"Implementing Elate was never just about replacing spreadsheets. It was about creating a shared view of our strategy, helping teams understand how their work contributes to ASHA’s Strategic Objectives and Operational Priorities, and giving us the ability to manage execution in a more connected and transparent way. Today, we spend less time collecting information and more time using it to make decisions. Which is exactly where we wanted to be."

-Rozsa Felix, Senior Director of Business Excellence, American Speech-Language Hearing Association

The American Speech-Language Hearing Association is the national professional, scientific, and credentialing association for audiologists, speech-language pathologists, speech, language, and hearing scientists, audiology and speech-language pathology support personnel, and students. With more than 247,000 members and affiliates, ASHA works to advance communication science, promote the interests of its members, and advocate for people with communication disorders. 2025 marked ASHA's 100th anniversary.

‍Thirty-five of them, to be exact. One for every team at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, updated every quarter. Every cycle, Rozsa Felix, Senior Director of the Office of Business Excellence, opened each file to check whether teams had updated their priorities, chased the ones that hadn't, and manually pieced together an organizational picture of how ASHA was executing on its strategic plan.

It was the only system available. There was no software to support this process, so like many organizations, manual processes were what ASHA had to lean on for execution.

The challenges were real. Data lived in different places and was owned by different people. Strategic Objective owners tracked their work on separate SharePoint sites that were disconnected from one another. The information was available, but finding what leaders needed often required clicking through multiple SharePoint sites, folders, documents, and spreadsheets to piece together a complete picture. Understanding work across teams and identifying dependencies was possible, but it was labor-intensive, time-consuming, and difficult to do consistently. Producing meaningful enterprise-level reporting required manually gathering and consolidating information from dozens of disconnected sources.

In short, leaders struggled to see the full organizational picture, understand how work connected across the enterprise, and track progress efficiently and consistently.

Rozsa had known for years what ASHA needed. When she joined nine years ago, one of her first conversations with leadership was a direct ask: the organization needed a strategic planning system. It just wasn't the right time.

So she kept running 35 Excel sheets, and several different SharePoint sites.

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The Moment that Changed it

As ASHA prepared to launch its new 2026-2028 Strategic Pathway, the organization took a hard look at how it planned, executed, measured, and reported on strategy. Moving from nine strategic objectives down to three, and from a ten-year horizon down to three years, the new Strategic Pathway was leaner, more focused, and built to be executed. But the redesign made one thing clear: the processes and tools that supported the old pathway weren't going to be enough.

ASHA needed a platform capable of supporting a more integrated and transparent approach to strategic planning and execution. Rozsa began evaluating tools.

ASHA started with a list of twelve vendors and quickly narrowed the field to four finalists: Elate was one of them. Beyond the standard evaluation criteria, Rozsa had a simple test. After watching a few videos, could she recreate ASHA's own process in a vendor's sandbox without help? If she could, that was a real, promising signal. If she couldn't, no amount of sales polish would change that. Elate was the only vendor that passed.

Part of what made it work was ease of use. ASHA needed a platform the entire organization could navigate intuitively, not just the people closest to the strategic plan. Elate was built that way.

But the moment that made the decision easy came during the evaluation itself. She raised a specific use case on a call, and within ten minutes of hanging up, Elate's Director of Customer Solutions had recorded a custom video walking through exactly how Elate could solve it.

"I wasn't even a customer yet," Rozsa says. "But the willingness to come alongside our journey was there from day one."

That was the a-ha moment. Not a feature. Not a pricing concession. A ten-minute video that said: we were paying attention.

ASHA chose to start clean. Rather than implementing mid-year, they built the architecture deliberately, giving the team time to get the new plan right and build the right muscle at the leadership level before cascading down to the broader organization. Elate's recommended phased approach matched how ASHA needed to manage change internally: leadership first, then the broader organization.That decision set the tone for everything that followed.

Farzaneh Seifi, Assistant Director, Project & Portfolio Management, who partnered closely on the technical implementation, reflected on the experience:

"Elate made implementation easier by asking thoughtful questions, understanding how we approached strategic planning, and translating our conversations and thought process into a system configuration that reflected ASHA’s needs."

