Icelandic Red Cross

Icelandic Red Cross Takes Control of its Future with Salesforce

“With its vital dual role of delivering essential health, welfare, and social care services to its citizens, and supporting humanitarian efforts, the Icelandic Red Cross strives to be a transparent, trustworthy, and accountable organisation.

But despite almost a century of life-changing work, the organisation’s technology was out of date and its leaders were unable to see a single, complete picture of all its activities and their impact. Communication with its many stakeholders was uncoordinated and inconsistent, and its data resided in numerous siloed locations and formats.

To gain visibility, control, and co-ordination of its activities, the Icelandic Red Cross selected the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), the platform designed specifically to meet the unique needs of nonprofit organisations. It also wanted to reap the rewards of automation while achieving closer relationships with its members, volunteers, and partners.”

Striving for Transparency and Clarity Through Technology

As well as keeping citizens safe, the Icelandic Red Cross has longer-term goals too. It wants to mobilise people to achieve positive change in their communities, build capacity, and deliver sustainable programmes that improve lives. Despite partnering with Salesforce since 2013, the Icelandic Red Cross was only using a fraction of its features and functionality. Data was held in a variety of formats, disconnected systems, and in even in notebooks.

“We hadn’t updated our technology for many years as we didn’t have the resources. The result was that we had major problems with our system,” explained Quality Team Manager, Margrét Gíslínudóttir.

With its new strategy focusing on digitalisation, the organisation knew it’s Salesforce technology would be an integral part of their way forward and decided to upgrade the platform.

The Icelandic Red Cross had a vision to manage and report on its projects efficiently and in real time, while also enabling fast and effective communications with its branch network and stakeholders.

By automating manual administration tasks, it would free up staff and volunteers to be more productive and help those in need. Lastly, it wanted to improve evidence based advocacy.

“We wanted to make decisions based on real-time data, and to use automation to ease the burden and pressure on our people. Most importantly we wanted to bring our activities together in one place, using Salesforce as the platform for our entire operation.”

Data Drives a World of Opportunity

The Icelandic Red Cross leveraged Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), leaving behind spreadsheets and siloed information. The organisation first focused on developing its programme management and reporting capabilities, to create a 360 degree view of operations. With Salesforce becoming a core tool for its 120 staff members, it’s now a central platform across the organisation.

By automating manual tasks – such as the booking and management of vital first aid courses to 10,000 students per year – it is increasing the efficiency of its teams. Now, with real-time data and a better overview of programme management, the organisation is better equipped to take an analytical approach – allowing for faster, evidence based decision-making.

The organisation launched a new website and secure portal, enabling everyone connected – members, volunteers, donors and partners – to create their own account, capturing real-time data and activity which is updated in Salesforce. And through an integration with the Icelandic Government, this data is automatically updated on the country’s National Registry, for the benefit of all Icelanders. Users can also download certificates from training courses they’ve completed with the organisation – saving the team hours of admin each month.

Meanwhile, Salesforce Survey Response is automating the dispatch of questionnaires after each training course, providing instant feedback from participants. The solution also presented new opportunities, for example access to new sources of data which can be analysed and deployed in future fundraising and communications efforts.

Benefits for the Red Cross and for the Nation

“For the first time we have a complete view of the full scale of our activities, the services we provide, and what we are delivering,” explained Gíslínudóttir. “Given our role, we need to be a trustworthy and transparent organisation. Thanks to Salesforce, we now have instant visibility of all our activities, enabling us to make sound, strategic, and accountable decisions in real time.

The organisation is making use of the reports and dashboards available in Salesforce. “We can see how we are doing against our targets in real time and we can analyse our programmes to get valuable learnings for future activities.

”Management of all first aid training in Iceland is now handled in Salesforce, maintaining records for 10,000 students taking part every year. Automation has significantly reduced costs for the Icelandic Red Cross and has also reduced administration time by 89%. Now the team can also track more projects than before with their single, accurate, and real-time data pool.

Finally Salesforce Survey Response is harvesting comprehensive feedback about the quality of training courses and trainers, enabling quality control and continuous improvements.

Next, Icelandic Red Cross is building out its fundraising capabilities. With a rapidly expanding database, NPSP will allow the organisation to capture accurate information from diverse sources – and with a Marketing Cloud integration in the works, this will open up opportunities for timely, personalised communications to their members and donors.

More about the Icelandic Red Cross

The Icelandic Red Cross is an auxiliary to the Icelandic government delivering essential health, welfare, social care, and emergency services for citizens, and supports international humanitarian and disaster relief efforts. It has 11,000 members, 2,500 regular volunteers, and a full-time staff of 120.