Children’s Medical Research Institute

A powerful fundraising platform gives CMRI the confidence to ‘go out and grow’.

Using the flexible foundations of Salesforce CRM, Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) have modernised their fundraising toolkit. They’re harnessing the power of automation to handle day-to-day tasks, and using analytics to build better relationships with donors.

CMRI is an independent organisation with over 170 scientists committed to finding treatments and cures for serious conditions affecting children. Funding directly supports more than a dozen teams in world leading research areas such as cancer, neurobiology, embryology, genomics and gene therapy.

The famous ‘Jeans for Genes Day’ has long been the mainstay of CMRI’s fundraising and brand awareness strategy. However, as times have changed, so too has fundraising. The team needed to upgrade their CRM and fundraising systems to support online campaigns and create a better donor experience.

With the help of AlphaSys, the team now has a fit-for-purpose CRM, based on the powerful Salesforce Non-Profit Cloud, taking advantage of AlphaSys’ extensive expertise in fundraising.

Challenge

CMRI’s existing fundraising platform was more than 10 years old. Built on technology originally intended as an ERP system, it offered limited functionality for the fundraising team, hampered the Fundraising teams use of the application. A lack of data analytics and insights impeded the team’s ability to identify and manage different relationships with donors.

Over time, the team had built numerous add-ons or developed convoluted manual processes to handle even simple fundraising and donor-management tasks. For example, monthly regular-giving processes were managed manually, and credit card donations needed to be double-entered into two separate systems. The Fundraising and Supporter Services teams worked increasingly hard to ensure that donors weren’t directly disadvantaged or inconvenienced, but they were acutely aware that these time-consuming processes were absorbing resources that could be directed towards creating a truly outstanding donor experience.

The team identified that the best in class CRM, Salesforce, would deliver the flexibility to integrate with their website, support all aspects of Institute donor/supporter management, offer end user flexibility and functionality and deliver native integration options with peer to peer platforms.

“AlphaSys didn’t just come in and say ‘this is the way we’ve done it with other clients.’ They were open-minded and thought outside the box about how to get things to work for the Institute’s objectives. They understood the industry we are in and what we were trying to achieve.”

– Gaelen Fembock, Senior Business Analyst, CMRI

Process

Delivering the project during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team worked 100% remotely. However, collaborating virtually didn’t impede the project’s success. The team leveraged the strengths of the AgilePM methodology to ensure that end-users from across the organisation were engaged in the development process, with subject matter experts from each internal team participating in workshops and user acceptance testing.

“We had a fantastic relationship with AlphaSys. They were so engaged, got to know everyone in our team and built relationships with them throughout the project. We felt as though we were one team – it didn’t matter who was working for AlphaSys and who was working for CMRI.”

– Gaelen Fembock, Senior Business Analyst, CMRI

Outcome

“We’re now able to engage with our supporters in a far more proactive and tangible way. We’re able to offer them a much richer experience than we could have done in the past.”

– Jane Ruston, Fundraising Operations Manager, CMRI

The CMRI team are thrilled with their fast and responsive new system. They have automated processes that would previously have delayed team members for several minutes. Seamless integrations allow emails and letters to be sent to supporters within seconds, with automatic follow-up communications to help foster an ongoing connection. Using the AlphaSys’ Web Integration Toolkit, donors are now able to quickly and independently sign up to Monthly Regular Giving on the CMRI website, with no additional administration required.

The team is excited to explore opportunities to further automate more of their processes, freeing time to devote to fundraising and relationship-building – and with the flexible foundations of a Salesforce CRM, there’s plenty of scope for future enhancements.

Rich data analytics allow the team to uncover valuable donor insights through easy-to-use dashboards and self-service reports. Adding and updating donor information is easy, so data is accessible to everyone, leading to more collaboration and better results.

“We’re able to build a visible pipeline and be far more strategic in our approach to potential donors as well as our existing donor partners. It’s helping us improve how we communicate with our donors, how we select our donors, how we plan our campaigns..

“This whole project has given us the confidence to start a Regular Giving acquisition program. We know we’ve got the system behind us to be able to manage and maintain it ongoing.

“We can go out and grow.”

– Jane Ruston, Fundraising Operations Manager, CMRI

Solution Components

  • Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
  • Fundraising Accelerator
  • Payment Processing with integrated Payment Gateways
  • Payment Details management
  • Receipting and Consolidated statements
  • Offline Donation Processing and batching
  • Finance Reconciliations
  • Bulk Data Importing
  • Regular giving subscription management
  • Processing refunds
  • Conga Composer
  • Preference Centre (Lightning Component/Communities)
  • Marketing Cloud – Account Enagement
  • Web Integration Toolkit
  • Direct Debit Regular Giving