Stories

The Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity (DVLCC), supports children under 5 with cerebral palsy and other motor learning impairments to make the best possible start in life – and give families the support and skills to continue their development at home.

Children with cerebral palsy struggle to learn fundamental skills – they do not have the typical early experiences of their peers because of their disabilities; often excluded from everyday activities in their communities and unable to attend mainstream nursery provision, limiting their opportunities for socialisation and integration.  They are at risk of isolation and early intervention is crucial. 

DVLCC have been using Salesforce for 10 years, but like many charities they do not have a specific in-house Salesforce administrator or advisor. They use Salesforce for managing donations and logging payments, as well as for managing campaigns.

Salesforce Community

Managing a Salesforce Org is always a challenge. The internal team worked hard to keep the data clean, make configuration changes, and even picked off a good few Trailhead badges. But with no permanent in-house expertise it is nearly impossible to keep a track of new features and updates, never mind analysing implications of architecture changes and integrations. 

When the Fundraising Manager started to hit hurdles, she reached out via the Salesforce Community and met with our CEO Phil Walton. That was back in 2014.

Although there have been some changes in DVLCC personnel during that time, Phil and the team at Cloud Galacticos have always been happy to help such an essential charity.

“We are incredibly grateful to Cloud Galacticos for their help over the last 10 years. No question is too big or too small, they are always willing to help. They are professional and friendly and go above and beyond using their knowledge to support our Fundraising team. Thank you.”

Hayley Wicker-Bradbury, Fundraising and Business Development Manager

Sadly Dame Vera passed away in 2020, aged 103, but the work of the charity will continue, and Cloud Galacticos will happily support them in any ways possible. 

At Cloud Galacticos we like to work with a diverse range of industry types. So we were pleased when The Church of England approached us. They wanted us to help them make the most of Salesforce to better communicate with their community.

CoinFLEX (Coin Futures and Lending Exchange) is the world’s first physically delivered cryptocurrency futures exchange. It was developed to provide avenues for investors to hedge cryptocurrency exposure with minimal index or price settlement risk.

Cloud Galacticos was tasked by NCS to help with their digital offering. With the use of Salesforce Community Cloud, we helped them with the engagement with their community and users.

GuardCap Asset Management Limited is a specialist investment company based in London, United Kingdom. They are focused solely on managing concentrated, bottom-up, strategies constructed on an “index-agnostic” basis for institutional investors.

Salesforce Lightning

GuardCap engaged Cloud Galacticos as their chosen Salesforce partner. The core focus was to help them deliver a Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning migration. We also updated the Account and Contact objects and a mass data load.

Cloud Galacticos carried out the Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning upgrade. We optimised Lightning record pages for key objects, refreshed the object specific and global actions and established a home page to display key information. Also we implemented My Domain to improve security, provide a consistent URL and a branded login page to give users reassurance that they were in the correct place.

Account and Contact Object

The final project deliverable was to evaluate and update the Account and Contact object. Obsolete fields were removed and value added fields were created. After a page layout reorganisation a mass data load was carried out to ensure the commercial team had the latest information to effectively manage their customers.

Salesforce Lightning Training

We delivered virtual training to the full team. It helped guide them towards the business value of Salesforce Lightning. It also focused on practical tools that they could utilise right away to maximise productivity, personalise their experience and take advantage of the upgrade. These included list views, actions, tasks, events and calendar, reports, dashboards and Lightning Record Pages.

Lightning UI

Salesforce introduced the new Lightning UI several years back. After a number of iterations it is now widely used and supports the majority of Classic functions as well as many new features (UI and background functionality). GuardCap can now take advantage of all the new features and the plush UI, safe in the knowledge that anything new that is released by Salesforce will be compatible with GuardCap. 

In addition to this they have a secure custom domain and easy access to a suite of productivity features that will save them time and improve efficiency. Salesforce Lightning is a robust UI that will scale and grow with GuardCap’s system requirements and it’s good to see them make this transition.

Pardot

As well as the Lightening migration, we suggested the use of Salesforce Pardot to improve their email marketing. Cloud Galacticos assisted in its implementation and configuration. One of the main issues was prospectors were getting unsubscribed automatically from their email database. The adoption of Pardot helped resolve this issue.

GuardCap Feedback

“Cloud Galacticos were a joy to work with and delivered on all aspects of the project. We migrated smoothly from Salesforce ‘Classic’ to ‘Lightning’ edition and implemented Pardot as a distribution tool without problem. Everybody at Cloud Galacticos was extremely helpful and professional and we appreciate the swift support we receive by the company.”

Alexandra Schwarz, Marketing Manager, GuardCap

Buglife is the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates. The non-profit organisation actively works to save Britain’s rarest little animals; everything from bees to beetles, worms to woodlice, and jumping spiders to jellyfish.

One of Buglife’s main objectives is to halt the extinction of invertebrate species and to achieve sustainable populations of invertebrates.

Payment Integration

Buglife approached Cloud Galacticos when they had some issues that needed resolving quickly. This included a payment integration that had stopped functioning. And without a full-time in-house Salesforce team, the issues were affecting their day-to-day operations.

