Customized Salesforce Streamlines Pittsburgh Film Office Operations

Customer Case Study: The Pittsburgh Film Office

IT Edge’s customer the Pittsburgh Film Office (PFO), has a lofty mission, but needed Salesforce to help centralize their organization. The Pittsburgh Film Office is a non-profit corporation whose goal is to attract film production projects to the greater Southwestern Pennsylvania region. A resource for the film industry since 1990, the Pittsburgh Film Office assists in the process of sourcing locations, vendors, and crew, as well as working with government and business entities to support production.

But the Pittsburgh Film Office was relying on manual data entry to organize their contacts and events. The organization needed a process that could efficiently supply film producers with a list of crew members, vendors with a specific skill set (costume designers, production assistant, lodging, etc), and track event attendance. Enter IT Edge’s customized Salesforce solution.

Challenges for the Pittsburgh Film Office

Before working with IT Edge, the Pittsburgh Film Office ran solely on spreadsheets and manual data entry to organize operations. Managing staffing and events were the most labor intensive part of PFO’s operations:

• Pittsburgh Film Office workers managed contacts by grouping them by specialty in a master spreadsheet. When a film producer needed a list of crew members with a specific skill set, the Pittsburgh Film Office would use their master spreadsheet to find the requested skills and manually copy and paste the relevant crew members onto a separate spreadsheet that they could send to the film producer.
• The Pittsburgh Film Office hosts movie screenings for individuals who support the film office, known as “Friends of the Film Office” (FOFO). The Pittsburgh Film Office RSVP tracking process relied on FOFO members replying back to an email invitation. Before our solution, staff members would generate the admission list by manually copying and pasting each RSVP into a spreadsheet.

These manual data entry methodologies were leading to lost revenue and wasted time. The Pittsburgh Film Office needed Salesforce to facilitate organizational communication and enable staff to take a holistic view of the non-profits’ processes. And it needed IT Edge’s experience in building custom coded Apex and Visualforce pages in Salesforce to ensure that their investment into Salesforce enabled it to best meet their business needs.

IT Edge CRM’s Custom APEX and Visualforce Salesforce Solution

Through the use of custom Visualforce Pages and business process automation, IT Edge CRM streamlined Pittsburgh Film Office’s cumbersome processes. We fine-tuned Salesforce to empower staff members to easily communicate and organize directly through Salesforce.  

Now, Pittsburgh Film Office staff member can select as many crew or talent specialties as the producer requested and send the producer that information directly through Salesforce. A process that use to take 30 minutes can now be processed in five. Furthermore, the system can generate a activity history, so other staff members can review and minimize duplicate efforts.

The new custom coded Salesforce process for managing invitations and attendee lists for FOFO movie showings has also enhanced workplace efficiency. Salesforce allows staff to schedule events and automatically send invitation emails with personalized confirmation to all FOFO members in the system. FOFO members can then use a unique link to confirm their attendance and select the number of tickets they need. Salesforce will automatically add FOFO members’ entries to the list of attendees for the event.

Why Salesforce Works for the Pittsburgh Film Office

The adoption of Salesforce, coupled with IT Edge’s CRM customization to their unique business processes, equipped the Pittsburgh Film Office with a streamlined process. It provides more consistent data by removing labor intensive data entry tasks that lead to errors. And, it provides accurate performance metrics through Salesforce Reports that can be used by all of Pittsburgh Film Office stakeholders.