More time for donors, less time managing data
Every donation starts with a person. Someone responds to a campaign, signs up through an agency, buys a lottery ticket, attends an event or decides they want to support a cause they care about. Behind the scenes, though, every one of those interactions also creates data.
For one UK animal-welfare charity, managing that data had become a huge operation in its own right. More than 50 agencies and fundraising channels were feeding information into the charity’s CRM, over 90% of it handled manually, file by file.
Organisation
UK animal-welfare charity
Sector
Nonprofit and charity fundraising
Services
Data cleaning and validation, matching and de-duplication, donation reconciliation.
Key platforms
Fundraising data was arriving from everywhere
Nonprofit, membership and charity retail
About the charity's fundraising data
Door-to-door campaigns. Telephone fundraising. Digital and social campaigns. DRTV. Lottery activity. Events. External fundraising agencies. More than 50 different agencies and channels were feeding information into the CRM, often in different formats.
Sweet Potato Tec built an automated supporter-data engine that cleans, validates, matches and standardises fundraising information before bringing it into Salesforce, creating one much more reliable view of every supporter. The result is less administration, cleaner data, faster campaigns and hundreds of hours returned to the organisation every week.
The challenge
The situation
Getting that information where it needed to go depended heavily on manual processing.
01
More than 200 hours every week were being spent managing fundraising files, with over 90% of channels requiring some form of manual handling.
02
Around one in seven donor records were duplicates.
03
There were more than 15 data errors every month serious enough to disrupt campaigns.
04
Bringing a new fundraising partner on board could take weeks.
05
Someone could be thanked twice. They could be approached twice. Or they could be missed altogether.
The charity didn’t simply have a data problem. It had a fundraising problem caused by data.
What would have happened if nothing had changed?
The organisation could have continued adding people and processes to manage the workload. But that wouldn’t have solved the underlying problem. Doing nothing would have meant continuing to spend hundreds of hours every week managing a problem that would become harder to manage as the charity grew.
Every new fundraising campaign, agency or channel would have brought another stream of data into an already complicated environment.
More files would need processing. More records would need checking.
More opportunities for duplication and error would be introduced.
Mistakes don't just create untidy records. They can affect reconciliation, campaign selections and ultimately income.
Our approach
The goal was bigger than automation
It would have been easy to describe the project as a data-processing exercise. That wasn’t really the objective. The aim was to give the charity one clean, accurate view of every supporter, with fundraising information flowing into Salesforce automatically and becoming useful to fundraising and direct marketing teams much more quickly.
That meant reducing more than 200 hours of weekly manual data work to fewer than 40. It meant dramatically reducing duplicates and errors. It meant bringing new agencies and fundraising channels live in less than a day rather than waiting weeks. Ultimately, the goal was to give the fundraising team more time to fundraise.
1
Collect
2
Clean and validate
Incoming data is checked as it arrives. Errors that previously needed someone to identify and correct them manually can be dealt with before they become a problem further down the line.
3
Match and de-duplicate
Supporter records are matched so that the charity can maintain a single, accurate view of each person rather than creating unnecessary duplicates. Donations are matched and reconciled through FinDock, helping ensure gifts aren’t missed or counted twice.
4
Standardise
Once the information has been checked, cleaned and matched, it is standardised before flowing into Salesforce and CRM Analytics. The process runs automatically from end to end. No one needs to sit in the middle moving information from one place to another.
From weeks to hours
Data arrives → cleaned and checked → matched to the supporter → ready for selections, insight, campaigns and stewardship. What previously took weeks can now happen within hours.
Scope of work
What Sweet Potato Tec delivered
More than 50 fundraising agencies and channels were feeding supporter information into the CRM, with over 90% of that data handled manually. The process consumed more than 200 hours each week and created duplicate records, campaign-disrupting errors and lengthy onboarding for new fundraising partners.
- Automated supporter-data processing
- Supporter matching and de-duplication
- FinDock integration
- CRM Analytics integration
- Consent and preference management
- Data cleaning and validation
- Automated donation reconciliation
- Salesforce integration
- Standardised data processing across fundraising channels
- Configurable onboarding for new agencies and channels
Key integrations
FinDock
Partner agency feeds
Lottery
Events
DRTV
Digital & social
Salesforce capabilities
Salesforce
CRM Analytics
The outcome
The difference it made
All of this was delivered within six months. But perhaps the most useful way of understanding the outcome isn’t through the technology — it’s through what those numbers mean for the people doing the work.
- ~80% reduction in manual data effort — 200+ hours a week to under 40
- Zero campaign-disrupting data errors, previously 15+ per month
- ~75% fewer duplicate and error records
- Under one day to onboard a new agency or channel, previously weeks
- 15.73 million supporter transactions processed automatically each year
- One automated engine replacing 170+ individual data links
- Delivered in six months
“The experience has actually made an IT project a joy.”
What happened next
Built for what comes next
“The project hasn’t created a fixed solution that can only deal with today’s requirements. It has created a foundation. The next step is moving beyond overnight file processing towards real-time supporter updates, reducing the gap between an interaction taking place and that information becoming available inside Salesforce.
There is also an opportunity to take the same approach beyond fundraising and apply it to other parts of the charity. What began as a solution to a fundraising data problem has effectively created a blueprint for handling complex, multi-source data across the wider organisation.”
Could your nonprofit spend less time managing systems?
If membership data, events, reporting or everyday processes are spread across different platforms, there may be a simpler way to bring them together.
Sweet Potato Tec helps charities, nonprofits and membership organisations design Salesforce around the way their people actually work.
Let us make your technology work harder for your organisation
Tell us what you are trying to improve, where your current systems are holding you back and what success would look like.
We will arrange an initial conversation to explore your requirements and determine whether Sweet Potato Tec is the right partner to help.