Success Story: Christian Family Solutions
Empowering Admins to Advance Their Mission with Salesforce
About the Client
Christian Family Solutions (CFS) is a nonprofit organization that provides holistic evidence- and faith-based counseling services to individuals across the United States each year. Since its inception in 1965, CFS’s services have evolved to meet the needs of the human family, from senior and adoption services in its early decades to its current focus on mental health ministry. To support advancing this mission, CFS needed an effective CRM that made it easy to be strategic with their fundraising and programmatic planning.
About the Challenge
Advancing their mission hinged upon leveraging the data they already had and finding a donation and events platform flexible enough to meet their needs. CFS was already using Bloomerang - a donor management and fundraising platform - in combination with spreadsheets to track events and relationships with organizations. Bloomerang’s limitations quickly became hurdles to the organization’s growth. Without the ability to track activities and emails, donor cultivation happened outside of the database and couldn’t be used to inform future efforts. As they continued to grow, CFS realized they needed a more robust tool to serve as a single source of truth for their data.
“Canvas Cloud was both budget-conscious and solutions-oriented.”
CFS began working with a partner to make the initial move into Salesforce, but still had a long way to go to unify their different areas of operations. They needed to find a way to effectively manage events and consistently upload information from other internal systems into Salesforce. After the initial migration into Salesforce, the CFS team worked to verify that data had migrated correctly and to set up user preferences for various team members. When their partner recommended custom development for their events management, CFS began searching for alternative options that better suited their needs, increased internal ownership of their system, and reduced dependence on custom solutions.
From Implementation to Lasting Partnership
The partnership between CFS and Canvas Cloud began with a discovery conversation about events management options. Canvas Cloud - a Salesforce consulting partner specializing in both technology and business process - listened to CFS’s needs and provided them with flexible options that could grow with them without breaking the bank. Even before the initial project began, Canvas Cloud demonstrated respect for CFS’s goals and needs, and helped them rethink exactly what they needed an events management solution to accomplish.
During initial conversations, Canvas Cloud recommended Give Lively, a free digital fundraising and events management tool for nonprofits. Give Lively’s pre-built integration with Salesforce made setup a breeze - within a couple of months, CFS was able to start using the system to sell tickets, manage attendance, and track outcomes of their annual golf outing fundraiser. Throughout the project, CFS felt that Canvas Cloud acted as a true partner, prioritizing training and providing the resources needed for CFS staff to use Salesforce and Give Lively to their fullest potential.
Once CFS saw the benefit of a true partnership in their work with Canvas Cloud, they planned to continue their Salesforce growth through Canvas Cloud’s Collab Managed Services program. When asked, why they decided to continue working with Canvas Cloud through Collab Managed Services, one Director noted:
“Knowing the power of Salesforce to evolve with our organization and increase our impact, it was clear that we needed a partner who we could trust to maintain and innovate our Salesforce instance in an intentional and strategic way.”
Collab Managed Services gave CFS the space and time they needed to identify and prioritize key areas for change while also having a safety net for any issues that arise. Every week, CFS administrators spent time with their designated Canvas Cloud consultant who shared in-depth explanations behind changes made and provided hands-on training to continue to upskill staff as the system evolved.
After working with the CFS administrator to identify that user adoption was a pain point, Canvas Cloud met with staff across departments to gather information on what reports, fields, and training they needed to begin using Salesforce on a regular basis. Canvas Cloud and CFS worked together to bridge the gap, creating highly-requested grant tracking and donor retention dashboards, and training staff on how to use and access reports in Salesforce.
With these key reports and dashboards in place - and more staff using Salesforce as a single source of truth everyday - CFS was able to strategically track their ROI on campaigns and events, and better analyze fundraising data from the previous years to inform future decision-making.
The Next Chapter
Thanks to the ongoing Collab Managed Services partnership, the CFS team reflects on their growth in confidence as a result of their work alongside Canvas Cloud. CFS’s lead administrator reports that her confidence in her ability to solve a Salesforce problem on her own has risen from 40 to 60 percent in the past year.
In 2024, the team plans to focus their efforts on putting their data to work through segmentation, field optimization, and strategic communications with donors. CFS also wants to continue leveraging their data to better understand what services provide the most impact to their constituents so that they can focus their resources in the best places. Finally, CFS aims to incorporate a framework that creates the spaces needed to improve stakeholder confidence and foster an environment where users of Salesforce are not only using the platform effectively but directly informing how it is improved.
“The move to a powerful CRM like Salesforce is a big one. The opportunities are endless. We need an ongoing relationship with someone who will help us prioritize, resolve issues, and capture opportunities as they arise. We couldn’t do it without the help we receive through Canvas Cloud [Collab] Managed Services.”
