Salesforce for St John's Foundation 1174
Client
St John's Foundation Est. 1174
Services
- Sales Cloud configuration
- Bespoke Partner Community
- Ongoing support
St John's Foundation Est. 1174 is a Bath based Foundation whose purpose is to “build resilient communities by supporting people to overcome challenges, improve their lives and live as independently as possible.”
St John's achieve this in a number of ways; providing quality almshouse accommodation, awarding funding support to individuals and organisations and engaging directly though the local community through its Community Outreach Service.
Deciding on the allocation of funding to many worthy causes is a key challenge for any charitable foundation and no different for St John's. Proper structuring of the funding application process is essential to making decisions about allocation of funding. Tracking the benefits of the funding, or impact, can be a data management headache unless properly considered and planned from the outset.
St John's have been at the leading edge for funding support with a web based method of funding application entry for many years. Whilst useful, in recent years this system has been slow to update and in need of change to support this fast moving organisation.
Using the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Partner Community, Commerceworks worked with the Funding and Impact team at St John's to design a user-focused funding application process from initial application through to monitoring and evaluation of funding benefits to the recipients. This all encompassing process starts with a user writing and submitting an application for funding through a Salesforce Partner Community. The Partner Community is much more than a static form, it has logic throughout to ensure an application meets the specific data requirements for St John's to accurately assess the application whilst capturing information in the correct structure to support decision making. Therefore, understanding and reporting against targets for specific impact within the Bath and North East Somerset area becomes a task automated by the specific Salesforce configuration.
As so many charities put great detail into their applications there is a facility to Save for Later. This allows the user to save the application but not submit so they can complete the work over multiple sessions. Once the application is formally submitted the team at St John's receive email notifications to start processing the application. Applications are assigned to budgets so the team can always asses status against available funding. The objective is not to under or overspend and Salesforce helps them achieve that throughout the year.
Once applications are funded, a custom integration with SurveyMonkey emails a specific survey link to the applicant or referrer to take a survey that helps the St John's team understand the impact of the funding. The survey results are sent back to Salesforce and back to the original application. The design of the Salesforce system means that all interactions pertinent to an application are recorded in one place and are consequentially easy to find and understand. The advanced reporting and dashboard capabilities of Salesforce means that tracking progress against targets is always a few clicks away. With the old system this data management could tie up 50% of an FTE, now it's immediate.
Since implementing Salesforce for the funding process, St John's have worked with Commerceworks to extend the use to include Community Outreach which involves positive activities for the over 55s to help reduce isolation and increase their wellbeing through developing of new skills.
On the success of the project to St John's, Louise Harvey, Director of Funding and Impact commented “The implementation of Salesforce has enabled us to offer a better service to the communities that rely on our support. Our core processes of funding through to monitoring and evaluation has been completely automated which enables us to work far more efficiently. As we now have a real-time dashboard of all metrics we have real-time understanding of how our work is impacting the local communities.”
For more information please go to www.stjohnsbath.org.uk