VolunteerMatch Boosts Visibility and Builds Better Relationships with Salesforce CRM

Full Case Study

Alex Holderness is chief operating officer of VolunteerMatch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping everyone find a great place to volunteer. VolunteerMatch supports volunteers, nonprofits, and corporations through its three primary functions: matching volunteers to a good cause; helping nonprofits to better recruit and manage volunteers; and providing corporate volunteering programs to companies of all sizes. VolunteerMatch is also one of the first nonprofits to receive a Google Grant and has successfully been using AdWords to reach volunteers, nonprofits, and corporations since 2003.

What issues were you were facing in your business that led you to consider Salesforce CRM?

We were using “old-school” client and donor management techniques—we had an Access database, tons of Excel spreadsheets, and Word forms. Processing a donor database like that is hard! Version control with Access and Excel can get tricky—they’re hard to update and it’s easy to overwrite a more current version and lose donor names and information. We realized a Web-based tool could really help us improve our efficiency and outreach. We wanted a universal, single point of access for all the information that didn’t force us to enter data twice. We are spread out—we have offices in San Francisco and Washington D.C.—so the online solution was really appealing.

We also realized we needed to collect a lot more information about each of our contacts so that we could effectively reach out to them on an ongoing basis and give them more targeted messages.

What other solutions did you consider?

I can’t remember what else we looked at! Salesforce CRM had all the things we needed so it was a clear winner for us.

Once you chose Salesforce CRM, how did you get started?

We had Paul Hagen, an independent Salesforce CRM consultant, help. Since we got up and running, Salesforce CRM has really grown and adapted as our needs changed. On the corporate side, each sales director has made more customizations, and added functionality, as our understanding of Salesforce CRM options and capabilities has grown.

What advice would you give companies like you getting started with Salesforce CRM?

VolunteerMatch works with over 66,000 nonprofit professionals and other volunteer managers and we have certainly been a consistent proponent of Salesforce CRM. Nonprofits have so many needs and competing priorities that the question for them is, “Why invest my scarce time learning this system versus another?” It’s been easy for us to show them the relatively low cost and high benefit of this solution.

For us, a challenge has been breaking old habits. For example, we love Force.com Connect for Microsoft Outlook, but at first we had to keep reminding people to click the “Send and Add” button instead of just “Send” so that outgoing email would be added to the activity history in Salesforce CRM. It’s about giving the right reminders and reinforcing process changes. Education is really important.

How are you using Salesforce CRM at VolunteerMatch now?

We’re pretty much dependent on Salesforce CRM—everyone here has a license! We’re using it for three main activities.

We use Salesforce CRM to collect and manage donor information. Everyone who donates to VolunteerMatch goes into the system. We have web-to-lead forms set up to capture their names and track their entire giving history and our communications with them.

We also use Salesforce CRM as a more traditional CRM tool to help us build our network of corporate and national nonprofit partners. In this capacity, we sell Web-based volunteer management solutions to help clients manage their volunteering programs. We gather leads from our Web site and have a sales team that follows up and manages the relationships. Being able to manage and track the relationships we build for this component of our business operations is crucial because the revenue we generate here goes to support our mission of connecting great people to great causes.

Lastly, we also have adapted Salesforce CRM to help us manage our internal team of VolunteerMatch volunteers. Our own team of volunteers is crucial for helping us take on several significant projects, and so we’ve customized Salesforce CRM to help manage scheduling and our relationships with our internal volunteers. The next step would be to use Salesforce CRM to manage our millions of volunteers that we connect to other non-profits, but we’re still working our way there.

Did you use Google AdWords before you adopted Salesforce CRM?

We were one of the first participants in the Google Grants programs, which allows us to use Google AdWords to reach potential volunteers, nonprofits, donors, and corporations. We’ve been using Salesforce CRM since November of 2003 but we’ve just recently begun integrating the two systems since November of 2006 when we first saw the AdWords app on the AppExchange.

We are already planning on how we can do more with the new integration capability.

How has Salesforce CRM changed the way you market with Google AdWords?

It’s a big deal for us to be able to track our ad campaigns all the way through the sales cycle in our corporate branch. Knowing exactly how many leads we’re bringing in and knowing the conversion rates through to sale helps us know where to make improvements.

Our campaigns have improved--we looked at some initial data, decided we could be doing better and updated the creative and budget. Now we're focused more around feedback we’ve gotten from our target audience. With that feedback we’ve fine-tuned the ads and created some sub-campaigns. Some are more successful than others, but we never would have tried all these things otherwise. We love the real-time feedback; we immediately see a success or failure, and then we can react to it.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out with Salesforce CRM and Google AdWords?

Just do it! As you learn about the two systems your sophistication will grow. They are simple solutions that are approachable by people who aren’t all that experienced, and as you learn more about Salesforce CRM and AdWords, both tools can grow in sophistication with you. It’s worth the effort to learn, especially for nonprofits.

Salesforce CRM makes you more efficient at what you're doing. Nonprofits are toiling to achieve their mission, and Salesforce CRM can help them do more of what they're doing, only faster and at lower cost.

With AdWords, it’s about reach. Google has an incredible footprint into the world of donors and volunteers, and getting access to that world is huge for nonprofits. They may not know yet how AdWords could work for them, but it can really extend your ability to reach people with your mission.

visit VolunteerMatch