ActionAid Brazil is a non-profit civil society organization working to advance social justice, gender equality, and poverty alleviation. The organization exists as a division of ActionAid International, a global federation aiming to see a just, fair and sustainable world. ActionAid International’s work falls in four broad areas: women’s rights, politics and economics, land and climate, and emergencies.
ActionAid Brazil partners with local communities to work for social justice, gender equality, and for ending poverty and hunger. Founded in 1999, ActionAid Brazil has reached more than 2,400 communities and 300,000 individuals throughout Brazil.
As ActionAid Brazil continued to expand its reach across the country, the organization sought to enhance its donor and donation management. ActionAid Brazil wanted a more extensive system than its current donation platform and CRM system. In addition to traditional CRM functionality, the system needed to connect with ActionAid Brazil’s payment processor, track the collection and execution of payments from donors, include functionalities for payment management and processing, and allow for future system customization. It also needed to connect efficiently with their beneficiaries management system to receive relevant data on beneficiaries. Overall, ActionAid Brazil strove to rethink and revamp their current processes with a new platform.
In 2019, Vera Solutions partnered with ActionAid Brazil to implement a solution on the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.
“The partner you choose is more important than the platform itself. The best platform with a bad partner will not work because some decisions will influence the rest of the life of the organization… For us this project wouldn’t have existed without Vera. Vera was agile, always quick to address doubts, and laid out clear steps in the implementation process.”
“We’ve become crazy about reports and dashboards. When you have information on your clients and donors so readily available, you can make better decisions about next steps. You can assess what’s working and not working. The possibilities around information are endless.”
Vera configured automations on Salesforce to save time on common tasks, like canceling recurring donations without payment after six months, email alerts based on donor actions and automatic assignments from donors to beneficiaries. Additionally, if a beneficiary hasn’t received a donation in over 180 days, the child will be submitted again in the system to wait in line for a new donor.
ActionAid staff can create campaigns on Salesforce when they need to raise more funds for beneficiaries. The system automatically schedules activities around campaigns, from calls to sending campaign materials to better engage with institutional donors and major donors.
Vera built custom objects on Salesforce for the integration with Collect, the payments system from Trackmob. Trackmob system allows the validation of donors’ data, and process payments in real time through a full integration with Salesforce.
Vera created a custom object on Salesforce to collect data from the beneficiary management system. The system houses data from global beneficiaries and generates an ID for the match between them and the donors in Salesforce. ActionAid Brazil staff can now enter in information on beneficiaries from across the country in the beneficiary management system and the information will be synced to Salesforce. Staff can see the sponsors connected to each child – whether the donation had been active or not, and the history of interaction with the beneficiary.
Vera Solutions designed and configured Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) (Salesforce.org’s free CRM solution for nonprofits) for ActionAid Brazil’s team to manage all data related to potential donors, current individual and institutional donors and ActionAid staff. Now, ActionAid staff can view historical data on all meetings, calls and notes to better understand each relationship. The database also prevents and removes errors by eliminating duplicate contacts within the database.
The ActionAid team can now create reports and dashboards to view and analyze data related to donors, donations and communications, as well as to facilitate the process of importing financial data.
“The process is much more stable now than previously, with all information related to the donor base easily accessible.”
Through implementing Salesforce, ActionAid Brazil now can:
The system allows the team to view and manage information on stakeholders and various methods of donations. By knowing how each method performs, the team can focus campaigns to make better forecasts for the following years to come. The team can now easily view historical data on donors, donations and beneficiaries to better inform decision-making and ultimately better support their beneficiaries.
Now, the team has the opportunity to increase donor segmentation and base segmentation with visualized data on their clients and donors.
By integrating Trackmob and Salesforce, ActionAid staff can view all payment information directly on Salesforce. Before the integration, all payment data was available in a separate system and they were manually imported into Salesforce. Whether payments come in by credit card, bank transfer, or automatic debit, ActionAid staff can easily view donation and payment data. In addition, data security has improved through encrypted payment data fields that hide sensitive information, while being read by API.
The system included 30+ automations around opportunities and donations. For example, rather than manually following up whenever a beneficiary’s donation status changes (e.g., losing a donor), Salesforce now automatically assigns a task or sends an email. Funds are now ensured to reach the correct child without delays, and this alleviates the burden on ActionAid staff.
