The Rainforest Alliance is creating a more sustainable world by using social and market forces to protect nature and improve the lives of farmers and forest communities. To achieve our mission, we partner with diverse allies around the world to drive positive change across global supply chains and in many of our most critically important natural landscapes.
As an international nonprofit organization with more than 30 years of experience in sustainability transformation, we understand that the social and economic well-being of rural communities is tightly connected to ecosystem health. This knowledge has shaped our rigorous programs to advance sustainable land-use and commodity production.
Supporting a Connected Vision
Rainforest Alliance is an incredibly diverse and connected organization, requiring symbiotic coordination between all of their people and departments working towards a common goal that reflects the complex landscapes the organization seeks to protect.
With that perspective comes a crucial need for effective technology solutions to connect the expansive organization and empower their work across the globe. Before partnering with Cloud for Good, however, Rainforest Alliance utilized Blackbaud’s Luminate CRM (LCRM) on two fragmented Salesforce instances, one supporting the fundraising/development arm of the organization, including all sales processes and donation processing. The other focuses on compliance needs, a rigorous system of checks and balances inherent to a system tracking and supporting organizations and individuals globally.
Creating Newfound Sustainability with Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack
Megan Friedfeld serves as the Manager of Rainforest Alliance’s Fundraising Operations and described their legacy environments as “impractical, very rigid, and with many errors. 50% of our organization was in one instance, and the other 50% was in another. It just wasn’t ideal or cost-effective.” Rainforest Alliance required a new solution, and Cloud for Good knew the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) would be the best fit for the organization’s global demands.
“One of the reasons Rainforest Alliance was especially comfortable with Cloud for Good was their specific knowledge in the nonprofit space,” said Friedfeld on what initially led the organization to pursue Cloud for Good-implemented Salesforce solutions. Cloud for Good brings their proprietary data migration accelerator and methodology to every one of our system migrations, utilizing pre-built mapping logic so that clients don’t start from zero when transitioning from legacy systems like LCRM to NPSP. This process ultimately helps reduce risk and minimize interruptions to operations.
Migrating Rainforest Alliance from Blackbaud and consolidating the two disparate instances onto one unified environment through the Nonprofit Cloud enabled Rainforest Alliance to view relationships across their organization at a grander scale than with their previous technology. The solution also allowed for multi-touch tracking of Rainforest Alliance constituents and provided greater opportunities for streamlined categorizations of relationships giving the team more mission clarity and reporting ease. “One huge benefit is the visibility,” said Friedfeld, “You can look into accounts at a holistic level and see the Rainforest Alliance team working with the account, how they’ve interacted with us before, and what is in the pipeline. Our grant management procedures and contract approvals have been shortened tremendously, and the whole process has just been streamlined.”
Connecting Missions, Systems, and People with Pardot
The migration from Blackbaud to Salesforce also included a move from Luminate Online (LOnline) to Pardot for their digital marketing and email communication needs. Now they’re able to create enhanced marketing journeys allowing for more advanced segmentation of donors depending on their past relationships with the organization. One particularly impactful journey is triggered following a supporter’s first donation or after they sign up to the organization’s email list.
Dubbed the “30-Day Sustainability Challenge,” this constituent journey invites its audience to take personal action in the global movement fighting against climate change. Participants in the journey receive a step-by-step guide on how to “follow the frog” to a better tomorrow, and an email every three days featuring simple every day actions they can take to make a difference. To date, the email journey has exceeded nonprofit industry averages with a 32.56% open rate and 4.05% click-through rate.
How Salesforce Helps Rainforest Alliance Innovate
As a result of heightened data visibility and enhanced marketing effectiveness, Rainforest Alliance has developed several new business processes built around donor projections, goal setting, and budgeting. “The key takeaway from having all this data in one place is being able to react almost immediately to what we’re seeing in front of us. We now have two meetings a month where we’re analyzing our data and putting new strategies into place, if need be, for the following month,” detailed Friedfeld.
These solutions are accompanied by pipeline dashboards that allow the organization to see, in real-time, their progress towards overall goals. New communication codes and designated fields on contact objects are now used for higher-touch donors in Pardot, and customized rollups allow the organization to maintain a donor health dashboard tracking the overall rate of growth within the donor file. “We wouldn’t have had that information in our old instance because there were no rollups at all,” Friedfeld revealed.
Rainforest Alliance is quickly realizing the benefits of these donor health dashboards as it relates to budgeting and planning for the future, as their decisions are now backed by data made visible through the clear, concise reports being pumped into the dashboards.
On the overall keys to the success Rainforest Alliance has found on the Salesforce platform, Friedfeld noted the importance of Cloud for Good’s Managed Services team in finding and maintaining success post-implementation: “As a product owner responsible for a Salesforce instance, there’s never a shortage of work to be done. Managed Services allows you to prioritize the most critical enhancements that could really bring the most value, increase the sustainability or efficiency of certain processes, and then leverage the entire Cloud for Good team to surface the latest and greatest Salesforce updates information. Working with Cloud for Good has been fantastic.”
When harmony is created through technology systems like Nonprofit Cloud and Pardot, so too is it created for the diverse allies of the Rainforest Alliance as they seek to make deep-rooted changes to help create a more sustainable world.
For more information on the Rainforest Alliance, including what you can do to help their mission, visit their website at rainforest-alliance.org.
Written by Blake Becker
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