Collaborative for Children
Houston, TX
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Products Used:
- Dynamics 365 Sales
- Dataverse
- Power Pages Portal
enCloud9 Services:
- Portal Design
- Implementation Services
- Data Migration/ Integration
- Plugin Development
- System Logic
- CRM Optimization
- Ongoing Support
Client Overview: Collaborative for Children is a Houston‑based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of early childhood education and care throughout Greater Houston. Working with educators, families, and community partners, the organization delivers programs that strengthen early learning systems and help ensure children are prepared for long‑term academic and life success. As Collaborative for Children continued to expand its programs, partnerships, and regional impact, the organization needed greater visibility into constituent relationships, program data, and internal operations—driving the need for a more connected, scalable platform to support collaboration, reporting, and sustainable growth. Their mission for the past 35 years has been to be “The” trusted nonprofilt resource for early childhood education in the Greater Houston area.
The Challenge: Collaborative for Children needed more than a traditional
CRM.
Their environment required:
- Managing complex relationships between students, teachers, and classrooms
- Handling large volumes of data imports, including assessments and attendance records
- Allowing external users to enter and update data through a portal
- Maintaining data accuracy across multiple sources
At the same time, they faced real-world challenges:
- Data inconsistencies and missing identifiers
- Complex imports involving 100+ fields in some datasets
- Ongoing updates and evolving requirements
The challenge wasn’t just building a system—it was building one that could handle complexity and continue to evolve.
Our Solution:
Custom Dynamics 365 Application Development
enCloud9 designed and built a custom Dynamics 365 solution tailored to Collaborative for Children’s data model.
This included:
- Creating custom tables, forms, and fields
- Structuring the system around key entities (students, teachers, classrooms)
- Building a dedicated CRM environment aligned to their workflow
In addition, enCloud9 delivered a connected Dynamics 365 solution for CFC that enabled secure collaboration with external users through a custom portal for managing student, classroom, and assessment data. The team handled complex, large-scale data integrations, implemented custom plugins to automate processes and enforce data integrity, and improved overall data quality and system logic. As needs evolved, enCloud9 continued to enhance the solution through ongoing updates, imports, and refinements—all following a consistent build → test → refine → improve approach.
Results Achieved: Collaborative for Children gained a system better aligned with their needs:
- A custom-built CRM designed around complex data relationships
- A functional portal enabling external data input
- Improved handling of large and complex datasets
- More consistent data structure and validation
- Ongoing flexibility to adapt the system as needs change
Conclusion: Collaborative for Children’s experience highlights an important reality: Not every CRM project is about implementing a standard solution—some require building something that fits a very specific and complex use case.
“Most Dynamics 365 projects don’t fail—they just never fully work the way they should. That’s where enCloud9 comes in.”
By focusing on custom development, data management, and iterative improvement, enCloud9 helped create a system capable of supporting both the organization’s complexity and its long-term needs.
Ready to start your own success story? Contact enCloud9 today!
