Wings of Support: “Salesforce is our International office”

Wings of Support is a private initiative by KLM and Martinair staff. Its mission is to provide shelter, education and medical support to children in the countries these airlines fly to. Because of the nature of their work, the airline staff regularly stay in many countries, providing fantastic opportunities to see and get involved in their projects around the world. This opportunity is readily available, to both Wings of Support contributors and by interested supporters and sponsors. As well as KLM and Martinair Wings of Support is supported by various companies and with the support of Salesforce.org it has been able to create an online international office in the cloud. This has increased the effectiveness of the organizations fundraising activities and in developing and nurturing sponsor relationships.

Danette Toet, Volunteer: “We don’t have an office for our organization and we all work from home or from the project locations on different continents and different time zones. We now effectively use Salesforce as our office. Salesforce is where everything can be found. We can work at the same project at the same time because the information in Salesforce is always up-­‐to-­‐date. Before Salesforce quite often information got lost. For example, when volunteers would leave the foundation, they would take all the information with them that was stored on their laptops. It was always very hard to find accurate and up-­‐to-­‐date information but now with Salesforce everything is centralized and available in the cloud so everybody can access a single source of information.”

“We use Salesforce for all our fundraising activities: all our sponsors and donors are in the system and we can always keep track of all the actions and interactions we have had with those donors. Wings of Support has a goal to get 96% of all funds to the projects and the children. The Salesforce.org has given us access to the application as well as their time to help us achieve this goal. It has been a great help throughout. And hopefully also in the future.”

In many cases, a Wings of Support project is the financial support of a local initiative, run by local people. This could be an organization such as an orphanage, school, or day care center. New projects can both be started at organizations that are unknown to Wings of Support and organizations where Wings of Support already carried out and completed a project before. In principle, everyone can suggest a project, however, projects that are suggested by volunteers , donators or supported organizations are given preferential treatment. New applications are carefully screened to see whether the project befits the Wings of Support objectives, as well as to assess the feasibility of the project and whether it can easily be visited during a stopover. If a project coordinator is assigned, he or she will collect all required information, submit a project proposal and defend the proposal by replying to the questions of the other project coordinators. Together they vote on which projects to take on. The list of successful projects is getting longer and longer.