The Royal Dutch Guide Dog Foundation
The Royal Dutch Guide Dog Foundation improves donor and client relations with Salesforce
Founded in 1935, KNGF Geleidehonden (The Royal Dutch Guide Dog Foundation) is one of the oldest, most well known and most respected charities in the Netherlands. The organisation’s mission is to provide people with disabilities a better life by partnering them with trained guide dogs to improve their mobility and independence.
Despite its long history, KNGF is far from traditional and continues to keep pace with society by modernising its systems and services. Next to its core program of training guide dogs for the blind, KNGF also supports people with other disabilities and with Salesforce as its CRM, the team can continues to modernise its client, donor and partner engagements.
“Since our establishment in 1935 we have trained over 5,000 dogs for the blind and visually impaired,” says Ellen Greve, Director, KNGF. “We have a wealth of knowledge and experience in this area. The knowledge we have is now being applied to people with other disabilities; people in wheelchairs, children with autism, or former soldiers suffering from PTSD.”
Getting a 360 degree view with Salesforce and Converse
In addition to all the dog-related activities like breeding, raising and training, fundraising is also very important to KNGF as it relies on donations to support and grow its programs and services. With Salesforce, KNFG’s fundraising team is empowered to engage with potential and current donors in a more strategic and personal way.
“Before we moved to Salesforce, the team was using a CRM but it was outdated and offered little ability for customisation,” says Rolf Victorie, Team Leader of Philanthropy at KNGF. “If we wanted to make any updates or run reports we needed to involve an IT person. In addition, the old CRM could not handle new media and modern ways of fundraising.”
“Last year we decided to adopt a new solution to support the organisation – in particular for fundraising. The new solution had to be flexible and extend to make other business processes work seamlessly together and improve efficiency,” adds Victorie.
KNGF’s decision was ultimately between two CRMs. The decision to go with Salesforce came down to its functionality coupled with cost factors and ease of implementation. “Of course there was a need to do some customisation, but when we combined the Converse app from Salesforce Partner, Step Orange with our Salesforce instance we were able to do all the important things in a short space of time.”
The organisation now has a complete 360 degree view of its members, donors and volunteers. In addition, donations, gifts and payments can be easily recorded in Salesforce which means that fundraising can be deployed efficiently and effectively.
“Now we can do more for ourselves,” says Victorie. “Take for example donor segmentation for mailings and newsletters. Previously, we needed a technical person to execute this, but now it can be done by the fundraisers and relationship managers themselves. This means communications can be more personalised and targeted, and helps our team get to know our donors better, improving relationships.”
It also helps them understand their clients better so that they can boost awareness programs. “We’re now targeting a new type of contact in the system – our ambassadors,” offers Victorie. “These are successful clients of ours who help us raise awareness of the work we do by visiting different organisations and businesses to share our story. Salesforce helps us track all these activities.”
As well as managing contact and donor data, nonprofits need to track where the donations are spent, so they can report back to donors.
That process is now much better at KNGF. Victorie concludes: “The more we use Salesforce, the more opportunities we see to make additional use of it.”