Explore How a Nonprofit Empowers Donations Across 85 Countries with a Modernized Digital Experience and a Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Platform
Smile Train is the world's largest cleft-focused non-profit that has a partnership with 1000+ local hospitals and medical practitioners in more than 70 countries to train surgeons and doctors in cleft repairs. The organization was struggling with ways of sustaining steady streams of funding and raising awareness to increase donations due to lack of streamlined operations & digital tools to run charity smoothly.
Learn how partnering with Icreon helped them overcome digital transformation challenges, streamline operations, campaign more aggressively and significantly increase donations.
Smile Train was looking for a flexible and user-friendly platform to raise awareness and donations for cleft surgeries. The platform it used earlier lacked the flexibility and control to make custom charity campaigns. Also, SmileTrain’s existing Donor Management solution was quickly becoming outdated, required a lot of manual processes from the internal operations team, and could not see donor behavior holistically. The system needed to be downloaded as a desktop application - and was beginning to create a set of problems involving syncing online/offline data. There were a lot of dependencies on manual data input, and to grow, they knew they would need to re-think their donor management tools.
Therefore, the organization was looking to redesign the existing website along with integrating a new donor management system that could streamline the whole process of fundraising. However, there was another major challenge in this transformation - migration of millions of data points from disparate sources.
Smile Train was looking to partner up with a digital transformation agency to analyze their website and figure out ways to raise awareness about a case and increase funding. With extensive experience in working with nonprofits, the client chose Icreon to work on establishing a digital ecosystem to connect the dots between donors and receivers.
Icreon started by working through a discovery and design phase to gain a better understanding of what was required from the website redesign, and the ways in which donations can happen. The team mapped out donation workflows, dove deep into existing donor management tools, and started to build out the UI & UX components of a new website that fit better to the needs of the organization’s constituents.
With emphasis on customization and ease of use, Icreon recommended Drupal for the CMS component and Salesforce for CRM – with plans to integrate the two as a ‘donor management system’. Drupal offers complete customization through modules, and its open-source nature provides the flexibility to make UX/UI on donor-facing websites. Salesforce is an extremely robust platform, and the non-profit specific product directly aligns to the donor/donation processes. Along with redesigning, the team also introduced a user-friendly P2P or peer-to-peer fundraising platform. The objective was to achieve an integrated and extendible donor management infrastructure, where constituents can be known and tracked seamlessly as they move from offline to online, online to offline.
During the second phase, Icreon started with a deep dive into the people, processes, and products that were involved in the existing donation management landscape. The objective was to collect a thorough understanding of how data flows and integrates within the prospect and donor management systems and then devise a solution for the Smile Train team to have a 360-degree view of the constituent.
With a vision established, the next step was defining a solution that best fit, and Icreon recommended using SalesForce NPSP, a solution specifically designed for Non-Profits, as the foundation of the fundraising platform. With NPSP taking care of donor and donation basics, additional features would be developed and integrated into the system to automate the day-to-day processes further.
The platform solution fundamentally revolved around knitting together a series of open-source platforms that enable the entire project – from fundraising to content management to constituent relations to database migration. The key activity in transitioning from the legacy system was handling large volumes of data – mapped to Salesforce NPSP defaults wherever possible and custom modules being developed and integrated for features and scenarios not handled by Salesforce.
“Having access to a lot of resources gave us incredible nimbleness. I could call their team in the morning with a request, and they’d fully implement it by the next morning. As we’d get results back, we could adapt and change." - SmileTrain
SmileTrain’s existing donor management solution was growing outdated, requiring a lot of manual processes from the internal operations team, and lacked the ability to see donor behavior holistically. Icreon team offered a fully customized and scalable peer-to-peer fundraising platform that better connected their digital ecosystem – CMS, CRM, and donor-facing tool.
The existing platform that SmileTrain was using packaged CMS & CRM components together but lacked the flexibility and control to make custom changes for the website. Icreon started by working through a discovery and design phase to better understand what was required from the redesign exercise. The team mapped out donation workflows and started to build out the UI & UX components of a new website that fit better with the organization’s goals.
The organization was dealing with many stakeholders like employees, donors, and 3rd party vendors. Thus, there was a need to migrate millions of data points from disparate sources. Together, Icreon team migrated over 300 million records from the legacy software into the new integrated P2P platform without any data loss.
When Icreon experts finished analyzing SmileTrain’s existing portal, one thing was vivid, i.e., there was a need for digital transformation. As the organization relied on manual processes, it couldn’t achieve its goals. Icreon introduced automation rules to automate various processes, including flagging donors based on different rules and parameters – minimizing the manual workload and enhancing productivity.
With a vision established, the next step was to define a solution that would best fit non-profits' CRM needs. Icreon recommended Salesforce NPSP (nonprofit success pack), a solution specifically designed for non-profits. With NPSP taking care of donors and donation basics, additional features would be developed and integrated into the system to further automate the day-to-day fundraising processes.
Using the modern platform, donors can register, create personal campaigns, donate to the running campaigns, and participate in the various activities held for fundraising. The running campaign can also be shared on different social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Doing so made the whole process of fundraising and donor management much easier than it was before. Now the non-profit can easily engage individuals to register, participate and organize fundraising events like races, yoga, supper, etc.
For the non-profits, P2P fundraising platform offers automation in several areas including reaching out to a larger donor base, collecting and utilizing donor’s data to carry out business-related activities, analyzing campaign’s success metrics, leveraging social media prowess to encourage user engagement with the cause, and a lot more. With so many tasks being automated, SmileTrain was able to focus on business expansion and growth.
