Redkite Keeps Costs Down, Provides Better Client Support with salesforce.com

Challenge

• Significant growth in hospital based and community services, fundraising and grants over the last several years brought about an urgent need for an easily scalable, unified approach to data management
• Mandate for a highly customisable system for managing a wide range of stakeholders (families, donors, volunteers, hospitals and service providers)
• Keeping costs low is paramount for a not-for-profit
• Existing IT system based on a collection of Microsoft Access applications was fragmented, time consuming, non-coordinated and provided only short-term strategy
• Redkite used “Open Alms” which was based on an outdated version of MS Access and the vendor stopped providing technical support

Solution

• Redkite replaced Microsoft data management applications with 41 Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition licences in February 2009 – the transition took just 3 months
• Salesforce.com Business Analyst & CRM Architect Paull Betts and Quattro (consulting/software development company specialising in SaaS) managed the implementation
• Salesforce integrated with organisation’s Content Management System and Payment Gateway for a cohesive, end-to-end approach
• 13 team-specific dashboards (Fundraising, Service, etc) were customized to allow Redkite to grab relevant team metrics quickly and easily
• Apex data loader and Conga Merge sourced from The AppExchange cut down the development cycle

Results

• Faster data input and better tracking gives Redkite’s team more time to focus on core daily operations, contributing to a 20% increase in productivity
• Donations are channeled directly from Redkite website into salesforce.com for seamless end-to-end data management
• Salesforce easily scales to support the growing scope of services provided via hospitals and in the community, as well as delivering accurate fund tracking for each
• Content Management System is automatically updated with new fundraising event information from Salesforce.com, saving double keying.
• Universal user access to a single database improves data quality (with over 4,000 records per user) thus delivering better reporting
• Costs are controlled in the cloud through minimising the reliance on proprietary software and servers