“Sarah gave $1,860, and nobody noticed.” - How a CRM found our hidden donors.

Naisimari, one of the elephants on the Reteti Adoption Program.

A typical scenario

Sarah is given a Reteti elephant adoption for her birthday. Her husband buys it after they visit Reteti on their honeymoon. She loves the updates about her elephant, so she sets up a $150 monthly gift. Then she buys an adoption for her mother on Mother's Day. In her first year, Sarah gives $1,860. She's exactly who a fundraiser should call next. But she sits on four different lists, and nobody can see her.

• Reteti Visitor

• Reteti Adoption Gift Recipient

• Reteti Adoption Gifter

• Reteti Recurring Donor

That was the example I gave our Salesforce partner.

The problem

Our biggest Achilles heel that we had at the time, was that we did not have a single source of truth. We sat on data spread across numerous spreadsheets. Duplication was a big - and very costly - problem.

The Sarara Foundation is a US 501(c)(3) which raises money for its own programmes and for Reteti Elephant Sanctuary. Over time, our donor data had grown in phases and on different platforms. Donations, adoptions, newsletter sign-ups and enquiries each lived in their own spreadsheet.

What I did

I'm comfortable with tech, so at first I thought I'd set up Salesforce myself. I quickly learned it's a far more complicated platform than I'd expected. So we brought in Peeklogic, a Salesforce partner, and they were brilliant. The project took several months to complete as it required a fair amount of development.

• Mapped every route (images below). I traced how each person reached us, from first contact to Salesforce to Mailchimp. That map became Peeklogic's brief. The map looked different for Reteti and Sarara.

• Wrote the rules. Who counts as a Foundation donor, a Reteti donor, or a potential donor, based on where they signed up.

• Built one dashboard. With Peeklogic, we set up Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) for Reteti and the Foundation, bringing every platform into one view.

• Automated the rest. Make.com was the automation platform I build the Reteti adoption programme with. Since it was already in use, we used it to pull in data from spreadsheets, websites and donation platforms automatically.

• Made Salesforce the master list. Salesforce was the master list and Mailchimp was its mirror, unsubscribes included. So, nobody who opted out got a call.

Mapping out each route that donors / contact could take.

What changed?

Shortly before we started the Salesforce project, we hired a US-based director of development and for the first time, he could research donors properly. He could see who was warm and who had gone cold, how often someone gave, where they gave, and the path they took to get there. Every donor had a different journey, so outreach could be personal.

We also found major donors who had been in our database all along, unnoticed. We built warmer relationships with them, and revenue grew. I can't share the figures, but the difference was substantial.

Having a CRM and a single source of truth on our donors changed how the we raised money.