South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute is South Australia’s flagship not for-profit health and medical research institute with hundreds of researchers collaborating to cure disease and save lives.

Challenge 

The small team was working with a very old database and multiple types of software for emails and event invitations.

These data silos did not talk to each other, were incomplete, and the amount of manual data entry by fundraisers and the finance team was wasting time and resources and causing errors.

Solution

Blaze your Trail implemented Salesforce NPSP, integrated Raisely forms via Movedata and migrated over 25,000 legacy transactions.

The result was Salesforce as a unified database of donors, fundraisers and supporters with their related transactions, campaigns, relationships and preferences, updated in real time with any online donations, regular gifts and community fundraising.

We removed as many manual data handling processes as possible - reducing error and taking advantage of automations to work smarter not harder.

Communication preferences are now easily tracked, providing a clear consent flow that supports the Mailchimp integration, so Salesforce is now a robust source of truth for all fundraising and communications information.

Benefits

Wasting less time with data entry
Automations reduce time spent collecting donations, issuing receipts, coding donations to different research projects and reporting to the finance team. All data now exists in one primary system, communicating seamlessly with an email program, several online donation forms and a P2P fundraising platform.

Simplifying Processes
Implementing the solution has provided the opportunity to revise and simplify processes to give the team more time to talk to donors and create compelling stories about researchers.

The team actually enjoy using the systems
The previous database was unwieldy, and most of the team was reluctant to use it. The fundraising team adopted Salesforce quickly and find it easy to use. It’s responsive and provides the reports, tasks and data each of the team needs to run their campaigns.

In his own words

The significant advantage of Blaze Your Trail is they understand fundraising in the real world and take an informed, common-sense approach to implementation. It’s flexible and not locked into an arduous process. Their experience in connecting fundraising and communication platforms was precisely what we needed. They inspired confidence, were generous with their time, very friendly in their approach, and detailed and diligent with our data.

Dave Simms

Head of Fundraising and Marketing

South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute


You can view and print the

South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute Case Study here.