Guide Dogs NSW/ACT is the leading provider of Guide Dogs and orientation and mobility services that enable people with low vision or blindness to get around their communities safely and independently.

Each year our highly trained Orientation and Mobility specialists work with around 4,000 people of all ages to help them achieve their mobility goals.

We rely heavily on generous donations from the people of NSW and the ACT to fund our services. Less than 10% of our income comes from government funding, including NDIS.

Alphasys’s innovative solutions have helped Guide Dogs NSW/ACT improve operational efficiency, enabling new ways of working that supports evolving supporter and business needs.

Key areas of innovation delivered include:

• Enhanced Accessibility and Inclusion for staff with Low Vision or Blindness
  • Accessibility and inclusion is important to Guide Dogs.
  • An accessible application and easy to use page layouts were designed, developed and tested by Alphasys in consultation with our internal Accessibility advisors, helping us meet the needs of our Users with Low Vision or Blindness.

• Intuitive layout design makes finding relevant information easy
  • Recommendations of using tabulated layouts in the Contact object to present relevant. fields/information to our various fundraising business areas have made it easy for Users to quickly find information relevant to their day to day work.

• Customised Engagement Plans provides new ways to manage Major Giving
  • Engagement Plan related advice and recommendations provided to the Major Donor Team helped transform the way fundraising and supporter engagement activities are managed. This provided a significant uplift to the administrative effectiveness and efficiency where previously these were managed manually on a number of spreadsheets. Activity dates were automatically adjusted when a predecessor activity date was changed.

• Time and effort saved in Regular Giving donation processing
  • Before Salesforce was introduced, it took days for the Fundraising Team to prepare for Regular Giving pledge runs manually, requiring multiple handoffs between different teams in the manual process to format data in the right way.
  • Pronto Products enables pledge runs to be made with no manual intervention required, giving time back to the Engagement Team for other tasks.
  • With the Data Loader and a template created by Alphasys using Pronto Products, this process is now a button’s click away, there is no formatting required. Alphasys solution allows us to batch update multiple objects at a time, which Data Loader on its own cannot do.

• Cost and time savings with new Donation Receipt Processing
  • Receipting previously done using Airdocs is now replaced with the recommended Conga/Salesforce, resulting in lower costs for making receipt changes/customisations to meet evolving business and Accessibility needs. With this capability now being in-house, the reduction in vendor’s ongoing development costs has resulted in substantial savings.

• Better Payway integration
  • Replacing and updating payment source has now been made easier.
  • Payway response codes are now managed within Salesforce, saving time. Payment information is pushed to  Payway via Pronto Products and the response is also updated in Salesforce record automatically.
  • Easy separation of hard bounce declines and soft bounce declines and its usage in reattempting monthly debits.

• Reduction in costs required in Finance and Reconciliation processes
  • The monitoring and issue resolution time for Finance data extraction and uploading into designated folders was significant – this is no on longer necessary as Reports are readily available directly from Salesforce.
  • All Finance reports delivered were highly customised to meet internal reporting, auditing and integration needs to Xero. These reports used to be in Excel format. Now it is readily available at any time without waiting for an upload. 

• SDL file developed by Alphasys enables easy data importing
  • Alphasys developed  sdl files that have helped make the process of uploading of data seamless.
  • With the introduction of the Data Loader, a simplified way is now available for Engagement Team to upload data into the system.

• New functionality introduced with Barcoding RTS
  • Easy to use Retrun mail entry component.
  • RTS processing 30 times better – All team members are eager to do this task because it is simplified and fun.  

• Alphasys Team supported the innovation
  • Seamless transition between consultants, excellent handover that allowed for continuation of project without interruption.
  • Highly skilled professionals helped us design, clarify requirements and proposed recommendations that led to quality sustainable solutions for our organisation and innovative problem solving for complex business problems unique to our organisation such as linking Regular Giving, Major Donor and Estates to Dogs.

• Cost and time savings with better Website integration
  • Website donations are now fully automated, resulting in significant time saving for the Engagement Team from manual processing.
  • Vendor Partner monitoring no longer required.
  • Internal IT trouble shooting time reduced by up to an hour each time to resolve issues where donations failed to sync.

• Better supporter experience with Quick Donate
  • Improved our ability to process donations immediately whilst supporters are on the phone, with instant feedback on whether the payments went through.
  • The pool of people has expanded from just Engagement Team to include Account Managers who can now also process Quick Donate transations.

• Campaign innovation specifically for Guide Dogs
  • Guide Dogs presented Alphasys with the problem of how to keep track of donor journeys connected to dogs within fundraising programs. Alphasys came back with an automated solution to allocate dogs automatically through campaigns. Improved donor journey experience and data accuracy.

• ProntoPayment settings easy to change
  • There is no longer a need for us to seek external advice on changing parameters related to Payway.
  • It’s easy to update the hard bounce codes in the system.
  • Easy to update the number of retries for direct debit.

• Customisation of the Donation Dogs object
  • This enabled us to connect organisations and contacts with Donation Dogs, and attribute collections/donations along with soft credits to the Donation Dogs and their collectors/influencers.

• New ability to manage Soft Credits
  • We did not have this ability in the past, Alphasys helped us build the solutions that support Community Fundraising, matching donations etc where soft credits are involved
• New ability to accurate capture Workplace Giving
  • We are now able to recognise giving levels of Corporate Partners on workplace giving programs and upload the data easier via data loader

• Connection of our two unique business areas
  • Alphasys provided recommendations as to how best to connect GDC and Fundraising – dogs are now set up as a Contact type which enables us to tailor fundraising program and communications with contacts to litters and dogs.
    • Regular Gifts need to be linked to 1 or more active Litters at a time while maintaining a history of every Litter previously linked to a Contact so they can provide Pupdates for the current or historic Litters. 
    • Major Giving needs to be able to link a Contact to a specific Dog so that they can provide tailored communications.

• Merchandise management improved
  • Ability to manage pricing with option to include/exclude GST 

• Achieve system design goals
  • Alphasys helped Guide Dogs achieve some system design goals:
    • Simple, accessible user interface
    • Configuration over customisation. Minimal customisation for ease of ongoing system management
    • Saving costs from third party support
    • Enhance or supplement NPSP with recommendations on  
      • Payment processing with integrated payment gateways
      • Payment details management
      • Receipting and consolidated statements
      • Batching
      • Finance reconciliation
      • Bulk data importing
      • Regular Giving subscription options
      • Processing refunds