From Foundation to Future: How the Holdsworth Center Modernized Its Salesforce Platform with Agentforce Education Cloud

Located on a beautiful campus right on the shores of Lake Austin, the Holdsworth Center proudly serves Texas schools by dedicating time to developing its leaders. Through offering rigorous programming and deeply personalized career coaching, the Holdsworth Center has served nearly 1,900 educators in 88 public school districts since its founding in 2017. It is truly mission-driven work, and as such, it requires an operational foundation that matches its ambition. 

As programs expanded and demand increased, the Holdsworth Center knew they needed to scale their platform strategically to support their growing community of leaders, donors, partners, and staff. Originally built on Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Starter Pack (NPSP), the organization had outgrown its platform. In order to support its future, it needed to transform its platform. That’s where Elevation Solutions came in. 

The Challenge: An Outdated Platform

Holdsworth’s NPSP org reflected years of organic growth with well-intentioned customizations, department-specific use cases, and constituent data spread across siloed objects and processes. The platform started to become disjointed, which made it harder to streamline scalability. The core problems Holdsworth used to face were interconnected – leader data lacked a single, holistic view, the teams operated in their own corners of the system without much automated overlap, and processes relied on tools like Google Sheets and various disconnected forms that were manually managed. 

As the Holdsworth team looked ahead, it was clear the existing architecture was not meant to support the digital experience their constituents and staff deserved. They viewed the decision to move from NPSP to Agentforce Education Cloud not just as a migration opportunity, but a chance to reimagine their platform and align it with their internal objectives. 

The Vision

Before development began, both the Holdsworth and Elevation teams aligned on a set of strategic objectives that served as a guide through the entire project process.These weren’t just technical goals but organizational ones. These goals were: 

1. To create a comprehensive digital experience for applicants, leaders, partners, donors, and staff — one that reflects the full scope of the Holdsworth community.
2. To move away from siloed platforms and heavily customized processes in favor of a more sustainable, automation-forward architecture.
3. To establish one holistic view of each leader, district, and school — eliminating duplicate records and disconnected data.
4. To give staff across every department the tools and training they need to engage with, collaborate on, and monitor constituents throughout the entire Holdsworth experience.

The Path Forward: A Unified Platform 

After a thorough discovery process, Elevation Solutions designed and implemented an iterative approach to the Agentforce Education Cloud migration. Both teams spent time testing and validating one department at a time to encourage a holistic Holdsworth validation process, while keeping the broader platform vision intact. What made this transformation successful wasn’t just the technical rigor but the true partnership that began to form between both teams..

“We are very happy with the relationship with Elevation Solutions. From the very beginning, you all have been superb. Your knowledge of our ecosystem and how we operate is adding value and helping us work with you in an efficient manner. The team is very strategic and supportive. It leads to a more cohesive decision-making process and outcome.” – The Holdsworth Center Leadership Team

Throughout the development process, the Elevation team wanted to orient the platform around Holdsworth’s Application and Program management processes. At the heart of Holdsworth’s work is the leader journey. It was essential that the platform could track and support that journey from the first point of interest through active program participation. Elevation Solutions designed and built a platform that could serve and scale all of the different programs Holdsworth offers: open enrollment programs like the Community Leadership Program, nomination-based cohorts like the Advanced School Leadership Program, and invitation-only tracks like the Superintendent Leadership Program. 

The enhanced platform focused on giving staff real-time visibility into the full applicant pool across every offering. FormAssembly was integrated directly into Agentforce Education Cloud to replace the disconnected Google Form and spreadsheet-based processes that had previously fed data manually into NPSP. Staff no longer have to chase data across platforms. New director-level dashboards and demographic reporting give leadership the visibility they need to understand who is being served, how programs are performing, and where to invest next. 

Elevation Solutions also implemented Marketing Cloud Next also known as Marketing Cloud on Core with Salesforce Data 360 serving as the connective layer between Agentforce Education Cloud constituent records and outbound communications. This gave the Holdsworth Center’s Communications team a scalable platform that reflects the full sophistication of Holdsworth’s constituent relationships and a level of targeting the previous system couldn’t support. 

Partnership Highlight: Onsite Training

Before going live, Elevation and Holdsworth decided to spend a week together with the Holdsworth Center staff to walk through the new system together. This intentional strategy deepened the working relationship between both organizations and helped surface nuances about how Holdsworth teams actually operate, accelerating alignment on the final stretch of the build. We were able to connect with the separate teams and ensure the path to system adoption was successful. 

The Impact

What Holdsworth has today is more than a new system. It is a unified, scalable platform that reflects the full complexity of the organization and gives every team the tools to do their best work. Now their team is easily able to track the full journey of the constituents they serve, from their first application, through their program experience, into alumni engagement, and alongside the donor relationships that sustain the mission. Departments that once operated in isolation now share a common data foundation, a common language for constituent types, and a common set of tools for tracking engagement and outcomes.

And perhaps most importantly, the migration was delivered without disrupting the work that matters most: serving the education leaders who depend on Holdsworth to strengthen their schools.

Interested in a Platform Built Around Your Mission? 

This story reflects what’s possible when technical strategy and organization vision align. If your nonprofit or education organization is outgrowing NPSP or looking to build a more unified Salesforce environment, reach out! We’re all about helping innovative, human-focused organizations create value. Reach out to our team at booking@elevation.solutions or fill out the form below to learn more about how we work.