Leukaemia Foundation of Australia
The Leukaemia Foundation of Australia: better data breaks down state barriers
With a ‘vision to cure and a mission to care’, The Leukaemia Foundation is Australia’s peak body for blood cancer, funding research and providing free services to support people with leukaemia, lymphoma, myeloma and related blood disorders. These include emotional support, transport to treatment, and accommodation for regional families who need to relocate closer to treatment. The Foundation invests millions of dollars every year in research to improve treatments and find cures.
Support is personal, no two people requiring the same and it can cross regional boundaries. When data doesn’t, that creates a problem. The Leukaemia Foundation was keen for data to never stand in the way of care. Its solution was to place all data in one system serving every role and region. It turned to Sales Cloud.
Pre-Salesforce data was everywhere, stored in more than 100 different databases across 5 states and territories. The back and forth of phone calls to retrieve individual histories was considered an unfortunate necessity. In fact, tracking down data typically involved contacting multiple data centres, hoping to catch someone with access to the relevant history. As information was sometimes scattered across several locations, the whole thing could take days.
Wyan Carter, National Database Manager, explains how Salesforce is taking all of the data sources and migrating them into a single cloud CRM, accessible anytime, from anywhere. “It’s changing our conversations. Instead of being about tracking down details and getting back to you, those details are there. It’s about glancing at the screen to get up to speed and then engaging in a meaningful conversation there and then.”
Carter also impresses the immense value of not asking people to repeat their details, in the world of care; “Service co-ordinators carry iPads so that they can carry all of that intelligence with them as they move around the community visiting people. It lets them know who has spoken to them previously, what has been discussed, and to step straight into the person’s care cycle at the right point,” says Carter.
The scenario is a far cry from where The Leukaemia Foundation of Australia was when Carter first arrived. “Our support services system was so old that when I Googled it the search results revealed that the Museum of California was accepting donations of this software!” According to Carter it’s not uncommon for systems to be out of date in donation based not-for-profit organisations that rely upon grants and donated funds, in addition to having a unique use case to accommodate with software.
The advantage of Salesforce being a cloud solution, aside from the inherent low cost of ownership, is that it’s flexible and customizable to individual needs. The Leukaemia Foundation chose a bolt on application from the Salesforce AppExchange specifically geared towards member and donation management to extend Salesforce to the fund raising part of the business.
The Foundation raises its annual turnover of approximately $30million a year predominantly through direct donations and through events like The World’s Greatest Shave. This App tracks fundraising efforts and donations, in addition to managing donor relationships. All of this information is integrated with Salesforce and analysed, to drive fundraising campaigns around regular giving programs – making donor lifecycle management possible for the first time.