Reimagining How Salesforce Serves a National Cancer Research Association

The Challenge: Salesforce Worked for Some, but Not All

Research associations need a cohesive approach to Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) and data management to effectively drive their missions forward. Too often, the disparate requirements of individual teams and departments lead to silos even within a single platform like Salesforce.

These barriers impact constituent experiences, hinder collaboration, and impede the flow of vital information across departments. Salesforce can serve as a unifying force, breaking down these silos and enabling seamless communication and collaboration.

Identifying a Need: Reimagining Salesforce

For the fundraising team at a major cancer research association, gaps in how Salesforce was currently serving them proved particularly challenging, as they obstructed the tracking of donor interactions, engagement metrics, and fundraising efforts. Salesforce worked for many at the association but wasn’t working for fundraising – impacting vital revenue generation strategies.

Organizational leadership enlisted Build’s expertise to assess the current instance of Salesforce, understand business needs, and create a roadmap forward.

Developing a Salesforce Roadmap

Build conducted an assessment that articulated the key challenges, including system architecture, usability, and areas for potential investment.  The association’s current CRM, a highly customized instance of Salesforce, suffered from poor user adoption among fundraising staff. Working with foundation stakeholders and key IT leaders, Build developed a strategic roadmap for Salesforce that captured the needs not only of the foundation, but of the broader organization, including education, membership, and marketing.

Selection: Identifying an Implementation Partner

Build Consulting outlined three potential scenarios for future investments in Salesforce, including redeploying Salesforce to better leverage the Nonprofit Cloud, or simply finding a purpose-built fundraising tool that could integrate with the broader ecosystem.  Through collaborative discussions and thorough analysis, the association elected to make a significant, and impactful, investment in reimagining how Nonprofit Cloud supported the functional, data, and technical requirements of a broad set of stakeholders.

Build prequalified Salesforce implementation partners with significant fundraising depth. We collaborated with key internal stakeholders to select a new partner capable of meeting deep membership, marketing, fundraising, and data integration requirements.

Implementation: Driving Purposeful Change

The entire association is relying on Build to ensure a seamless implementation of Salesforce for a National Cancer Research Association. In addition to helping to guide platform configuration and data migration, Build is providing implementation change and project management to support and empower staff to effectively utilize Salesforce. With a unified CRM in place, the Foundation will be able to effectively track interactions, engage donors and members and drive impactful investments research to find cures.