Children’s Advocacy Org Switches from Blackbaud to Salesforce

Children’s Institute envisions an Oregon where every child is developing on track, ready for kindergarten and successful by third grade. Founded in 2003, the Institute moves research to action by promoting cost-effective investments in children birth through third grade. This includes advocacy and policy innovation and demonstrating the effectiveness of linking early learning with elementary schools at two community-based sites. Chief Development and Financial Officer Doug Wells explains that “the Children’s Institute is focused on transforming Oregon’s early learning system so that more children have access to the high-quality services they need.” To support this strategy, the Institute needs a strong technical system to track supporters and partnerships.

The challenge: need for enhanced communication and constituent tracking

Much of Children’s Institute's work is facilitated by communicating with influencers in education, social work, and civic circles. Naturally, they need a tool that will enable them to target this communication and keep track of every touchpoint. However, when Children’s Institute was using Luminate (a CRM created by Blackbaud), they weren’t able to hone their communication and monitor their relationships with their constituents as well as they needed to.“We’re a small organization with a big reach,” said Wells, “and we needed a solution that allowed us to communicate effectively from the governor to grassroots organizers.”

The communication and constituent management pain points affected the Children’s Institute from top to bottom. Holes in their communication strategy influenced their ability to follow up with leads, thank donors, connect with evangelists, and grow support from their network. Despite the complexity of making a big technology change, it was worth it to them to move to a CRM that would better account for their needs:

“We were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It created more roadblocks for communication and fundraising than help. It’s a big deal to make a change in solution, but for us it was very important.”

The solution: focus on communication and advocacy

In addition to doing a lot of outreach through mass email and social media, the Children’s Institute hosts a large annual luncheon to ignite their community. In 2015, nearly 400 businesses, educators, and community leaders came out to support their work. Events like this, in addition to hard copy mailings and advocacy campaigns in tandem with Oregon legislative sessions, are important aspects of their outreach and communication strategy, and the Institute needed a system that would support their robust offerings.

When the Children’s Institute came to Idealist Consulting, they reiterated what years of experience have taught us again and again: communication and fundraising are intrinsically connected. As Wells put it, “You need to be able to target communication to fundraisers and potential fundraisers instead of hitting them with a blunt object.” When Children’s Institute moved from Blackbaud to Salesforce, Idealist Consulting migrated 6,000 records from Luminate to Salesforce, installed Soapbox Mailer for their email needs, CQ Roll Call for advocacy, and Click and Pledge for event management and donations. Idealist Consulting customized and connected these solutions to serve Children’s Institute’s goals, which made Salesforce an extremely dextrous tool that delivers targeted and precise communication to the right constituents at the right time:

“I would just say that our ability to segment lists using the relational features of the database are much stronger than they were in our old platform. We’re able to really target our advocacy in a way that we weren’t able to before.”

Moving forward: more work to come

While Children’s Institute has already experienced a positive change, there is much work to be done. Wells explains that Children’s Institute is “a small organization that’s not particularly tech savvy, so it will be a slow process, but one that we’re committed to to get everyone using Salesforce effectively so we can continue to make good decisions.” The twelve-person team behind the Children’s Institute leaned on Idealist Consulting to help them through the stickier points in moving to a new system and setting everything up: “Idealist Consulting held our hand through the whole thing. Without them, the process of migrating to this new system would have been much much harder, and much more challenging. The assistance, project management, and training they gave us was critical to our success.”

Moving from Luminate to Salesforce allowed Children's Institute to reduce operating system costs by about 30%, which lets them focus on strategy instead of troubleshooting the technology. They feel confident that their ability to segment better means they can better craft their messaging, target their audience members, and be more effective overall.