Case study: Health and wellness nonprofit uses peer-to-peer fundraising

Founded in 2013, Vs. Cancer empowers athletes of all ages to contribute to the fight against childhood cancer. Athletes from youth leagues to professional teams are funding childhood cancer research and donating to hospitals. In just three years, Vs. Cancer has helped 58 children’s hospitals and 40,616 children.

Vs. Cancer not only supports research and hospitals with the funds they raise, but also raises awareness within the community. When athletes create donation pages that reveal their personal connection and dedication to fighting childhood cancer, teammates, friends, families, and community members can become inspired and involved. Before you know it, the small donations gathered through personal networks combine to create a big impact.

Vs. Cancer approached Idealist Consulting to integrate Classy’s peer-to-peer fundraising with their Salesforce instance and explore opportunities for enhanced outreach to improve their efficiency and make the most of their tools.

The Challenge: unscalable systems

When they came to Idealist Consulting, Vs. Cancer was using Classy for their reporting, fundraising, and development needs, and Salesforce for managing their donor relationships and for internal operations. But these two important tools weren’t connected, so Vs. Cancer struggled to track how they were administering grants to their network of children's hospitals. Their original process was too complex and incorporated many moving pieces.

“We had to keep going between Classy, spreadsheets, and Salesforce to determine how much teams had raised, which team it was associated with, and what cause or hospital it was going to. We needed something to tie all the pieces together so we didn’t have to keep bouncing between Excel spreadsheets to figure out our data.”
--Chase Jones, CEO and Founder

Vs. Cancer realized they needed a significant systems upgrade when, as a young nonprofit running on a tight margin, they miscalculated some donations and overgave to one of their recipients. Since they were managing donations through manually referencing Google docs, spreadsheets, and their online platforms, they had made an understandable human error. Vs. Cancer is deeply committed to responsibly representing donors, stakeholders, their community of athletes, and the network of children they serve. They knew they needed a more reliable system.

The Solution: start with Classy, then scale

For Vs. Cancer, Classy was an integral part of what they did, but it didn’t do everything (and was never designed to). Excellent at raising money and inspiring their audiences, it didn’t provide the workflows Vs. Cancer needed to carry out their mission from start to finish. For this reason, they looked into Salesforce.org to help them fill in the holes and bring them the rest of the way.

Specifically, Vs. Cancer needed Salesforce to enhance their communication and reporting:

“We looked at Salesforce to help us be a better organization when it came to communication with leads, donors, etc. We weren’t okay sending someone an email that said, ‘Thanks for raising money.’ We wanted the specifics! ‘Thank you Bobby for raising $400; that’s going to benefit the Writers in the Schools program at Seattle Children’s Hospital.’ We wanted to get down to the nitty gritty information, and that's where we turned to Salesforce.”

Now, with the help of Predictive Response, Vs. Cancer is sending hyper-focused emails and notifications to fundraisers and donors to inspire giving and keep them engaged. They’re also putting targeted content in front of prospective audiences, and can more accurately and persuasively communicate who they are and what they do.

The Implementation: What the system looks like

Vs. Cancer needed an active and dynamic system that built on the foundation they had already built with Classy, but they couldn’t do it on their own. That’s where Idealist Consulting stepped in to help. Vs. Cancer had very distinct goals with how they wanted Classy to integrate with Salesforce, which was slightly different than the average nonprofit configuration. Since their donors rely on a peer-to-peer platform, “We were less interested in donor information and more interested in team and fundraiser information. This was best for our model and how we communicate, so we needed Idealist Consulting to understand where we were trying to go with it and then make it happen.”

Idealist Consulting helped Vs. Cancer customize their database to sync up with their specific needs. Everything from when donations come in, how much is raised, and which hospitals the money is given to, is available and accessible to Vs. Cancer employees. By integrating Classy with Salesforce, when a donation would come from a particular team, it is tracked and attributed to the receiving hospital right away. “Now,” Chase explains, “if I’m going to meet with a children’s hospital, I can tell them how much we’ve raised and who has contributed on the fly. We’ve never been able to do that before!”

Salesforce and Classy in Action

Internally, Vs. Cancer refers to Salesforce as ‘Cancerforce’ to remind their team that the database is another powerful weapon in the fight against cancer. Onboarding and user adoption has increased, and the team is connected by being able to constantly share centralized information. Vs. Cancer is more confident in their retention rates, visibility, and transparency. With Vs. Cancer’s unique model of giving to research and local children’s hospitals, they’ll use Salesforce to give their fundraising dollars the ultimate transparency; with every dollar given, a donor will know in advance the exact project, the exact hospital, the exact research initiative, and the exact amount needed to make the impact.

By setting up a system that enables them to work more efficiently, Vs. Cancer is using technical solutions to fight cancer. As Chase explains, “We’ve got a small team, but we’ve got big hopes, big hearts, and big dreams. And now we’ve got a big tool that will help us scale and help us beat cancer.”

Technical Stats: Other apps include Predictive Response, Apsona, Conga Composer, TaskRay, and Rollup Helper. The Vs. Cancer Foundation is currently on version 3.0 of the Nonprofit Starter Pack.