Helping Children Heal With Salesforce

Riley Children’s Foundation serves as the fundraising arm of Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health and the founding organization that opened Riley Hospital in 1924. Riley Hospital is recognized as one of the best children’s hospitals in the US and donations to the Foundation help sustain critical programs at the hospital, including Pediatric Research and Patient Care, Maternity and Newborn Health, Family Support Programs, such as Child Life and Social Work, and so much more.

Unifying Constituent Data with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Pardot

With a team of 70+ fundraising and communication professionals, the Foundation needed a system that could track every engagement the organization was having with their constituents in one single source of truth. Using a combination of Blackbaud Luminate CRM (LCRM) and Luminate Online, the Foundation was facing limitations in the way they managed their constituents, donors, gifts, events, and emails.

Instead of consolidating insights into the engagement of donors, they were faced with duplicate and ununified data. With Cloud for Good’s help, the Foundation moved to a combination of NPSP and Pardot allowing them to better target and track the efforts of fundraising and communications teams.

Katie Askey serves as the Senior Project Manager at Riley Children’s Foundation and helps drive large, operational projects to completion, including the transition from Luminate solutions to the NPSP initiated in early 2020. “Luminate CRM is sort of a Blackbaud and Salesforce hybrid product which gave us a preview of Salesforce, but we also felt the limitations that come with adding that additional layer,” said Askey, “NPSP appealed to us because the possibilities for automation through development or apps seemed endless and only limited by our resources.” After only a few short months, their migration to NPSP was complete and now most every Foundation employee works in Salesforce daily as their main central operations hub.

To further expand the capabilities of their Salesforce instance, the Foundation moved their marketing from Luminate Online to Salesforce’s Pardot, which provided a seamless connection between NPSP and the communication with their constituents. Integration of Classy to boost online fundraising and bolster online event registration added yet another upgrade to the Foundation’s digital marketing strategy.

Cloud for Good was proud to sponsor the Foundation’s annual Riley Rally in 2020, which was held completely virtually. Online attendees met Riley Champions and Junior Champions, exclusive live updates were revealed from Riley Hospital, and all donations were met with a 2X match. With the help of Classy and Salesforce, the Foundation handily met their fundraising goal through this virtual event and helped so many Riley kids in the process.

Digital Innovation Through Data + Relationships

The Foundation’s Salesforce solution has enabled better multi-touch tracking of donors, supporting opportunities for more creative moves management. The Foundation is now able to leverage the data within Salesforce to help personalize and segment their constituents for more effective and efficient marketing, including enhanced digital marketing capabilities that have helped keep their messaging strong during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Askey explores these enhancements deeper by stating, “We use NPSP for everything from housing information and interactions with our donors to the transactional donations made. I like to say that if it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen. Our goal is for the system to be as streamlined and automated as possible so that our development team can focus on raising funds and let the system do the rest.”

In time, the Foundation hopes to utilize the NPSP and Pardot integration by exploring email journeys to make automated, data-driven donation asks to their constituents. The Foundation has taken steps to test these strategies out by utilizing dynamic content to make upgrade asks of Riley Hospital employees who donate via payroll deduction, as well as to personalize asks for first-time givers, Riley Society members, and high- or low-active donors. These automation advancements in digital connection and deeper understanding of constituents will free up the Foundation communications team to create unique content that reaches these constituents more effectively, as well as free up the development team to work on more personalized donor interactions.

User adoption and staff time savings as a result of embracing Salesforce’s NPSP have had a significant impact on Foundation employees, illustrated most notably by their “State of the Union Dashboard,” which tracks and reports on all the major happenings and data points within the Foundation. Before the migration to NPSP, it would take Foundation employees one full business day to pull reports and build this dashboard, another full business day for a team to review the data gathered, and then finally, on the next day, the dashboard would be unveiled to the whole of the Foundation featuring the previous month’s information.

Now, through Salesforce, this process is completely automated, granting every person in the organization access to real-time data illustrating the health of all Foundation operations. Not only does this save the operations team time, but it also allows the development team to quickly retrieve information themselves without having to work through IT. Askey excitedly summarized the quality-of-life improvement this automation has presented, capping her description by exclaiming, “it’s a game-changer!”

Sustained Success Through Training + Communication

Change management remained an integral facet of the Foundation’s implementation plan throughout the migration to Salesforce from Luminate CRM and Luminate Online. As the Foundation began evaluating CRM options, a cross-functional data governance committee was formed. Members of this team offered input into which CRM would be best for the organization as a whole and was involved with the discovery and testing throughout the entire implementation of the Salesforce technology.

The training of team members on this new technology was enabled through a virtual training event in the summer of 2020, following their go-live date; members of the data governance committee led training during a Salesforce kick-off week and continues to train through weekly meetings that gather feedback on behalf of the many Foundation teams.

Later that summer, the Foundation linked up with Cloud for Good Managed Services to further support team members and the organization’s change management. On this partnership, Askey noted, “We get the full experience of the Cloud for Good team through their breadth of knowledge to understand best practices and get firsthand feedback on how things worked for other clients. Managed Services not only implements solutions but makes sure that we understand what they did so that we can independently maintain it and learn new skills.”

At Riley Children’s Foundation, every gift received makes an impact, and every act of giving has the potential to greatly improve the lives of children. Such a mission deserves best-in-class technology that facilitates and empowers the organization’s work in any way it can. In Salesforce, Katie Askey and the many, hard-working team members of the Foundation have found that technology and they aren’t looking back.

Askey says, in closing, “It’s been such an excellent experience working with the Cloud for Good implementation team that we often joke we’ve been spoiled forever because no one else can live up to the experience. Not only did they deliver an implementation on time and on budget – which, as a former consultant, I can attest is no easy feat – they did so during uncertain and challenging times. They always listened carefully to our needs.”