Start at the beginning: When Mission Meets Salesforce: Jewish Community of Louisville’s Blueprint for Connected Fundraising Impact
The first story covered the build. This one covers what came after: 19 months of active use, real outcomes, and a platform the team is still growing into.
About the Jewish Community of Louisville
The Jewish Community of Louisville (JCL) brings together two organizations with more than 200 years of combined history: the Trager Family JCC, founded in 1890, and the Jewish Federation of Louisville, founded in 1934. Their mission is simple to state and complex to carry out: to bring people together to discover, connect, and flourish through Jewish culture and values.
The JCC serves more than 25,000 community members a year through senior nutrition, early childhood, youth, health and wellness, and cultural arts programs. The Federation raises and distributes more than $2 million annually to local Jewish agencies and global partner communities. Both branches share the same mission. Until recently, they did not share much else.
In 2024, JCL partnered with Cloud for Good to build infrastructure that could serve both branches. That implementation is covered in JCL’s first story. This story picks up at go-live and follows what has happened since.
The Challenge
JCL’s fundraising team was working out of Abila Millennium, a donor management system that had run its course. Data was spread across that system and a growing collection of spreadsheets. Pulling a report took one to two days. The two branches had no shared view of their donors or their giving history. The full picture of that challenge is in the first story.
“We had an outdated legacy database that was inadequate for our needs. We needed a system for comprehensive donor management that captured, tracked, and reported information across a broad spectrum, and which could grow and expand with our philanthropy efforts. It also needed to integrate with our financial system and with other organizational systems.”
Frances M. Skolnick | Senior Director of Planned Giving and Endowments, Jewish Community of Louisville
How We Worked Together
Before any technology decisions were made, we asked JCL to slow down. The urgency was real. But organizations in the middle of a painful system often reach for a replacement before they have fully mapped what the replacement needs to do. We did not want to solve yesterday’s problem with a new tool.
Over a series of working sessions with staff from Fundraising, Marketing, Finance, and IT, we helped JCL articulate what their operation actually required: not just the features they had been missing, but the workflows they had been building workarounds for, the data they wished they had, and the decisions they needed to make faster. Bringing every department into the room early was deliberate. The problems JCL was experiencing were not isolated to one team. The solution needed to work across all of them.
From that foundation, we recommended Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) as the right platform for where JCL was, and we designed the implementation with Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud already in mind for where they were going. Every architectural decision we made was tested against that long-term path, so the system JCL launched with would not need to be rebuilt when they were ready for the next step.
The configuration covered every gift type JCL manages: one-time donations, recurring gifts, major gifts, planned gifts, pledges, and multi-year installment giving. Gift designations were tied directly to funds and accounting units, so the finance team could trust what the system showed them. We connected Classy (online peer-to-peer fundraising) for online donations, set up automated donor acknowledgment, established deduplication rules to protect the integrity of constituent records, and built three dashboards and eight reports tailored to how JCL’s leadership and frontline staff actually made decisions.
Data migration was one of the highest-stakes parts of the engagement. Years of donor history sat in Millennium and across spreadsheets. We worked through it carefully: mapping eight tables, running repeated test migrations as the build progressed, and validating every batch against a set of golden records that JCL’s own team had approved. By the time we reached go-live, the data had been validated multiple times. There were no surprises.
Training was not treated as a handoff. It was part of the strategy from the start. We identified change champions within JCL early, built knowledge transfer into every sprint, and designed the training to match how each team actually worked. Virtual sessions ran during the build phase. Then, just before go-live, four Cloud for Good team members spent three days on-site at JCL’s offices working directly alongside more than 20 staff. The goal was simple: make sure everyone felt confident before the system went live, not after.
“From the outset, every department impacted by the system was part of the team that worked on the change process. That was a huge part of ensuring the system’s success. Equally as important was the training. From the start, we planned for a 2-part training. First, we spent multiple days with the project team providing training remotely. But most important was the 3-day onsite training that we orchestrated very carefully for 20+ members of our staff, conducted by 4 members of the project team onsite at our organization just prior to go-live.”
Frances M. Skolnick | Senior Director of Planned Giving and Endowments, Jewish Community of Louisville
Post go-live, the collaboration strengthened. JCL moved to Cloud for Good’s Managed Services program, and the same standard of engagement was carried forward. The team that built the system stayed close to it. Learn more: cloud4good.com/services/managed-services/
The Impact
The early results came in fast. They have not slowed down.
Early Wins That Set the Tone
Within two weeks of launch, every fundraising and finance staff member was using the system. During JCL’s first major campaign on the new platform, they raised $200,000 more than the year before. For the first time, staff could track pledges in real time during live donor calls. That capability alone changed how those conversations went.
Time Returned to Donors
The team now gets back up to five hours a day that used to go to manual data entry, reconciliation, and working around a system that was not built for what they needed. That time goes to donors now. Relationship building, stewardship, and outreach. The work that actually moves the mission forward.
Decisions That Do Not Wait
Reports that used to take one to two days to build, and were often skipped because the effort was not worth it, now take ten minutes. Staff pull their own data when they need it. Leadership makes decisions based on what is happening now, not what was happening two days ago when someone finally had time to run the numbers.
A Single Source of Truth
One legacy system and countless spreadsheets have been replaced by one place. Data accuracy has improved by 50%. For a fundraising team, that is not just a cleaner database. It means knowing who gave, when, how much, to what fund, and how they want to be thanked, without having to dig through three sources and hope they agree. Clean data means better donor relationships. Fragmented data means the opposite, quietly, over time.
Scale and Speed
The volume of records and transactions managed has gone up 40%, handled by the same team, faster and with fewer errors. Outreach turnaround is 25% quicker. Organization-wide user adoption is above 90%, which means the system has become part of how everyone works, not just the teams that went live first.
A Platform Still Growing
Nineteen months in, JCL is still adding to what the platform does. Marketing Cloud and AI are already in the conversation. The system they built in 2024 is the one they are expanding in 2026. That is the sign of a platform that was built right.
“Our system is everything we hoped it would be, and more. We are now 19 months post go-live and could not be happier with it. The functionality is excellent. We continue to explore new aspects of what we can do and how we can use it.”
Frances M. Skolnick | Senior Director of Planned Giving and Endowments, Jewish Community of Louisville
The Cloud for Good Partnership
JCL came to Cloud for Good through a Salesforce referral. Frances Skolnick, Senior Director of Planned Giving and Endowments, had worked with outside consultants throughout her career. She had seen how these engagements usually go. She came in with a high bar and clear expectations.
What she found was a team that was genuinely invested. Questions got answered. Concerns were raised early and addressed directly. When something needed to change, it changed. The Cloud for Good team did not treat the engagement as a project to close; they treated it as a problem to solve together. And when the implementation ended, that did not change. The move to Managed Services felt like a continuation of the same relationship, not a handoff to a new one.
From pre-sales through go-live and post-go-live support, JCL rated Cloud for Good a perfect 5 out of 5 across every dimension of the engagement. Responsiveness. Expertise. Communication. Collaboration. Guidance. All of it. That kind of result does not come from a good delivery process alone. It comes from a team that cares about the outcome as much as the client does.
“I have worked with many consultants over the course of my career; this was by far the best experience I have ever had. It was not a consultation; it was a true partnership.”
Frances M. Skolnick | Senior Director of Planned Giving and Endowments, Jewish Community of Louisville
The system JCL is using today is the one they will keep growing. Cloud for Good will be there for it.
We work with nonprofits across the country to build Salesforce solutions that fit their missions. Learn more: cloud4good.com/industries/nonprofits/