Dreamforce 2022 delivered an abundance of valuable insights for not-for-profits (NFPs) with sessions featuring KWF Dutch Cancer Society, Year Up, Ukrainian Red Cross, American College of Radiology and Australia’s own Settlement Services International.
Here’s a wrap of highlights from the lineup of information-packed and inspiring episodes.
The Genie’s out of the bottle
Session: Not-for-profit keynote: Drive your mission forward
The message at the heart of the keynote was simple: speed.
“You not only have to understand what’s happening in the world,” said Salesforce’s David Slater. “you have to be able to respond really fast … embrace change, but with speed in mind.”
And to create speed, NFPs need to have their data in one place so they can make confident decisions about their missions, donors and volunteers, and meet expectations in real time. Lori Freeman, Salesforce’s VP NFP Industry Solutions and Strategy, put it like this: “The donor on Thursday can become the passionate volunteer on Friday if you meet your constituents at their interest.”
Enter Stakeholder 360 powered by Genie, Salesforce’s new real-time data platform. Think personalised experiences with intelligence, automating critical workflows and connecting touch points across all your stakeholders not across days or weeks, but in real time. You can see a demo of Genie’s magic here.
The Simplus team can help you understand what Salesforce Genie can do for you.
Empowering volunteers and making every dollar count with digital solutions
Sessions:
KWF (the Dutch Cancer Society) is a powerful example for any NFP looking to undertake digital transformation.
The organisation went from cash-only donations for its annual door-to-door fundraising to completely cashless – with an increase in donations. Building an app streamlined the volunteering process for fundraisers, while donation boards with QR codes made collecting donations easier. New functionality in Experience Cloud supports recurring donations through personalised portals and Marketing Cloud delivers real time feedback to volunteers about their fundraising efforts.
“We want to engage a younger generation that doesn't have the time to be on the street for a couple of hours – I always say let’s be open to the last-minute volunteer.”
It was a real privilege to hear from Yaroslav Ivakhno from the Ukrainian Red Cross Society. He’d made a long journey to speak at Dreamforce about how the Society acted fast to manage the huge number of donations that started flowing in when the crisis began.
With 95% of donations coming from overseas, it needed a system that could accept different currencies and support different languages. It took five weeks to build and Marketing Cloud automation means the Society can not only accept donations but engage with donors, thanking them for their generosity and keeping them up to date with what is happening and how their money is being used.
Diving into a data lake to scale impact
Sessions:
Building a 360-degree view of its users and creating a data lake to overcome the challenge of siloed data means adult job training provider, Year Up, can manage and secure the cross-functional data it needs to innovate, adapt and scale its impact. The goal? To serve 10 times more young adults by 2030.
And plugging Tableau and Slack into its Salesforce ecosystem allows the organisation to stay alert to key insights and easily act on them.
“The power in data is the trust that’s built when it’s shared. I say, don’t tell me what you think, tell me what the data says.”
Durga Gandi, VP at The American College of Radiology (ACR) explained Data Lake for Nonprofit Cloud, Powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has also been central to the creation of ACR’s data strategy. With more than 150 systems capturing data, ACR previously had no single source of truth. Implementing CRM created a 360-degree view of ACR stakeholders and Data Lake overcame the analytic challenge as well as reducing the cost of storage, archiving and multiple data silos. And here too, the addition of Tableau has been critical to driving actionable insights.
A reality check and some hard-won advice
Session: (mis)Adventures in digital transformation
David Aitken, Group Business Applications Manager at Settlement Services International, delivered a frank (and funny) account of the pitfalls associated with digital transformation.
The organisation, looking to streamline its work with humanitarian arrivals, worked to consolidate systems and manage its casual workforce through Field Service. If this sounds like you, look no further for lessons learnt, but be sure to stick around for his tips too. Think flexibility, communication and trust.
Simplicity and incremental improvement
Session: Not one-size-fits-all: Personalised journeys
Marloes Klaasen, IT Project Manager & Architect at KWF, closed with fantastic advice for developing a data strategy.
“It sounds obvious but the key word is ‘simple’. Try to keep it as simple as possible … If you have multiple siloes, it’s really difficult to change it in seconds.”
She called out Customer Data Platforms (CDP) as an essential tool for speeding up the process of engagement.
Finally, for those starting on a digital transformation, Klaasen encouraged pinpointing the problems you need to solve and taking them step and step. Be brave and, above all, prioritise progression over perfection.
