiple disconnected systems - a legacy CRM, several spreadsheets, and a grants management platform. Data was fragmented, duplicated, and often contradictory. They needed everything unified into Salesforce to get a single source of truth for their impact-driven operations.
My Approach
Data Assessment
Before touching any migration tool, I spent two weeks mapping every data source:
- 3 legacy systems with overlapping contact records
- 15,000+ records that needed deduplication
- Custom objects required for grants, investments, and philanthropic tracking
- Complex relationships between organizations, contacts, and financial instruments
Migration Strategy
I chose a phased approach rather than a big-bang migration:
- Phase 1: Foundation - Core objects (Accounts, Contacts) with clean, deduplicated data
- Phase 2: Relationships - Linking records with proper junction objects and lookup relationships
- Phase 3: Historical Data - Importing activity history, notes, and attachment records
- Phase 4: Specialized Objects - Custom objects for grants management and impact tracking
Data Quality Framework
I built a validation framework that ran automated checks at every stage:
- Record count reconciliation between source and target
- Field-level data integrity checks
- Relationship validation ensuring no orphaned records
- Business rule validation against known data patterns
Results
- Zero data loss across all migration phases
- 15,000 records deduplicated down to 9,200 clean records
- 100% adoption within first month post-migration
- Single source of truth replacing 3 disconnected systems
Key Takeaways
The most critical factor was stakeholder communication. I created a migration dashboard that showed progress in real-time, so leadership could see exactly where we were at any point. This transparency built trust and made it easy to get quick decisions when edge cases came up.
This case study covers work completed at Builders Vision in 2023. Specific data volumes and details have been generalized to protect proprietary information.