Sailors Childrens Society: A fully mobile lifeline during lockdown
Sailors Childrens Society is a children’s charity based in Hull providing financial, emotional and practical support to children of seafarers around the United Kingdom.
The Challenge
Sailors Childrens Society were predominantly operating an ‘on premise and paperbased’ medley of systems which in September of 2019 was considered to be an administrative hinderance, not a crippling problem. Luckily, thanks to the forethought of Deanne Thomas to sort this problem before it became a disaster is ultimately what allowed SCS to provide support to the influx of children needing help during the Covid-19 pandemic when their beneficiary base exploded over 1000%
The Solution
- Salesforce Non-Profit Success Pack
- Bespoke grant tracking to allow automatic output for payment system
- Review current process to understand donation model
- Integrate various donation platforms
- Create custom application to allow holiday booking for disadvantaged children/families
- Train existing staff on Salesforce in all of it’s glory
- Extensive remodelling and simplifying of processes
- Customer specific alterations to allow different teams to collaborate on beneficiary records
- Grant tracking system
- Salesforce for office 365
- On-going support and regular visits to keep improving the skill level of key individuals
The Results
- Scalability during emergency
- Scalable system for expanding headcount
- A fully mobile system allowing the team to WFH during lockdown
- Vastly Increased team productivity
- Less time on admin = More time spent looking after kids
- Visibility of the inner workings of the organisation on the road and in the office
- Increased collaboration using Chatter
- Easy visibility of historic donations
- Trackable growth
- Vastly improved reporting to allow intelligent organisational decisions
"As a Society we decided to move to a cloud based system to improve remote access and increase efficiency. Working with Art of Cloud we moved from two separate databases for Fundraising and Beneficiaries to the Not For Profit Success pack via Salesforce. This reduced our running costs and ultimately allowed the entire team to become home based overnight as COVID19 hit. Since then we have seen an unprecedented increase in applications for assistance and without the input from Art of Cloud we would have struggled to respond to these families quickly who are now living in poverty. The Art of Cloud team are flexible in their approach and remain always on hand as we need them."