The areas we focused on were misalignment of their website visualforce page, and the current business process. We also looked into the integration and consolidation of payment gateway with Salesforce.

Website Donation Page

Buglife needed the website donation page aligned with their current business process. They also wanted to offer one-off donation as a default. We investigated into the current payment gateway. And we worked out how much value could be extracted with its other services, with the aim of consolidating the payment processes.

E-Newsletter using Lightning Templates

Buglife currently sends email updates to their members via Salesforce using Lightning Email Templates. We updated their main email template to address some display issues. This work involved doing some minor alterations to the HTML and CSS code of their base template. It also involved testing how it would display upon distribution and offering some guidance on how they could best use Lightning Email Templates going forward using the standard clone functionality.

Outcome

“We were stuck with some issues within our CRM system for a while until we found Cloud Galacticos.

Their team has picked up most of our issues and sorted them out really quickly.  We are now able to focus on projects without delays and continue to grow.

All communication within all parties was great and efficient and we look forward to continuing to work with Cloud Galacticos in near future.” Beata Rajchel, Administration Services Manager

More about Buglife and Cloud Galacticos

If you would like to learn more about the Buglife and the work they do, you can visit their website or make a donation below.

Are you a charity or nonprofit who is looking to use Salesforce or improve your use of Salesforce? Contact us and one of our team of friendly and experienced Salesforce experts will get in touch.

Walkabout Foundation is a UK and US registered charity with the mission of restoring dignity, freedom and independence by providing wheelchairs and rehabilitation in the developing world and funding research to find a cure for paralysis.

Their motto “Mobility is Possibility”. It speaks of their drive to help restore dignity, freedom and independence by providing wheelchairs and rehabilitation in the developing world. As well as helping fund research to find a cure for paralysis.

Managing Donations From Around the World

The way people donate has shifted in recent years, driven in particular by the COVID-19 global pandemic. It is now common for people to donate through a digital medium, and the fact that you can accept donation’s online means that donations can come in from anywhere around the world. It is imperative that an organisation like Walkabout can adapt to such changing circumstances and continue their good work helping change people’s lives.  

Managing Donors and Donations in a Digital Way

The Walkabout team had already been using Salesforce for a while but were not really getting out of it all they could to see the greatest value.

One of the key objectives for the foundation was to allow them to improve the way they track and report upon donations. As a global charity, Walkabout Foundation has donors around the world who donate in different currencies. Walkabout needed to be able to store details of these donations and reconcile them in a single, simple way. 

Once donations had been captured and recorded, Walkabout needed to be able to report upon this information to allow them to gain insights into whether they were meeting their donation targets, as well as on the donors these donations were coming from. Having this data available to them would enable them to most effectively reach out to new and existing donors.

This outreach required changes too. The team needed to be able to assign donors a primary liaison, who would be tasked with ensuring that the donor was kept up to date as to how they were helping change lives and could help further. 

Working With Cloud Galacticos

The Walkabout Foundation engaged Cloud Galacticos to help them adapt their Salesforce system and meet these challenges. Updates were made including new record types, multi-currency enablement and dated exchange rates to allow the foundation to utilise more of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). This enables the foundation to capture, track and report on all donations no matter what currency they were paid in.

Further updates were made, plus training which help make it easier to engage with donors. Declarative Salesforce automation was also implemented. It includes emails and task reminders to allow users at the Walkabout Foundation to know when to get in touch with their donors. 

And the best part? All the data is captured into a single system which can then be easily reported on.

Greater Engagement and Simpler Reporting

“It was great to be able to boost our donor engagement and have increased visibility of major donations made to the foundation. It’s been a game- changer to just be able to report on all our donations and against our targets.

Working with Cloud Galacticos was a true pleasure. The synergy between our teams was seamless. They understood the intricacies of our business well. And gave the relevant advice and know-how to solve our problems and create a CRM better suited to our needs.

We would work with them again in a heartbeat.” 

Camilla Fitzgerald, Director of Development, Walkabout Foundation

“We are really pleased to be able to help good causes such as Walkabout Foundation” said Cloud Galacticos COO Paul Battisson. “They do amazing work, and are a great team to work with. We cannot wait to see how they continue to grow and help more people across the globe.”

More about Walkabout and Cloud Galacticos

If you would like to learn more about the Walkabout Foundation and the work they do, you can visit their website or make a donation below.

Are you a charity or nonprofit who is looking to use Salesforce or improve your use of Salesforce? Contact us and one of our team of friendly and experienced Salesforce experts will get in touch.

Data Protection People (DPP) asked Cloud Galacticos to help overhaul their salesforce org and streamline their business processes. Read our success story on how we approached this project and the resulting outcome.

We enjoy working with charities to help them make the most of Salesforce. Find out more about how we helped Jigsaw to enhance their use of campaign monitor with Salesforce.org.

We enjoy working with organisations to help them make the most of Salesforce. Find out more about how we helped STEP to utilise the salesforce lightning platform.