UNICEF Australia

UNICEF Australia is part of the United Nations Children’s Fund, a leading global humanitarian and development agency that works to uphold the rights of every child. They recognised that digital transformation was the key strategy to connect with supporters and foster innovation, so entered into a partnership with AlphaSys and Salesforce to make this happen.

UNICEF works to protect millions of children in more than 190 countries and territories: from remote island communities, to the heart of war-torn conflict zones, to first-world countries with failing systems.

Problem

UNICEF’s ultimate goal is to protect and improve the lives of every child in over 190 countries. Continuing to meet its fundraising goals required a shift to digital fundraising utilising new and innovative approaches. Cumbersome and complicated systems, processes and data – were holding the fundraising team back. Time was being wasted on unnecessary manual processes, and innovative ideas were impractical or impossible to implement.

For UNICEF, the impact of COVID-19 was a crisis that became an opportunity. Their legacy processes and technology were unsustainable, and left them no option but to quickly adopt a system specifically designed for the NFP sector. In particular, they needed to increase mobile accessibility to enhance the usability of their systems for both employees and donors.

“I could run my household on my mobile, but I couldn’t run the business on my mobile.”

– Sarah Grattan, COO, UNICEF Australia

Solution

“When we did a market scan of the three big providers, there was only Salesforce who really said it was about not-for-profit and for purpose. I felt that I wasn’t buying a product which was coming out of a bank and being somehow reconfigured into a not-for-profit. We’re not serving customers with transactions – we’re looking after donors with retention.”

Tony Stuart, CEO, UNICEF Australia

AlphaSys worked closely with the UNICEF team to implement the specialist AlphaSys non-profit industry solution and customise it to meet the growing needs of their organisation. The solution harnesses the power of Salesforce, the world’s number one CRM, to provide a solid foundation that’s optimised for non-profit organisations. The addition of AlphaSys’ Fundraising Accelerator allows the UNICEF team to seamlessly connect their fundraising tools and harness the rich data for analytics. By partnering with AlphaSys, the UNICEF team had access to expertise that they didn’t have themselves.

“We blew up all of our systems at once … We’ve got a new finance system. We implemented Salesforce and analytics, and all during a period where we were shut down and working remotely. We brought in the expertise we needed. We forged good relationships with the vendors. We were very open with each other and worked together to resolve problems.”

Sarah Grattan, COO, UNICEF Australia

Outcome

UNICEF’s digital transformation has made the once impossible, possible. It’s not just the ability to run the business remotely.

The team now have a 360-degree view of their customer, a higher level of analytics and personalisation, and has significantly reduced time to market for new products and campaign. This access to deep data analysis allows them to understand the impact of that work in real time.

“We can link our marketing system together with the data. The phones ring, and we know who that is on the phone, and what their history and their case has been over time. We have a data diary so we know where we’re up to in our fundraising. With the Tableau CRM analytics package, we can drill into different parts of the business.”

Sarah Grattan, COO, UNICEF Australia

Even more than that, UNICEF is now able to unleash the full creativity of its marketing and fundraising teams because they now have predicting and planning capabilities based on fresh insights and analytics. And the new platform has given the team a renewed passion for continual improvement.

“At UNICEF Australia, we’ve got a new dance floor, but we can’t turn up on that dance floor with the same dresses. We have to keep evolving. We’re going to have to look at a lot more product innovation now that we have the systems to go with it.”

Tony Stuart, CEO, UNICEF Australia

Solution components:

AlphaSys Fundraising Accelerator, which includes:

  • Real-time payment processing of one off and recurring donations
  • Batch input of donations
  • Peer-to-peer 3rd-party importing
  • Return-to-sender process
  • Bounce management
  • Reconciliation process