Transforming the Salesforce Strategy for the American Association for Cancer Research Foundation

Introduction

The AACR Foundation plays a critical role in combating cancer by securing vital funds for research, education, and advocacy. With the broader Association supporting over 58,000 members globally, the Founding relies on a Salesforce Strategy that manage and engage with diverse constituencies. However, the Association’s existing Salesforce instance was highly customized and lacked the ability to strategically serve multiple departments, including sophisticated donor and marketing strategies.

Recognizing the refresh its Salesforce strategy and prove data management, the AACRF partnered with us to tackle these challenges head-on and support them through a re-imagining of Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and their broader approach to Salesforce.

The Problem

The AACR’s mission to prevent and cure cancer depends heavily on effective donor engagement and fundraising through the AACRF. However, the diverse needs of individual teams and departments often lead to silos—even within a unified platform like Salesforce. Key issues included:

• Data Silos: While Salesforce, in some ways, served the Association’s membership well, the broader data management made it difficult to understand donors, supporters, and the broader cancer community.
• Low User Adoption: Salesforce’s customizations made the system unintuitive and difficult to use for fundraising staff including tracking leadership giving portfolios
• Time Intensive Fundraising Processes: Without a streamlined CRM, tracking donor engagement metrics and coordinating fundraising efforts were time-intensive (manual) and, at times, inconsistent.

These challenges impacted the AACRF’s ability to foster a donor-centric approach and achieve organizational goals effectively.

Build Consulting’s Approach

To address the AACRF’s challenges, we undertook a strategic, collaborative approach:

Comprehensive Assessment

We began with a thorough evaluation of the AACR’s existing Salesforce system to pinpoint weaknesses in architecture, data management, and usability. We worked closely with stakeholders from IT and the Foundation to ensure all perspectives were considered.

Strategic Roadmap

We developed a tailored roadmap with three potential Salesforce strategies and investment scenarios for improving CRM performance. Recognizing AACRF’s immediate and long-term needs, the strategies focused on fully leveraging Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to streamline donor engagement, enhance data integration, and support broader organizational objectives.

Partner Selection

We curated a list of prequalified Salesforce implementation partners with specific expertise in fundraising, membership, and marketing. We facilitated a collaborative selection process to identify the partner best suited to the AACR’s, and the Foundation’s unique requirements.

Implementation Support & Change Management

To ensure successful adoption, we led the change management efforts in the Foundation as well as developing business process documentation.

Results

The Association and it’s Foundation will have a fully integrated Salesforce strategy that serves the needs across the Association and Foundation. Beyond just a new instance of Salesforce, significant progress has been made, including:

Improved Collaboration

With a unified CRM and data strategy, the AACR teams can now seamlessly share data and leverage that data to better collaborate across departments. By moving off their legacy instance of Salesforce, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is enabling detailed tracking of donor interactions and engagement metrics.

Optimized Fundraising:

The AACRF is better positioned to execute targeted and efficient fundraising campaigns, securing crucial funding to cancer research as funding research has become increasingly challenging.

The AACRF’s leadership and staff are now empowered to adopt a donor-centric approach that will drive impactful investments in cancer research for years to come.

Conclusion

The AACRF’s partnership with Build Consulting demonstrates the impact of creating a strategic approach to CRM. Through a thoughtful, collaborative process, the Foundation overcame complex challenges to establish a unified Salesforce strategy, paving the way for stronger donor relationships, more effective fundraising efforts, and improved collaboration with colleagues.