American Red Cross and salesforce.com meet the magnitude of need created by disasters

Challenge

• Chapters of the American Red Cross, the country’s leading disaster recovery organization, had a need for a flexible CRM system that could track thousands of volunteers and partners
• The national headquarters needed a solution to help coordinate with chapter and external partners, and handle tens of thousands of public inquiries
• The new CRM system had to accommodate large spikes in usage, such as those created by Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti

Solution

• SalesForce.com’s applications are deployed in 35 chapters around the U.S. to manage everything from volunteers to donors, training, events, and back-office functions
• Implementation of the public inquiry solution at the national headquarters began in April 2009 and took 2 months, with assistance from Buan consulting
• National headquarters is using the Service Cloud to handle public and donor inquiries and the Sales Cloud to manage external partner information and improve communication with chapters
• The Service Cloud’s knowledge base provides a fast, easy way to organize and access responses to standard questions
• The Sales Cloud makes it easier to communicate with 150 national partners and with disaster directors at more than 700 chapters
• AppExchange partner VerticalResponse lets the national headquarters distribute targeted information and critical updates during a disaster or health emergency such as the H1N1 outbreak
• VerticalResponse capabilities, such as tracking who has read an email, who has responded to an email, and who has clicked on a link facilitate communications with everyone from emergency services directors to volunteers

Results

• Service Cloud features like email-to-case and Web-to-case simplified responding to inquiries about the Haitian earthquake, letting a two-person team handle as many as 10,000 cases per day
• The product’s flexibility allowed for emergency expansion to 50 users
• Reporting functionality lets senior management measure the accomplishments of the public-inquiry program and instantly take the pulse of top public concerns
• Greater visibility into data across the organization provides more effective communication with 700 chapters around the U.S.
• A single source of information on partners makes it easy to retrieve contact information and view relationship history
• Centralized access to information lets chapters place volunteers and coordinate partner resources at a moment’s notice, while dashboards provide insight into things like the number of people who have taken Red Cross Training
• Chapters can also measure the retention rate of volunteers, the conversion rate of interested volunteers, and the click-through rate of newsletter recipients