United Way Streamlines Business Processes and Fosters Team Collaboration with Salesforce CRM

United Way is a national system of 1,300 locally governed nonprofit organizations that work with a broad range of people and organizations to tackle communities’ most significant issues and create lasting positive changes in communities and people's lives. While priorities for action are set locally, the United Way system’s focus is concentrated on helping children and youth achieve their potential; promoting financial stability that leads toward independence; and improving people's lifelong health. United Way of America is the national organization dedicated to leading the 120-year-old United Way movement in the United States.

Annually the United Way system raises $4 billion and engages more than 1 million volunteers. (Of this, United Way’s 125 National Corporate Leadership partners represent more than $1 billion in corporate and employee contributions.) United Ways across the country are leveraging these financial and human resources to create measurable change in people’s lives and in community conditions.

Tracking both the fundraising results and the community impact work going on system-wide is not an easy task. Like any organization, United Way needs to target its customers effectively, develop products that appeal to their interests, and bring in new dollars to execute on strategies nationwide. Historically, one of United Way‘s strengths has been its decentralized structure, which allows local staff and volunteers to address significant issues in the communities they serve. But while this has proved to be a highly successful method to remain locally focused and effective, it has also made for a complex data management process.

Administrators in each local United Way can enter certain information through the United Way extranet. The challenge is to integrate that information with the other data management tools used by United Way.

Salesforce CRM Provides Winning Solution

In order to obtain an aggregate view of resource development nationwide, United Way decided to consolidate its data in Salesforce CRM. To do so, the nonprofit initially created a large set of custom Java applications that brought data from its legacy systems into Salesforce CRM. However, managing all of this custom code was time-consuming and required a significant amount of familiarity with the applications from a development perspective. As such, the development team knew it needed a way to integrate all of this vital data into one central repository.

“We wanted to focus our efforts on configuration rather than troubleshooting and debugging,” says Michael Pinck, director of application management at United Way. “Having systems that integrate easily is a must for long-term success.”

Integration Delivered Through AppExchange

Enter BlueWolf. Working with Salesforce CRM and AppExchange, United Way selected Bluewolf’s Enterprise Salesforce CRM Integration (ESI) to integrate data from its 1,300 local United Ways with Salesforce CRM. ESI is built to handle large transaction volumes and supports enterprise-level needs such as the ability to flag deleted records rather than deleting them from a local data store. The integration tool also has the ability to move data between Salesforce CRM and third-party applications, tie orders to forecasts, update and refresh leads, and pass key data to and from Salesforce CRM.

Pinck said BlueWolf ESI was extremely easy to install and delivered immediate results for United Way. In fact, the development team reduced the time it was spending troubleshooting and debugging their legacy systems by 25 percent in one month. United Way now has 10 objects talking bi-directionally, and Pinck said the application has been widely adopted by the development team.

Innovation via AppExchange

BlueWolf ESI isn’t the only AppExchange application that has made a difference at United Way of America. In fact, Eric Perez, the organization’s CRM administrator, consistently browses the marketplace in search of new and innovative solutions that extend United Way’s ability to raise resources, build relationships and create long-lasting change in communities.

“AppExchange apps continue to deliver extremely powerful capabilities to the United Way of America team,” Pinck says. “With the ability to match local needs to national resources through fully integrated systems, we can continue to make huge strides within the communities in which we operate.”

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