Challenge
Give Where You Live Foundation faced major challenges with its CRM. Poor data quality meant the team lacked confidence when communicating with donors, and reporting to the board required heavy manual effort. Salesforce was in place, but it had never been fully configured to meet the needs of a fundraising team.
Team adoption was another hurdle. Staff weren’t confident using the system, and critical processes were handled outside Salesforce in spreadsheets. This limited collaboration and created duplicate work.
Finally, the technical setup itself wasn’t serving fundraising goals. Roll-ups were based on the calendar year instead of the financial year, segmentation wasn’t possible for appeals, and integrations with tools like Campaign Monitor and Raisely weren’t working as intended.
Solution
Blaze Your Trail undertook a comprehensive data clean-up, fixing roll-ups, duplicates, and record ownership. New record types were introduced to segment campaign donations correctly, ensuring accurate reporting and protecting donors from irrelevant marketing.
A dedicated Partnerships App and Fundraising App were created, tailored to the needs of managers and frontline staff. These apps streamlined daily tasks, provided intuitive layouts, and enabled live donor insights. Training and support ensured that staff could use Salesforce confidently as their single source of truth.
Key integrations were extended and corrected, including Raisely for online fundraising and Campaign Monitor for email marketing. Data flows were rebuilt to capture consents, business gifts, and lead sources, ensuring clean, compliant data ready for appeals and reporting.
Benefits
Trusted Data
With cleansed and structured information, the team now has full confidence in its donor data. Reports are accurate, fundraising insights are reliable, and Salesforce truly acts as the single source of truth.
Streamlined Fundraising
From donation receipting to campaign segmentation, fundraising activity is easier and faster. Automation has reduced manual tasks, while dashboards provide live updates on giving, empowering more personalised stewardship.
Improved Decision-Making
Accurate reporting gives leadership and the board a clear view of fundraising performance and impact. Instead of spending hours reconciling spreadsheets, the team can focus on strategy, growth, and strengthening donor relationships.
In their own words...
"The service from Blaze Your Trail helped us exceed fundraising totals three campaigns in a row and streamlined our administrative processes. It was so helpful to have expert advice and know we were then delivering best practice in these areas."
Kelly Suvoltos
Communications Lead
Give Where You Live Foundation
You can view and print the Give Where You Live Foundation Case Study here.
