Driving Social Impact Through Data Management: The Hilton Foundation's Salesforce Solution
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation is on a mission to improve the lives of individuals living in poverty and experiencing disadvantage throughout the world. Like so many foundations and nonprofits, they used MailChimp to run campaigns for a long time. As the foundation grew, the team reached the point where manually handling spreadsheets every time they ran a campaign was no longer sustainable, prompting them to reach out to Idealist Consulting for support in transforming their engagement tools.
The Problem
Prior to their work with Idealist Consulting, Hilton had a very disjointed database, where email contacts were in one spreadsheet, program contacts were in another, and event RSVPs were always a fragmented, manual effort. It was impossible to track individual engagement between departments. Every time they ran a campaign, they had to send up to ten emails back and forth internally to organize. “It was just a mess,” said David Mascarina, Digital Communications Manager.
The Solution
Hilton Foundation chose Salesforce's Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), a marketing automation platform, for its automation and native integration with Salesforce with the goal of making data management as automatic as possible. Since Idealist Consulting had also supported their Salesforce and grant management set-up, it was an easy next step to collaborate on building Pardot segmented lists for grantees and partners. Idealist Consulting also supported Hilton in providing marketing automation best practices and terminology to help them get up to speed quickly.
The Result
Today, there is little to no clean-up required before sending a new campaign. Hilton is also automatically capturing new grantee data through a database that is synced to Salesforce, then Pardot tags the grantee to help segment them to the right campaigns. Event RSVPs are now managed through Pardot and, with 4-5 big events each year, the Hilton team is nearly always either planning or following up on an event. Now, teams who are managing events can think about the actual strategy of events rather than manually managing RSVPs. Overall, Hilton’s ability to track open and click-through rates are far better, and they see a lot of potential to further their efforts with the list management feature.
In their own words: “Today we can easily create a dynamic list of contacts, whereas before this was a spreadsheet that lived in someone’s computer."
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