The Client

Friends of the Family (FOTF) is a small independent charity, established over 20 years ago. They work in Winchester and its surrounding villages. Their aim is to improve the life chances of local children and families who are struggling and unable to cope with day-to-day family life. Their purpose is to offer a safe and nurturing environment where children and their families can learn to help themselves and focus on building a healthy family life for the future.

The Challenge

Whilst extremely careful and diligent with their record-keeping, FOTF was aware that records were duplicated and separated among the staff and volunteers. This meant it was difficult and laborious to build a single picture of all the Charity's operations (project management, volunteer management and fund-raising) for management meetings or grant applications. With the advice of one of their largest donors, they tasked Supl to build a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system to fulfil that need.

The Solution

After some preliminary work, Supl chose Salesforce for the role of CRM. Arguably the most well-known example of its type, Salesforce has an excellent offer for relatively small charities that do not have large data requirements. Supl undertook the application process with Salesforce on FOTF's behalf and secured 10 free licences. Whilst traditionally known as a CRM, in this instance Salesforce needed to be a WGO - What's Going On. The reality of FOTF's work is that its three operational areas of projects - helping families, volunteers and fund-raising - overlap.  A family who were the recipients of the Charity's help might go on to volunteer or donate, requiring careful design that took the system way beyond its standard configuration. Furthermore, the nature of the projects involved the logging of often quite sensitive information, requiring careful thought to ensure that only accredited staff were able to see the sensitive data without losing the power of a data set of people and families common to all three elements of its operations.

In addition to the bespoke architecture of Salesforce for the Charity's needs, FOTF also benefitted from the excellent features available in such a world-leading application. Its cloud-based structure meant that staff and trustees could log in from anywhere (so important in the Pandemic), its workflow tools could usefully underpin the Charity's obligations to update their volunteers' DBS (regulatory) clearances, and the flexible reporting functions could allow the trustees to gain visibility without the need for staff to prepare reports manually. 

Events form a large part of the Charity's activities. Not only do the projects organise a large number of social events, FOTF sets up induction and training courses for its volunteers. In a post-pandemic world, the ambition is to organise a number of fund-raising events. It had always been an aim to maintain a single Charity diary which showed all of the various events, and Salesforce was able to report in that way alongside all the other elements. In addition, Supl built the events module to include information on attendees: thus each event would have the llist of attendees, and each contact record would hold the list of events attended.

The Build

Given the relative complexity of the different projects, Supl spent much time with the relevant members of staff to build a picture of how they operated. Besides modelling their ways of working, care was taken to help build a consensus among the staff for a common operating model across all projects, even if the aims and target demographics were very different. This helped to build resilience for the Charity, as reliance on single members of staff would be lessened and it would be easier to launch new projects.

It was recognised that many people dislike the traditional methods for note-taking, so efforts were made to exploit Salesforce's capability on mobile devices to deliver an innovative "speech to text" functionality to enable staff to input their important care notes straight into the system by talking into their mobile phone.

Once the project structure initial build was complete, time was taken with those members of staff and trustees responsible for volunteer management and fund-raising to build the right elements they needed into the system.

The Outcome

As a result of Salesforce, FOTF now has a single shared space to add and maintain all aspects of the Charity's work. Maintaining records that are common in general but private when needed lessens the load on individual members of staff, improves the ability of the Charity to work as a team and allows management trustees greater visibility whilst lowering the staff requirement to assemble reports. This is all for a zero ongoing cost.