A revered arts institution leaps into a digital workplace built for the way the foundation actually works.

What we did.

We started with a discovery that took the artistic context of the work as seriously as the technology context. Forty-plus staff members across administrative, dance faculty, and musician roles came through workshops, focus groups, and interviews. The scattered content, the email-bottlenecked communications, and the inadequate collaboration tools surfaced as the three pain points to address first.

The digital workplace transformation that followed had three named pieces. Content migration onto SharePoint and OneDrive, so staff had anywhere, anytime access to the mission-critical files the work depends on. A new intranet, launched as the primary destination for announcements, employee self-service, and cross-organization communication. A Teams rollout that gave staff a single collaboration surface and reduced reliance on Dropbox, Google Docs, and the other shadow tools that had filled the gap.

In parallel, the CRM consolidation was the heaviest piece of the engagement. We migrated more than 360,000 constituent contacts into a unified Salesforce CRM, replacing Raiser’s Edge, the SQL database, and more than fifteen Excel spreadsheets. Seven fundraising, marketing, and engagement systems collapsed into one. Automated reporting and data analysis replaced manual Excel-based processes, which gave leadership the strategic decision-making capabilities they had been working without. Development and Marketing now share a 360-degree view of every constituent interaction.

The change management plan ran across the entire engagement. Communications, training, and user support designed for an arts organization whose staff range from administrators to dance faculty to musicians. The plan accounted for the fact that the people doing the artistic work do not have the same relationship to technology as the people doing the administrative work, and that both groups had to come along together for the transformation to land.

A two-year digital workplace roadmap is in place. It plans the elimination or consolidation of at least fourteen legacy systems and gives the foundation a sequence the leadership team can govern against.

What sticks.

The two-year digital workplace roadmap is the artifact that keeps the work moving. It is owned by Ailey’s IT leadership and provides the sequence for retiring or consolidating fourteen-plus legacy systems over time. The unified Salesforce CRM continues to absorb constituent data that used to live in spreadsheets, and Development and Marketing run their work on a shared view of every relationship. The intranet is the foundation’s daily home. The change management practice that brought administrative, dance faculty, and musician staff through the transition together is the soft infrastructure that supports the next phase. Each retirement on the roadmap is a compounding return on the work the foundation has already done.