Salesforce: Managing Animal Welfare Constituents

During my tenure with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), as the Director of Development, it was an ongoing pain point to identify if a constituent was a donor, volunteer, pet adopter or event participant because our data was located across various systems & spreadsheets. While operating multiple branches, our Branch Managers used Excel to manage events and donor interactions, and then had to submit reports to the Head Office to manually issue official tax receipts. This would often happen weeks or even months later. It was impossible to accurately report on current monthly recurring donations because our online activity was not integrated with our donor database, Raiser’s Edge (RE). This lack of integration meant all of our data must remain in separate systems.

In fact, reporting was so complicated it would take our database administrator a couple days to pull together reports for our CEO. If she wanted to slice and dice the report or look at the data differently, it would take us another few of days to accommodate those changes. Reporting is key to an organization’s success, whether it is being accountable to your constituents, identifying trends or driving your ongoing strategies. Unless you are able to pull reports quickly and easily, it will be difficult to report on the success of your campaigns and the health of your organization. Without easy access to data, it’s virtually impossible to make smart decisions about donor stewardship and upcoming campaigns. When different departments are using separate systems to track constituent activity and program deliverables, seeing the big picture and accurately reporting on the success of your mission becomes a challenge.

Imagine a unified view of every interaction with your constituents; whether they are clients, donors, volunteers, sponsors or program funders. Imagine if your animal welfare organization could access one solution and know if a branch volunteer adopted a pet, attended last month’s gala and was a monthly donor. Imagine how powerful and interactive the stewardship experience would be!

Salesforce, along with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) offers a set of end-to-end solutions that any organization can use to become a connected nonprofit. Salesforce will connect your entire organization – your branches and affiliates, supporters, volunteers, events and employees – so you can deliver better programs and services, engage and strengthen your community, communicate more effectively and raise more resources. From day one, Salesforce has offered an industry leading Philanthropic approach, allowing well over 27,000 nonprofit and higher education organizations to access grants, volunteer hours and the Salesforce platform to manage constituent engagement and drive their unique mission forward.

Today, forward-thinking nonprofit organizations are seeking solutions that allow them to store and maintain data with an organization-wide integrated approach; allowing them to deliver a centralized multi-channel solution. Organizations are picking solutions that can be customized, based on the needs of their constituents, allowing them to become more donor/constituent centric. Organizations with staff and satellite offices around the world can now access their data to generate real-time reports, stewardship profiles and constituent updates. All they need is a username, password and access to the Internet.

One such organization is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. They found it difficult to connect, manage and access all their data points in their legacy system. Now, they can manage their auction items, track event attendance, split gifts by % and amount, deliver mail merge thank you letters to their donors and track companion animals in their facilities. The are accomplishing all of this in the cloud, directly from Salesforce.

Salesforce solutions are allowing organizations to be more efficient through administrative automation for approvals, receipting and task assignment/reminders. Integrating online donations and event registrations, real time/user friendly reporting, and the ability to engage constituents through a Salesforce Community portal interface provides organizations with the means to manage their entire mission in one location, with a platform that can scale as they grow.

By moving their mission to the cloud, organizations worldwide, have immediate access from any device, due to the flexibility of the platform. Salesforce nonprofit users manage more than just fundraising. They are managing volunteers, programs and cases within the same solution. This gives organizations, such as a Humane Society, the power to manage adoption programs. animal health data, volunteers, events, fundraising, and much more from a single solution.

Today, Animal Welfare organizations have a choice and that choice is Salesforce!