VisionTrust International, creating an online donation and sponsorship platform

Online donation and child sponsorship platform, powered by StoreConnect

Online donation and child sponsorship platform, powered by StoreConnect

VisionTrust International (VTI) is a Christian child development organization, founded with the goal to work with vulnerable children in extreme poverty. They serve thousands of at-risk children in multiple regions of the world alongside dedicated local heroes, staff, volunteers, and partners. Their programs seek to holistically care for children in their unique situation through health interventions, educational support, spiritual and community development. They run a child sponsorship program and also accept initiative-based donations for education, clean water, and other essentials that aid the wellbeing of the children they care for.

VisionTrust already successfully manages their charity on the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. They were on the search for a Salesforce-native solution to receiving online donations with the exact functionality they needed at an affordable price, ensuring good stewardship of their funds. Because of constrained staffing resources, having a fully integrated solution was imperative to maximize their existing Salesforce capability.

Choosing the right solution

VisionTrust had some key requirements on their list, which determined their choice of solution to power their online donation and child sponsorship site:

“VisionTrust had a requirement that our donation solution had to be native or fully integrated with Salesforce. We had problems in the past with poorly integrated tools. Our entire organization runs out of Salesforce—why shouldn’t our online giving? The solution we chose had to have the functionality really differentiated an online fundraising platform from just an online store platform. There are plenty of tools that can do eCommerce with Salesforce, but the non-profit space has some key differences. We had to have the option for a donor to specify the amount of a gift, set up and manage a recurring gift, and view both online and offline giving history.” – Devlin Donaldson, CEO VisionTrust International

The charitable giving and donations sectors have undergone the same digital shift that retail has experienced. People expect to be able to transact and donate online from any device to their favourite charities at any time of the day.

StoreConnect has reimagined the nonprofit giving experience by partnering fundraising and fully-featured eCommerce with the power of Salesforce through providing flexible fundraising and donation options for the nonprofit sector as well as standard eCommerce features.

StoreConnect is built on Salesforce and is managed entirely from within Salesforce. Salesforce-native solutions put the burden on the app developer to maintain and support the application, not the customer, thereby reducing administrative load and freeing up staff to do other tasks.

Key benefits for Nonprofits

StoreConnect combines a range of industry solutions allowing a nonprofit to utilise a full range of donation and sponsorship solutions alongside traditional eCommerce functionality, all in the one solution.

Various types of giving options are available on the one site, with all transactions instantly viewable in Salesforce by the VisionTrust team, including:

• One-time donations
• Fixed amounts or variable donation amounts
• Automatically suggesting a range of donation amounts or leaving an open range so the donor can decide on the amount they want to give.
• Recurring regular payments for repeat giving are fully automated within StoreConnect. Once they are set, they just work. All financial transactions are captured directly into Salesforce, with no syncing issues or delays and easily integrated with accounting software.

Mr Donaldson, CEO of VisionTrust explains, “Previously, variant donation products were challenging to create. StoreConnect solves this by allowing multiple donation opportunities on the site.

“One of the key benefits has been the automation we have been able to deploy by having a native Salesforce solution. StoreConnect does a great job with the online fundraising piece—but the fact their solution is native to Salesforce has allowed us to create automations based on incoming gifts that our previous solution did not. We are saving hours per week as a result of being able to automate business processes once a gift is received.”

Another key time-saver for their staff was StoreConnect’s ability to implement link tracking in order to gauge the success of their online marketing.

“Previously we were trying to use Google Analytics to track online gifts and measure the ROI of our marketing efforts. That’s a complex task for a marketing team of just one person. The StoreConnect team helped develop a way to bring the industry standard tracking codes right into Salesforce when an order is placed. Now, we can view all of our giving analytics within the Salesforce platform.” – Devlin Donaldson, CEO VisionTrust

StoreConnect ticked all the boxes with a Salesforce native donation and subscription solution:

“StoreConnect brought all our key requirements in a package that was affordable to deploy and maintain. There are only a few Salesforce AppExchange options that meet the non-profit requirements, but they were too expensive for a mid-sized non-profit. Ultimately our decision to go with StoreConnect was it was the most affordable solution that met all our key requirements. There’s no one in the market right now that can do what the StoreConnect product can do at this price point.”

“As a non-profit, we don’t have the resources to maintain the developers needed to support multiple integrated platforms. We have more confidence in upgrades and ongoing product enhancements with the native Salesforce tools,” says Mr Donaldson.

Working with consulting partners to install StoreConnect

Matt Reed, CEO of 10th Avenue, VisionTrust International’s Salesforce implementation partner, who implemented StoreConnect for them, said, “The installation and set up of StoreConnect is really simple and straightforward. You can get a good grasp of the object structure and the requirements within just a few hours. From that point, everything else is simple configuration. If you have a team member with some HTML/CSS experience, you can even build out the client’s entire website within the StoreConnect CMS—no need for another web tool.

“The ability to manage everything on the web out of Salesforce can be an advantage for many non profits. I see so many non-profits that have to utilize 3-5 different tools to achieve their online goals. StoreConnect could potentially replace every one of those.

“And from the total-cost-of-ownership perspective, StoreConnect has a real advantage. For many organizations, their existing Salesforce staff or partner will be able to manage the tool. That means no additional resources or support contracts.

“StoreConnect is our primary recommendation for all our non-profits looking for a straightforward online fundraising system”, Mr Reed concluded.

Results:

Streamlined processes allows VisionTrust International to grow their donations, without having to grow their staff numbers. Having a Salesforce-native donation receiving site also allowed them to build in the automation of their back-office procedures and save valuable staff time.

“There’s nothing else out there that gives you a fully native online fundraising solution at this price-point. StoreConnect allows us to have a native Salesforce solution at a fraction of the cost. Secondly, their team has been great. They have worked closely with our partner, 10th Avenue, and together they have made this implementation successful. They listen to feedback, respond quickly and we see them being a long-term partner with VisionTrust”, says Mr Donaldson.