Save the Children invests in becoming a digital leader

Innovate to support children

Since its foundation in the wake of World War I in 1919, Save the Children has been a voice for the most valuable and vulnerable global resource – our children. With an overall mission to improve the lives of children, the organization works at a global level to accelerate a better, safer, and healthier future for children all over the world. Locally, Save the Children advocates children’s’ rights, works to reduce injustice and poverty, and supports educational programs. At their heart is a tireless conviction that all children deserve better.

While governmental grants form the financial foundation for Save the Children’s work, the organization is still dependent on the support of private citizens and corporations. Before implementing the new CRM platform, executing on its essential mission of identifying, securing, and retaining new donors, members, and volunteers was cumbersome, highly manual, and prone to error. In addition, this process involved transferring data between multiple disconnected IT systems. This forced Save the Children employees to spend a majority of their time simply trying to make sure that funds from existing donors were received, and the organization was constantly struggling to unite their data in order to generate meaningful reports and analytics.

At the same time, Save the Children was facing a changing market. There are many organizations in the non-profit space, all of which are vying for the precious donations that individuals and corporations are willing to earmark for various causes. In order to capture the attention of their constituents and, more importantly, create a constituent experience that fosters loyalty and engagement, Save the Children needed to be more proactive in shaping and delivering customer experiences. The organization needed systems that would better support its work, integrated data that would enable not only better analytics but also a 360-degree view of their constituents, and a platform that would support more real-time interaction with stakeholders.

A platform for the future

Save the Children initiated a search to find a new constituent relationship management (CRM) system. The organization included both niche providers from the non-profit industry as well as more standard solutions from the “for-profit” industry. However, Save the Children was not just searching for a tool. It was looking for a partner that could support the implementation of a new technology as well as a larger digital transformation. After a lengthy evaluation process, Save the Children selected Salesforce as the platform, and Capgemini as its partner. Capgemini offered substantial technical expertise and experience in delivering Salesforce solutions, an understanding of the organizational changes required to achieve digital transformation, and a passion for Save the Children’s mission.

In choosing to build on the Salesforce platform by implementing Salesforce Non-Profit Cloud, Save the Children and Capgemini developed a future vision of Save the Children as a digital leader. The partners were able to move forward with a roadmap for how different modules in the platform could be leveraged over time to bring digital support to all areas of the organization, as well as their diverse stakeholders.

A solid foundation for expansion

As the project ramped up, it became clear that the most pressing needs for Save the Children was to create a single source of truth about its constituents, integrate core systems, and automate time-consuming manual processes. By shifting core Norwegian banking functionality over to standard modules in Agresso, Save the Children and Capgemini were able to eliminate much of the bespoke development that had weighed down the previous CRM solution. Using both the flexible Salesforce webservice technology and a third-party ETL tool, all systems involved in financial transactions were fully integrated with Salesforce.

With all of the data flowing through Salesforce, and with the user-friendly and flexible user interface, Save the Children gained a 360-degree view of its constituents. The data model that the partners designed also supported improved reporting, which will enable the organization to derive more detailed insights into donation activity. Finally, with near real-time integrations, Save the Children is empowered to analyze and react quickly to trends it sees in donor behavior, optimizing channel-mix for important fundraising campaigns.

Continuing the journey

Since the first phase was completed, Save the Children and Capgemini have worked together to further expand on the CRM functionality. With transactional processes stabilized and operational processes more efficient, the team can now look to introduce new functionality or modules available within the Salesforce ecosystem. With the foundation in place, the focus will now shift to creating a personalized constituent journey that will help develop the relationship Save the Children has with all of its stakeholders.