How Care Australia Launched its CareGifts initiative with StoreConnect

About CARE

CARE Australia is a leading international aid organization that works around the globe to save lives and defeat poverty. In just the past year, CARE Australia has made a tangible difference in the lives of 1.44 million people across 14 countries. They achieve this by putting women at the heart of their work.

Like any charitable organization, CARE Australia relies on funding from donors.

Whether this be for ongoing development projects or emergency humanitarian responses when crises such as natural disasters or conflicts occur.

Similarly, the team at CARE Australia are always looking for ways to make a meaningful connection with donors at the same time as ensuring their people, processes and technology are as efficient as possible to ensure as much money as possible can flow to projects, communities and individuals they support.

The Challenges for CareGIFTS

CARE Australia’s CareGIFTS program is a creative initiative that packages gift ideas in a way that will appeal to donors far beyond the monetary value of the donation. Who wouldn’t prefer the idea of gifting a goat, or a family veggie garden, stocks for a medical clinic or a school backpack to a community in need?

The donor would then have the option to send a digital or physical card to the recipient informing them of the gift.

The First Challenge

CARE Australia initially went with a Shopify store but ran into operational roadblocks when trying to integrate Shopify with Salesforce. Shopify was ok, but it just could not help them solve the duplication of customer records. This was resulting in frustration and a lot of work for the team to manually remove duplicate records to keep their customer information clean.

This was resulting in frustration and a lot of work for the team to manually remove duplicate records to keep their customer information clean.

The lack of seamless functionality left CARE searching for another solution that could simplify processes while improving the donor experience.

How StoreConnect solved it:

With StoreConnect, CARE Australia streamlined operations by centralizing customer data and eliminating the duplication issue. Each donor was assigned a unique identifier, making it easier to track and manage transactions. Whilst it is still early in the rollout of this new online system, there are already promising early results.

We’ve already saved 10 hours per month, and I can only see this time saving increasing as the volume of gift purchases grows,” shared Arnaud Charlier, CARE Australia’s Head of Data and Platforms Performance.

The Second Challenge

Getting sufficient support also proved to be a problem with Shopify.

You don’t really get support when you buy Shopify. Sure they guarantee it will work xx% of the time, but if you break it, it’s really your problem. Plus you probably have to engage - at significant extra cost - a technical partner to help you with any challenges you can’t handle yourself.

How StoreConnect solved it:

Unlike Shopify’s limited support, StoreConnect offers comprehensive assistance included in its subscription package. StoreConnect has a support team and they will help you with any issues, questions or challenges. The team was remarkable. said Arnaud.

We also love the StoreConnect Academy as a self-help tool. It has so much information and really supports you when you are implementing your project.

The result for CARE Australia has been that whilst they were able to self-implement a lot of the project, they had caring and personalized help whenever they needed it to nut out little challenges, such as how to allow customers to write their own messages for e-cards when buying gifts.

Eliminating additional tech stack

With StoreConnect consolidating all functionality within Salesforce, CARE Australia also eliminated the need for additional software platforms, saving both time and money.

With Shopify we had to add on MailChimp just to send out the messages with these purchases. Now StoreConnect allows us to redeploy this function within Marketing Cloud, which saves that additional piece of SAAS software.

Flexibility for the Future

StoreConnect’s adaptable commerce platform built on Salesforce allowed CARE Australia to dream bigger. They’re now exploring emergency-specific gifting pages, allowing them to easily launch new sites on the one StoreConnect licence, offering donors the chance to support communities during crises like floods or fires.

Time Saving Results

CARE Australia now enjoys a more efficient, donor-centric eCommerce experience, giving their team more time to focus on their mission.

With StoreConnect, CARE Australia’s team has significantly streamlined their workflows, particularly when handling CareGIFT orders. Previously, taking a donation over the phone would take approximately five minutes per call. Thanks to Salesforce integration and visual flows, this process now takes under three minutes—saving up to two minutes per call.

From personalized e-cards to real-time data management, StoreConnect has empowered CARE Australia to deliver more meaningful donor interactions while keeping operational headaches at bay.

When Technology Meets Purpose

At StoreConnect, we’re proud to support nonprofits like CARE Australia, helping them maximize their impact through smarter technology. We love that even small savings in time and money at a client level can translate into a far more than 1:1 benefit at the ground level in communities that our nonprofit clients support.