Founded in 2011, the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) is a unique social investment network based in Singapore committed to increasing the flow of capital towards impact in Asia. The network serves as an advocate, capacity-builder, and learning platform to improve the effectiveness of its members across the Asia-Pacific region. AVPN’s work spans five pillars: mobilizing capital, building impact communities, creating resources and tools, running an Academy, and organizing events to share learnings amongst their network. Since 2011, AVPN has grown to over 600 members and is the only platform in Asia that serves the full spectrum of social investors.
The Start of Our Journey Together
Vera Solutions began working with AVPN in 2018 to design and implement a CRM system for membership management. At the time, AVPN sought a centralized solution to collect and manage data related to members, constituent management, grants, sponsorships, events, and invoices — previously spread across various systems including Excel, Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox, WordPress, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and GoToWebinar. This resulted in data duplication and inconsistent reporting due to the lack of a centralized system and teams interacting with data in silos. Vera recommended migrating AVPN’s existing systems to a Salesforce Lightning CRM to serve as a single, scalable, and reliable source of truth, allowing staff to manage data on members, grants, and events in a centralized manner.
“When we first started our organization, it was very easy to collect data as the entire team could sit around a table. However, as we expanded and grew very fast as an organization, it became increasingly challenging to collect data and communicate institutional knowledge amongst staff members. We also had data stored in so many systems, it was hard to keep track of.”
– Alfred Poon, Director of Digital Transformation, AVPN
Phase 1: Centralizing Membership Management
Vera leveraged standard Salesforce CRM functionality and out-of-the-box membership management features from the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) in the design. This “Phase 1” solution enabled AVPN to collect essential data related to its 600+ members and the history of membership engagement, and allowed the AVPN Partnership Team to track information related to events, grants, and sponsorships they had previously managed offline.
Phase 2: A 360-Degree Member View
As internal adoption grew, staff identified a new challenge: teams across the organization were working with a single member in multiple capacities, holding different information about the same member in different systems, with no visibility or data transparency across teams. In 2020, AVPN and Vera set out to expand the system’s functionality in “Phase 2,” incorporating more elements of AVPN’s working ecosystem into the database. The enhanced system now provides AVPN teams a golden thread record giving a 360-degree view of all engagements a member has with AVPN, while maintaining transparency of data across teams — every AVPN employee can go to one record and access the same accurate data. The design also allows the system to remain flexible as AVPN’s platforms evolve and processes change, with an audit trail of member engagement to help the team understand how engagement changes over time.
“The 360-degree member view implemented by Vera in the last project has been a big hit and all our teams are taking that approach in everything they do.”
– Syarif Hamdi, Assistant Digital Transformations Manager, AVPN
Amplifying the Solution With Many2Many
One of the key features of “Phase 2” was the introduction of tagging functionality on Salesforce. Using Vera’s Many2Many product, AVPN staff can tag their Member Organizations, Events, and Knowledge articles with various themes including Social Causes, Markets, SDGs, and Beneficiaries Supported, making it easy to capture and search for members with thematic relevance. AVPN can also track connections between Member Organizations facilitated by their network, strengthening the relational capabilities of their reporting. Rolled out in August 2021, the consolidated data system serves as a central point for staff to access updated, real-time information on membership engagement and the flow of capital — equipping AVPN with the data it needs to bolster support for the philanthropic community within Asia.
“We needed a way to tag people and organizations with certain tags, but tagging can be difficult and complex. Many2Many was helpful in this way as it allowed us to see records but also flexible enough to let us implement it in many objects. We used to use multi-select picklist values, but it was challenging to govern with people changing values. Many2Many makes management much simpler.”
– Syarif Hamdi, Assistant Digital Transformations Manager, AVPN
Looking Ahead: The AVPN Academy and Fellowship
Looking ahead, AVPN is shifting focus to also champion individuals — not only organizations — through its Fellowship and Academy, encouraging people to develop and champion the cause of deploying capital effectively. As it becomes harder to provide high-touch service to a growing member base, AVPN is introducing a knowledge tier to enable members to self-serve and access more data. The AVPN Academy offers a space for professionals to accelerate their learning journeys by leveraging the wisdom of experts and practitioners on the ground, through self-paced and live classes as well as a resource library, aiming to build the collective knowledge needed to effect long-term change in the region.
“Previously, AVPN was very cause agnostic; we always talked about supporting all themes, be it education or environment. In the last two years we have started looking at specific causes — we have a climate and gender platform now. The flexibility of Many2Many and Vera’s support helped us pivot into specific platform developments.”
– Syarif Hamdi, Assistant Digital Transformations Manager, AVPN