Compassion in World Farming
The Challenge
Compassion identified a need for a single CRM system to enable them to grow into new markets and new functions, but also retain control and ownership of all data at a central level.
They chose Salesforce and the Non Profit Starter pack (NPSP) as the platform for this activity. The project covers their UK HQ, France, Netherlands, USA, Poland and Italy offices, plus representatives in China, South Africa and Belgium and a total of over 60 Salesforce users.
Project Aims
- To create a centrally managed, organisation-wide resource for the storing and sharing of contacts and the knowledge/learnings associated with them
- Remove departmental/country “silos” of data
- Ensure coordinated, clear communications with contacts
As Compassion expands into Europe and beyond, each country requires a system to support their work and enable them to widen their function into areas such as fundraising when they are in a position to do so. Compassion HQ needs to be in a position to support these offices whilst retaining control and ownership of all data.
As a campaigning charity, it is vital that all contact with external stakeholders is co-ordinated to maximise impact and ensure Compassion achieves its strategic aims.
Compassion had a mix of contact management systems in place (e.g. Raisers Edge, Access, Salesforce, Excel and Outlook). Online advocacy and email tool, Engaging Networks, is used by the UK, France, Netherlands, Poland and Italy offices to engage with supporters online and easy integration of this data into Salesforce was key.
The Fundraising team was looking to ‘personalise’ rather than just segment data and to Value someone’s engagement with Compassion based on non-financial criteria as well as RFV. A good measure was the time taken to co-ordinate cross-department communication with contacts (e.g. sending Christmas cards!) and needed to be a much simpler and less time consuming process.
A key part of the system was integrating Salesforce with Engaging Networks (used for campaigning activity). Why was this so important?
- It allows CiWF to provide an online advocacy system for each office, which is centrally managed
- It provides an excellent platform for advocacy work
- All online fundraising in overseas offices is done via Engaging Networks
Benefits of the Engaging Networks Integration
- EN instances are now synced with Salesforce every night, with minimal manual intervention – this previously took many steps and many days, and was rapidly out of date
- Single & repeat Credit Card donations (and soon Direct Debits in NL) are automatically created against supporter records in SF
- Now able to see that supporters are opted in to multiple countries email lists – much easier to identify highly active and motivated supporters; supporters can give much more than money; a much more accurate and complete picture of engagement
- Able to see that other contacts who have opted into emails, and have taken online actions – now know what they are seeing and when they are responding
- Able to “push” information back to Salesforce, such as donor type & last donation date, so it can be used to segment and target emails
Main Benefits of using Salesforce
- Very flexible, highly customisable system
- Easy to use
- Cloud based
- Salesforce AppExchange – ability to extend functionality easily
- Keep costs down – Licence donations and discounts from Salesforce.org