Tatkräftig e.V.
Tatkräftig e.V. – Re-energising the German Volunteer Market with Salesforce
The market for volunteering in Germany is on the rise. Over the last 10 years there has been a surge in the number of people wanting to give back to their communities, and this has sparked a wave of organisations working to connect would-be volunteers, to project placements at not for profit and social organisations around the country.
tatkräftig e.V. is one such organisation. Last year, the team managed placements for over 1,000 volunteers across 100 nonprofit and social organisations in Hamburg. They focus exclusively on short term placements. “We recognised a growing desire for people to volunteer in Germany, but many of them have a limited time that they can commit. We’ve created a new format for volunteering, where groups of young people from the ages of 18-45 years old can volunteer for one day placements,” says Miriam Schwartz, Founder, tatkräftig e.V.
Miriam identified the need for a scalable CRM early on. “I wanted to have a really good system to manage our projects, because I knew we were going to grow fast. Our goal is to establish 20 centres across Germany over the next 10 years. We didn’t want to start with Excel and then have to move to a new system, so almost from day one in 2012, we chose Salesforce. The fact that they had a nonprofit version really sold it to us.”
With the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), tatkräftig e.V. is improving the entire volunteer experience and it enables them to build better relationships. “The journey starts on the website – once a potential volunteer fills out our webform,” says Miriam. “This data is then automatically sent to Salesforce where a new project is set up. It makes it easier for us to manage projects, and provides visibility to the entire team. We then use this contact information to build our newsletter lists, so we can keep volunteers informed about upcoming volunteering opportunities in Hamburg.”
Salesforce’s cloud based set-up has been really important for Miriam and her team. “Salesforce saves us a lot of time, which frees us up to do other things, and to take on more projects. It also means that we can work from home, and still have access to the data. It’s like the internet – you’re always connected.”
As the organisation scales, the team is increasingly using NPSP to report on projects, review progress, and to inform decisions for the year ahead. “We use Salesforce to tell us what types of projects we work with most, who is volunteering, and how often they volunteer. This information helps us see the direction of the market, and how we should steer our efforts,” says Miriam.