Finn Church Aid (FCA) provides emergency relief and long-term development programs worldwide, focusing on education, livelihoods, healthcare, and sustainable agriculture. They promote peacebuilding, gender equality, and advocacy, empowering communities to address humanitarian crises and build resilience. FCA’s vision is a world comprised of resilient and just societies where everyone’s right to peace, quality education and sustainable livelihood has been fulfilled, guided by a mission of Action for Human Dignity grounded in human rights and international humanitarian law.
The Start of Our Journey Together
FCA collected data from various sources — including MS Excel, MS Word, and Kobo — used across different country programs, with manual data aggregation performed at both the country and global levels. New projects and institutional fundraising pipelines were tracked using MS Office-based analytical tools, while different financial approval processes and tools, including Quickbooks, MS Dynamics, and Sharepoint, were in use across regions. This made it difficult to generate insights for impact stories and narratives, and created challenges in planning, monitoring, and evaluating data due to disparate systems.
Amp Impact and Managed Services
Vera Solutions worked with FCA to implement Amp Impact for Strategic Framework planning, covering program and project management for country and global programs down to project-level detail, with disaggregation based on geolocation and thematic area. The solution includes partner management for both donors and implementers, fund allocation, tracking and management, budget management, global accounting leveraging Unit4, integration with third-party solutions such as HR using OpenFn, and risk management.
Thereafter, FCA worked with Vera Solutions to implement Managed Services – Salesforce Support, assisting with day-to-day System Administrator troubleshooting in line with agreed criticality escalation, building Reports and Dashboards, updating email alerts and other minor automations, providing recommendations, executing proactive optimizations, and providing end-user training and documentation. This enabled FCA to focus on its mission, rather than back-office administration — with Managed Support Services since evolving into Managed Admin Services.
“Amp Impact functionalities align with the best practices in our field, making it immensely beneficial as we considered our own processes. The expertise and support provided by Vera consultants have been invaluable throughout the implementation and roll-out of FCA’s version of Amp Impact. Thanks to Vera’s expertise, we have not only streamlined our project management but also significantly improved our impact measurement capabilities. The ongoing support we’ve received has been instrumental in fine-tuning the system to meet our specific needs.”
– Maija Granlund, Finn Church Aid
Benefits and What's Next
With Amp Impact and Salesforce, FCA now manages its data more effectively and shares MEL reports and dashboards with internal and external stakeholders, while streamlining program and project approvals as well as processes like audit logs and risk management. The organization has access to all data related to ongoing programs and projects at both country and global levels from a single source, improving efficiency and data management. FCA gains detailed insights into its impact, including geographical distribution and thematic areas, to inform decision-making and strategy. Simplified fund allocation tracking and budget management are reducing administrative burden and enhancing financial control, while an out-of-the-box solution tailored to FCA’s specific needs is saving time and resources on custom development. Seamless data integration from multiple sources — including Finance, HR, and project-related information — is enhancing data consistency and decision-making across the organization.
Looking ahead, FCA and Vera plan to manage and track approvals at different stages of the project, transfer staffing information from project records to project roles, and track incoming disbursements. Future plans also include adding asset management, redesigning security user profiles and permissions, refactoring process builders to Salesforce Flow, enabling qualitative reporting using Amp Submissions or a document generation tool, conducting system housekeeping and Amp upgrade management, and tracking concept notes, proposals, and go/no-go assessments.