Grants & Donations Growth: A Salesforce Success Story
September 2017
Austin ISD educates approximately 84,000 students and embraces 130 diverse school communities in one of the fastest-growing, ever-changing metroplexes in the country. In partnership with parents and our community, AISD’s mission is to provide a comprehensive educational experience that is high quality, challenging, and inspires all students to make a positive contribution to society. We partner with world-class universities, innovative businesses and nonprofit organizations and engaged community leaders to prepare our students for college, career and life.
Challenge
Austin ISD, a non-profit leading school district in the heart of Texas was looking for a partner who could help them achieve some significant improvements in Grants, Donor and Crowdfunding management via technology. Having used a disparate set-up of tools on their website and within their Office of Innovation & Development they were stuck. They had implemented Salesforce in 2013 with another partner but were looking for a partner to ‘connect the dots’ and leverage Salesforce with a crowdfunding tool and a marketing automation system to create a seamless technology platform to drive Grants & Donations.
The Office of Innovation & Development also wanted to take advantage of the NonProfit Starter Pack (NPSP) from Salesforce and have a proven partner migrate their instance to that from their existing Salesforce org.
Solution
Through a series of up front planning and discovery sessions with Ventas, Austin ISD found confidence in our approach and selected Ventas Consulting to as their Salesforce partner in 2015. Ventas Consulting worked with Austin ISD to reimplement Salesforce via the Salesforce NPSP and to set up integrations with, EdBacker, a donation & crowdfunding tool as well as MailChimp for email campaign management.
Some of the planned objectives are as follows:
- Repurpose Salesforce in the ‘new’ NPSP instance to be a platform that drives donations & grants–and allows for real-time analytics whenever the Executive Director needs them.
- Setup a seamless web to Salesforce integration to ensure that requests are responded to, donations are captured and tools are in place to communicate with donors–large and small.
- Achieve significant growth in Grants & Donations by using Salesforce as a donor management platform. Austin ISD wanted to be able to understand donor history and communicate with them before, during and after donations & grants.
Results
Austin ISD has achieved remarkable results since 2015, in large part to Salesforce and Ventas Consulting. The platform is now used for donor communication, grant process tracking (to ensure deadlines & deliverables are met) and to verify donations (by several different sources). Additionally Salesforce is now used as a professional email communication tool via Salesforce & MailChimp campaigns set up by Ventas. But most incredibly—since 2015 Donations & Grants awarded has jumped from $10 million in 2014 to $23 million FY 2017—an astounding 230% growth in just three years! As a result of the success of Salesforce Austin ISD is now getting more funding in order to continue to expand how the platform is used to create growth and efficiencies in other organizational teams.