FELM - Salesforce Nonprofit Case Study

The Challenges

FELM receives funding from a wide-range of organisations and individuals. While some donations are for FELM to use as they see best, many come with conditions, obligation and requirements for their distribution. FELM's Salesforce platform was able to collect donations but it was difficult to effectively match and distribute funds to suitable projects as well as see accurate forecasting.

The Wish

FELM wished to provide its staff with a simpler to use solution to automatically distribute donations to suitable projects, avoiding shortfalls while fulfilling any donation conditions. FELM wanted to provide greater transparency for their donors by revealing how funds were distributed to suitable projects. FELM sought to gain richer insights into funding forecasts for both individual project and overall funding levels. When combined with details of donor conditions, FELM would be able to more targeted its marketing activities to avoid shortfalls.

The Solution

VRP Consulting augmented FELM's Salesforce platform with new Fund and Fund Target objects. Along with these two objects, VRP set up a user-friendly system for inputting donation and a new logic to enable staggered releasing of funds to portfolios of projects that meet donor requirements. The FELM team can now easily comply with donation conditions and avoid project fund shortfalls as well as see up-to-date forecasts for both overall and individual project funding. This data can also be used to target marketing projects at donors who are compatible with the projects needing extra resources.

The Stages

The VRP Consulting team explored FELM's existing system and logic for allocating funding. With an accurate picture obtained, the consultants proposed new Fund and Fund Target objects and a new system logic to connect donation with projects in compatible portfolios. With these objects and logic in place, VRP enabled forecasts of upcoming donations and predicted project funding levels. In the process of creating this new logic, the team rewrote large parts of FELM's Payment Linking Tool to unify the experience and speed up the system.

The Result

Now FELM has a system that with just a couple of clicks matches new donations to projects that comply with any conditions. With their enhanced dashboards, FELM now has a clear picture of project funding so they can focus fundraising and marketing efforts more effectively, avoiding any funding shortfalls. These features are helping FELM further mission by complying with regulations and focusing staff time more effectively as well as facilitating reporting to donors on the impact of their generosity. FELM is already preparing a complimentary community to provide greater transparency to their donors.

Company Profile

The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission (FELM) is an agency of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for its international work. FELM currently works in 30 countries with more than 100 partner churches and NGOs. As one of the largest Finnish civil society organizations working in global development, FELM also receives funding from Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs.