“OKRify became a game changer for us as we could align our strategic plan to what was being captured in Salesforce and what the employees are expected to do”
Cecilia Blasco,Executive Director
We are a social hybrid non-profit organization. Our mission is to foster or catalyze a sustainable seafood market in Mexico. Bulk of our work is to create the capacity for environmentally sustainable and socially responsible fish and shellfish from small fishing communities. Fresh seafood has higher demand and market value than processed products, we help small fishing communities to handle fresh seafood better and sell to higher end markets. We are trying to create more monetary value for their products and keep the value in local fishing communities.
We have developed an intervention model which we think is working pretty well. Now we need to scale up to build more supply. We are pretty ambitious and trying to change how seafood is caught, handled, processed and sold in Mexico. But measuring success and progress is much harder in non-profit organizations. Especially when you are in a new sector that has never been done before, it is really hard sometimes to measure whether you are on the right track. It is easy to get lost in the weeds and focus all our energy on activities that are not as crucial to the organization goals. So it became important for us to clearly express to our employees what is expected of them and focus on the right activities.
We were introduced to OKR methodology in 2020 by a consultant that was helping with our strategic planning process. OKR methodology provided a great way to align our annual goals with the strategic plan and then the individual employee goals. Productivity is really hard to measure for nonprofit organizations because there are no clear metrics. So we chose OKR to set clear objectives and measure progress.
We use Salesforce for Project Management, and to track services and interactions with fishing cooperatives who are our customers. For OKRs, we were looking for a solution that will align our strategic plan to the data that is captured in Salesforce. We started with Excel which was hard and inefficient.
OKRify became a game changer for us as we could align our strategic plan to what was being captured in Salesforce and what the employees are expected to do. We chose OKRify as it helped us to easily align our strategic plan with team and individual objectives and we can track the progress of the objectives with data from the Salesforce.
We are getting better with OKR adoption everyday. OKRify has made it easy for our employees to know the expectations so everyone is focused and clearly sees how they are contributing to the strategic goals of our organization. All our goals from strategic and annual organization goals to individual quarterly objectives are now set up and tracked in OKRify.
OKRify’s ability to use Salesforce data to update OKRs progress has helped improve our business . When activities and projects are updated in Salesforce the progress is automatically reflected in the aligned objectives in OKRify. This has become a self reinforcing loop encouraging our team to input data regularly into Salesforce as it helps to show progress for their OKRs.
The rollout of the Milestone type Key Results has really helped us. Before the milestones, a lot of our key results were binary but with the milestones it’s much easier to break them down into the steps and be able to measure progress for each of the steps separately. It is also quick and very easy to register progress for each of these Milestones in the Key Result with the little sliders in the hub.
My advice for other organizations who want to use OKRs will be to have a strategic plan with clear metrics. Unless you have a really clear plan and system in place, it is really hard to implement any digital system of records.
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