Mother’s Choice connects with the community to give hope to the vulnerable

Mother's Choice

“So many of our programs require collaboration across a number of different people and services. We simply couldn’t do that at scale without Salesforce.”

Alia Eyres, CEO

Mother’s Choice connects with the community to give hope to the vulnerable

In Hong Kong today there are 3,600 children living in full-time residential care, without the presence of a safe, loving and permanent family. Hundreds more are waiting to get into residential care. Mother’s Choice is transforming the life stories for these children as well as the thousands of teenage girls in Hong Kong facing crisis pregnancies each year.

Now in its thirtieth year, the trailblazer is connecting with the community in new ways to bring about social change. It has a vision to see every child in a safe, loving permanent family and is using Salesforce to scale its success.

Alia Eyres, CEO of Mother’s Choice, said, “We were not satisfied with just helping those lucky enough to come through our door. So we looked at how we could better connect with the community and work together to care for more of those in need.”

To achieve this, Mother’s Choice needed to work smarter. It also needed more data to influence and mobilise its stakeholders, including individual and corporate donors, government and schools. Over the last three years the charity has reached many of these goals. Once heavily reliant on paper, it now thrives on technology and is using Salesforce to drive the best possible outcomes for clients.

Mother’s Choice is also creating a new ecosystem of people and services to support vulnerable children and teens. This includes Project Bridge, a new alternative to institutional care and figurative “bridge” for those waiting for a permanent home.

Eyres said, “We wanted to innovate and evolve but for us innovation is about meeting the changing needs of our clients and the community. Salesforce makes us smarter and more targeted in what we do.”

With its Nonprofit Starter Pack, Salesforce also offered a fast and flexible way for Mother’s Choice to start to connect all its services and data.

“We love Salesforce’s philanthropic approach. In addition to the donated subscriptions, the company has given us training and support to get off the ground quickly,” said Helene Rao, Assistant Director of IT.

Mother’s Choice built up its own expertise as it moved fundraising operations onto Salesforce and automated processing of donations. This was a huge efficiency win for the charity which had been manually processing the two hundred donations received each month.

Achieving a greater impact

Mother’s Choice does not want to be a place where children just transit through. It wants to change their lives and see them flourish so it invests in early intervention care and goes beyond the prescribed carer:child ratio. This requires an incredible volunteer effort with 400 individuals working three hour shifts each week.

Managing these volunteers was a significant challenge. Applications and rosters were managed via a wide net of spreadsheets and it was difficult to track or report on the hours worked by volunteers.

The Volunteers for Salesforce app from the Salesforce AppExchange has removed these pain points. Mother’s Choice now books 65,000 hours of volunteer hours seamlessly on Salesforce. Reporting is easy and lets Mother’s Choice demonstrate to stakeholders the millions of dollars saved by recruiting volunteers rather than employing carers.

On top of these benefits, Mother’s Choice is engaging with the community in new ways. It’s simplified management of its sexuality education workshops and is able to capture information in Salesforce to better respond to schools’ individual needs.

“So many of our programs, including Project Bridge, require collaboration across a number of different people and services. We simply couldn’t do that at scale without Salesforce,” said Eyres.