Wycliffe Bible Translators

Smoother Processes for Streamlined Donor Management

There are 1.5 billion people worldwide who do not have the Bible in their language. With 7,378 languages spoken across the globe, Wycliffe’s mission to connect people with a Bible in their language is no easy task.

Wycliffe’s supporters are at the heart of the organisation – they play a critical role in helping the charity to realize its mission. With this in mind, Wycliffe made the decision to upgrade its Salesforce solution to ensure it could meet its supporter’s needs, today and in the future.

“The wellbeing and happiness of our staff is really important to us and directly impacts their work,” said Robin Peake, Director for Supporters at Wycliffe Bible Translators. “During our initial move to Salesforce we didn’t set our Supporter Care team up for success so this time around we really wanted to focus on how we process donations. The objective was to make their jobs easier so they could focus on more meaningful work.”

Optimising Efficiency of Donation Processing

Wycliffe receives more than £8 million in donations from their generous supporters every year. After the initial implementation of Salesforce in 2017, the team were experiencing ongoing challenges with slow and manual processes which led to frustration. They were having to place their focus and manpower on processing donations rather than on more impactful work such as engaging with their donors and building relationships.

The original set up of Salesforce had been completed using a donation app which did not meet the functionality that Wycliffe required. This led to the charity not utilising core solutions such as Nonprofit Success Pack, which is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of nonprofits. Ultimately, this meant that Wycliffe was not providing the best experience possible for their supporters.

Partnering with Giveclarity and FinDock – a native AppExchange solution for managing donations and payments on Salesforce – Wycliffe went about transforming their donation experience to put their supporters first.

Smarter Solutions Bring Smarter Processes

By integrating NPSP and FinDock, Wycliffe’s online and offline donations are unified and actionable through one user interface in Salesforce – creating less administration work for the team and giving them full control over their data. Every donation is automatically recorded in Salesforce, which then triggers follow up actions such as producing thank you letters, acknowledging the donor’s specific contribution and its impact, further deepening the relationship between the donor and Wycliffe.

“It used to take us two weeks to get caught up with processing donations after the Christmas break. But this year, it took us 2 days, even though donation income is growing,” said Peake.

The management of donations through bank transfers and standing orders has also been streamlined through automation and daily matching of bank files with NPSP data.

“We have a lot of regular givers so having a tool to automate the management of recurring donations really helps to drive more efficiencies,” said Peake. “Before, we had someone spending almost two days a week doing manual reconciliations. Now, we’ve been able to automate that process and free up resources across the organisation. We are saving about £20k per year in staffing. Donation processing is much more streamlined.”

The real-time data and dashboards available within Salesforce also gives control to Wycliffe’s fundraisers to make data-driven decisions.

Supporting Change Across the Organisation

By streamlining and automating their donation processes, Wycliffe has created a smoother experience for their supporters. As a result, the charity is seeing significant efficiency gains and improvements in skills across their teams.

Since the project upgrade, the charity has seen an 80% reduction in the time spent on processing donations. This has freed up their teams to focus on communicating with their supporters about their work across the world.

“With this upgrade, we focused heavily around onboarding and training. We now have Salesforce champions across the organisation which really helped product adoption,” Peake commented.

Wycliffe has also been making use of the extensive Salesforce ecosystem by providing valuable input, helping to make an impact for them and other nonprofits using Salesforce AppExchange solutions.

About Wycliffe

Wycliffe Bible Translators dream of a world where everyone can know Jesus through the bible. They serve local partners worldwide as they bring the Bible to their communities in the language which speaks to them best.