After weekly check-ins with the Elate team, ASHA launched across all 35 teams on schedule, as planned. Every team entered their priorities and how they would be measured. Every single one. Individual contributors could now see how their day-to-day work supported the highest organizational priorities for the first time. 

To support adoption and change management, Rozsa introduced post-launch open office hours; a resource that continues today. As teams became more comfortable with the platform, the shift in engagement was evident. Instead of Rozsa tracking down updates across 35 separate Excel files, team leaders began proactively inviting her to their meetings to discuss priorities, align work, and explore how to use Elate more effectively. Staff participated in training sessions, took advantage of office hours when they needed support, and many became confident navigating the platform on their own. 

The change happened naturally, with ownership and engagement steadily growing across the organization.

The numbers tell part of the story. But the more interesting change was organizational.

Prior to Elate, leaders had access to planning information across the organization, but it was dispersed across dozens of separate Excel files, multiple tabs, SharePoint locations, and supporting documents. While the information was available, gaining a comprehensive view required significant time and effort to locate, navigate, and piece together the relevant information. 

Today, that same information is centralized in a single platform, allowing leaders to quickly view their own team's priorities alongside the priorities and progress of every other team across the organization. Rather than spending time searching for information, leaders can focus on understanding connections, identifying dependencies, and making more informed decisions. 

From the CEO’s perspective, the value of Elate extends beyond operational efficiency: it provides the enterprise-wide visibility leaders need to connect work across teams, communicate strategic progress, and engage the Board in a more meaningful way. As Vicki Deal-Williams, ASHA’s CEO, explains:

“I've talked routinely about the importance of connecting the dots between the work being done in each of our teams and the rest of the organization. Elate makes that a lot easier; we can see at a glance what's being done anywhere in the enterprise and how it connects, and those in leadership roles can show others those connections if they aren't aware. I can show our Board members what's happening with a quick screen grab or report.”

Teams became more intentional about aligning their work with the strategic plan, building a culture where strategy wasn't something residing in a document reviewed once a year, but a lens for how the organization made decisions every day. 

The response from leaders and teams was overwhelmingly positive. Many embraced the platform immediately and quickly incorporated it into their day-to-day planning and execution. Having organizational priorities, tactics, outcomes, and progress available in one place made it significantly easier to understand how work connected across the enterprise and where attention was needed.

As one leader remarked, "I never saw this on one page before. This is fantastic."

When Rozsa checked in with leaders about adoption across their teams, the feedback was remarkably consistent. Across the organization, leaders reported that their teams had embraced the platform and were finding it intuitive, valuable, and easy to use.

"We finally have a system that works for us," Rozsa says, "instead of us working around the system."

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From Reporting Burden to Reporting Rhythm 

Before Elate, producing meaningful reporting meant manually gathering information from dozens of disconnected sources. Today, everything lives in one place: objectives, priorities, execution status, metrics, and commentary.

That shift transformed reporting at ASHA. Every month, the Facilitating Team (FT) - ASHA's senior leadership - receives a report organized by FT member. Each section provides a complete view of that leader's strategic priorities and progress, along with the priorities, tactics, outcomes, and status updates for every team within their area of responsibility. Every quarter, leadership receives a Strategic Pathway Progress Report that rolls everything up into a 30,000-foot view of progress across all Strategic Objectives and Operational Priorities. 

When it came time for the Board meeting, the difference was just as clear. With the underlying data updated in Elate, producing the board-ready view was largely a matter of configuring and refining the report rather than manually gathering and consolidating information from across the organization. What used to take weeks now took a fraction of the time.

"For the first time, we were able to present a clear, visually engaging, enterprise-wide view of strategic progress directly from the platform, rather than manually assembling information from multiple sources," Rozsa says.

One of the most significant benefits was the time saved in preparing executive and Board reports. What had once required hours of manually gathering, reconciling, and formatting information from multiple sources became a streamlined process, allowing far more time to focus on analysis, strategic insights, and meaningful conversations.

Rather than spending valuable time explaining where data came from or validating numbers, leadership discussions could focus on organizational progress, strategic priorities, and outcomes.

The implementation has transformed monthly leadership reporting and quarterly Board reporting into a consistent, efficient rhythm, providing ASHA with a single, connected view of strategy execution across the enterprise.