Improve donor communication by leveraging the salesforce ecosystem

Client Profile

The client is a US-based non-profit organization operating from its head office in Baltimore. They have assisted people in more than 100 countries, working with organizations around the world, to help needy overcome emergencies, earn a living through agriculture and access affordable health care. The client offers several ways for donors to contribute to the fundraisers and pool volunteers. In their 75 years of operation, they have helped improve the lives of over 100 million people across the world.

The Challenge

The client wanted to get the holistic view of their mission and need efficiencies in measuring and reporting impact. They do not want to rely on multiple legacy platforms running in silos, rather wanted to leverage a unified system for managing donor relationships, fundraising programs, and meeting reporting requirements.

The client’s recent groundwork led to a huge boost in donation inquiries but their legacy method of communication was also costing them the opportunity to connect personally and follow-up with their donors.

To connect with their vast donor-base, the client was sending emails based on the database maintained on spreadsheets. This resulted in inefficient and impersonal communication. Donors were receiving irrelevant emails, e.g. donation request emails to the one who has already made a donation.

It was a tedious task to send personalized communication as there was no classification in the workflow to differentiate corporate donors from the individuals or the ones that merely inquired about the tax deduction.

There was no one source of true information for the donor base. Any attrition in the client’s team would lead to loss of critical donor data. The client wanted to improve volunteer retention through targeted messaging and keeping them updated to the campaign they contributed to.

The Solution

Damco worked with the client to understand their needs for CRM and the challenges with their existing system. We helped them in migrating donor data from spreadsheets to Salesforce Non-profit Cloud, deploy CRM customizations to cater to specific needs, and assisted the staff during the transition. The client had a huge database with fields andnotes pertaining to donation inquiries. We recommended them to go for a data-cleansing round for de-duplication. Apart from duplicate entries mapped under different processes, the spreadsheets had non-uniform conditional formatting. To preserve the relations between records and get data ready for Salesforce, we leveraged our proven process excellence capabilities and frameworks. For tapping opportunities like registrations at the website, we integrated the client’s CMS with Salesforce. CMS entities were synced with Salesforce objects to push CMS data to Salesforce as well as import Salesforce data into CMS.

The Transformation

Through personalized communication, the outreach team helped donors to match with suitable campaigns and geographies, thus reducing response-time for donation. The client recorded a significant increase in repeat donation in the first quarter post-deployment through donor-engagement and efficient fundraising management. There was an increase in volunteer registration attributed to personalized messaging and consistent nurturing.

Efficient database management due to Drupal-Salesforce Integration. Instead of manually adding data from CMS to spreadsheets, actionable data was ready to use instantly.

Immediate bonding of the donor with the cause. The prospective donors were seamlessly channelled from website inquiry and added to the campaign to the impact they made.

Decreased lags in donor follow-up through automated messages, keeping lead and contact information updated and complete.