Waterbury PAL, nonprofit organization, helps more children with Salesforce

When working with at-risk youth, the more you can do the better. In the town of Waterbury, Connecticut, a group of volunteers and donors felt like they could be doing more to help the children in their community.

The Police Activity League of Waterbury, Inc. (PAL), led by volunteer Police Officers, runs summer sports leagues, subsidizes meals, sponsors park cleaning, and supports kids headed to school. This is a group of public servants that wanted to do more in their free time.

The need to keep all information and processes in one place.

Last year, 2019, Waterbury PAL hired Mara Ford. With over 25 years of experience in nonprofit management and fundraising, she was ready to help Waterbury PAL. Her aim became to expand its reach and impact with kids who needed it the most.

During her first year on the job, she quickly realized that, in order to support children and families, she needed to see relevant information more easily. From how much money was coming in, to where families were moving, to who was volunteering. In order to be proactive, she needed more information and all of them in one place.

Implementation of Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack

CloudAnswers worked closely with Mara Ford to understand the challenges they were facing. Where the pain points were, and where they are heading so that the solution would meet these needs as fast as possible.

Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack was turned on just a few months into the job and started making immediate improvements. By using Campaigns to track outreach, reports, and dashboards to see trends, and Opportunities to increase communication, they were able to coordinate and strategize.

No More Filing Cabinets

During previous years, without a platform, it was impossible to report on revenue, fundraising, and goals without a substantial amount of effort. Documents were split between filing cabinets, spreadsheets, and Quickbooks. This required manually copying data from paper into spreadsheets.

Over the past 6 months, Mara and her team have transitioned to recording all of their donor information in Salesforce's nonprofit success pack. They can now schedule daily and weekly reports to track incoming donations as well as longer-term Grant writing.

By managing their pipeline consistently, they are able to optimize their efforts. From tracking the number of people called during a campaign, to who got the “Thank You” letters, they can make their personal touch more productive.

It is critical for Nonprofit organizations to track donors and fundraising dollars while measuring their impact.

Tracking Their Outreach

CloudAnswers helped the Waterbury PAL meets its objectives. They are able to track and maintain important relationships, get better visibility on their donation pipeline, increase user uptake, gather better data, measure, track, and create reports from its programs like never before.