KaBOOM!

Only 1 in 4 children gets 60 minutes of physical activity every day, yet research shows that kids who play as part of their day do better in school and develop into more creative thinkers. KaBOOM! is the national nonprofit dedicated to bringing balanced and active play into the daily lives of all kids, particularly those growing up in poverty in America. Since 1996, KaBOOM! has collaborated with partners to build, open or improve nearly 16,000 playgrounds, engaged more than 1 million volunteers, and served 7.4 million children.

But there was nothing playful about the state of data at KaBOOM! a few years ago. “Most departments had their own systems and way too many of them were dependent on spreadsheets,” remembers Jeff Govert, Director of Information Technology at KaBOOM!.

With Salesforce, KaBOOM! has said goodbye to their reliance on information silos and achieved a new level of visibility into their donor data. “The Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) allows us to get a better picture of who our donors are and why they support our mission, which has really helped us build better relationships with our donors,” says Govert.

Now every “Boomer” (KaBOOM! employee) is looking at the same fundraising data. They spend more time connecting with donors and partners and less time pulling reports together manually. “When we were doing end of the year reporting for our board, we had to go through every spreadsheet. It took weeks, or even a month, just to get these numbers to line up. Now with Salesforce, the reports are generated in real time,” says Govert.

In fact, the number of children served annually by KaBOOM! programs has more than doubled since their Salesforce implementation: 303,000 in 2013 compared to 748,696 in 2014.

One Mobile Platform for Fundraising and Programs

Fundraising is a vital piece of the KaBOOM! operations, but like any nonprofit, the true impact comes from their programs. Each year, the organization leads over 150 playground builds and provides grants to hundreds of communities to construct and renovate even more public playspaces. Salesforce helps KaBOOM! streamline these programs. Govert says, “Thanks to Salesforce, we are able to do fundraising, application management, grants management, and program management on the same platform.”

The Boomers running these programs spend most of their time in the field, often traveling three weeks out of the month. With the Salesforce1 Mobile App, remote staff stay connected and get work done faster than ever, from anywhere.

When employees would purchase supplies for a playground build, for example, they used to have to collect all of their paper receipts, bring them into the office and enter them manually, just to start the reimbursement process. Now they simply snap a picture of a receipt with their phone and upload it to the Salesforce1 Mobile App. The rest is handled by workflows and financial database integration powered by App Cloud.

“One employee told me recently that before he was done unloading his cart in the Home Depot parking lot, he’d gotten an email saying his budget projections had already been updated based on the purchase,” Govert says, “Processes like this that used to take months now happen in minutes.”