Migrated from Blackbaud’s Kintera Sphere, Integrated with Quickbooks, and Implemented Across Multiple Campuses
Client
Camp Kesem recognizes and embraces the often-overlooked population of children affected by a parent’s cancer. Camp Kesem empowers college student leaders in over 50 campuses nationwide to create free, life-changing summer camps for children affected by a parent’s cancer.
Challenges
- Camp Kesem is a large organization which utilizes students across over 50 campuses nationwide for fundraising. They needed a sophisticated way of tracking funds and donations. They were using Blackbaud’s Kintera Sphere which proved to be overly complicated and inflexible.
- Each chapter is primarily run by college students with some support by program directors from the national office. Each site is completely responsible for running its own camp as well as the fundraising to cover a majority of their budget. Using college students means a high turnover so it was difficult to train new volunteers and they were not happy with the level of customer service Kintera offered when issues arose.
- Donations came in via the national office and had to be transferred to the chapter they were intended for. Chapters also received donations but were keeping records in Excel which were not uniform or concise when received by the national office.
- Staff wasted hours trying to track information, transfer funds, create reports and needed a way to connect their websites as well as social media accounts to receive donations on a national and regional level.
Solutions
Donor and Campus Management – Cloud for Good helped them establish a clear fundraising platform on Salesforce with the Nonprofit Starter Pack and the Cloud for Good Fundraising Package to manage donors and donations. Sophisticated VisualFlow pages were implemented to support the need to designate partial or full donation amounts across various funds and campuses.
GiveBig Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Solutions by Click and Pledge was integrated with Salesforce. This customizable website allows a web based social platform where donations are entered by can be directed to individual campuses.
Finance – In order to streamline the Camp Kesem accounting Cloud for Good used Interweave to create a real time bi-directional integration between Salesforce and Quickbooks.
Event Management – Cloud for Good installed the Click and Pledge Event Management application to manage the ticket sales to the various events held both nationally and by individual campuses and Auctions for Salesforce was installed for the management of silent auctions. Cloud for Good worked with Camp Kesem to customize Salesforce to better track the social and financial return investment from events and other marketing activities.
Results
Catalyst for Growth – “Previously, we had no real useful or reliable information. We couldn’t rely on manual data since Kintera was too hard for college students to figure out. In turn, no one was using the database for updating information,” states Cristin O’Leary, Development Manager at Camp Kesem. “Since beginning, the implementation project we have grown from 41 chapters to 62 and Salesforce is a program that will continue to grow with us. “
Institutional Memory – Switching to Salesforce allowed one concise repository for all information. Since it is cloud based, all chapters are able to enter data directly into the system, allowing the national office to track goals and view real time reports rather than having to upload individual Excel spreadsheets.
Increase Efficiency – With the additional layer of VisualFlow pages on top of Salesforce and the customized profiles for the users, chapters are only able to see the information relevant for them which makes the entering of data much easier and requiring little to no training.
Since donors are able to access national as well as individual chapter websites for donations, funds are no longer transferred between accounts which were handled manually before.
“We tried to integrate with Quickbooks before but it didn’t work. The integration with Quickbooks allows us to be more in sync with our financial department, save time on data entry, and most importantly, see real time reports about our organization.” said Ms. O’Leary.
Trust and Effectiveness – “We now have clean, reliable data allowing for much better reporting. Before, setting up reports took 2-4 hours because we didn’t have the information needed. Now we can pull a report in 10 minutes and since reports are so easy to manipulate, anyone in the organization can do it.” Ms. O’Leary continued, “Of all the consultants we spoke with, Cloud for Good seemed to be the better personality fit. They understood the developmental side of things and cared for our specific needs. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Cloud for Good on future projects.”
You can view the Fundraising 101 Webinar with Camp Kesem and Salesforce.Org below.
