Client Overview
An animal welfare charity with four rehoming centres and more than 45,000 active supporters reached out to ProvidusCRM. The charity rehomed around 3,000 dogs and cats each year, and legacies, regular gifts, and animal sponsorships fund most of its work.
Its rehoming teams ran on dedicated animal rescue software, while fundraising ran on Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT. However, the two systems never shared a record. So, the people who adopted an animal and the people who funded its care sat in separate places.
The charity wanted a Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud-powered platform that held every supporter, adopter, gift, and legacy in one place. The rehoming teams also needed to keep the shelter system they relied on.
Their Challenges
Adopters lived only in Animal Shelter Manager, the charity's shelter system. So, the supporter care team could not thank adopters, invite them to give, or check whether an adopter was already a donor. Adoption fees also arrived through the shelter system, and finance staff had to separate them from donations by hand before each Gift Aid claim.
Sponsorship created another gap. Supporters sponsored named animals in the kennels and cattery, and the sponsorships sat in Raiser's Edge NXT. However, Raiser's Edge had no link to animal status. When a sponsored dog found a home, the team only heard about it from the rehoming centre. Each sponsor then needed an update and a new animal.
Legacy notifications were tracked on a spreadsheet outside the CRM, which made forecasting legacy income difficult. Direct Debits also ran through a separate Bacs bureau. As a result, regular giving, legacies, and sponsorships each needed their own reconciliation every month.
Solution We Delivered
Our team implemented Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and migrated the charity from Raiser's Edge NXT. Individual constituents became Person Accounts, and organisations became Business Accounts. Gifts became Gift Transactions, with Gift Transaction Designations for split gifts and Gift Soft Credits for in-memory and tribute giving.
Funds became Gift Designations, and appeals and packages became Outreach Source Codes under their Campaigns. We kept every Raiser's Edge constituent ID as a legacy ID. Before sign-off, our consultants reconciled gift totals by fund and financial year against Raiser's Edge.
We then connected FinDock to GoCardless and Stripe for regular gifts, sponsorships, and online donations. The charity moved its existing Direct Debits from the Bacs bureau to GoCardless through a Bacs bulk change. So, supporters kept giving without completing a new Direct Debit instruction. FinDock handles Gift Aid declarations and claims against the same Gift Transactions.
After that, we built an integration with Animal Shelter Manager using its Service API and a dedicated API key. A scheduled Apex job pulls recent adoptions and animals in care. It then matches each adopter to an existing supporter or creates a new Person Account. Only adopters who opted in to marketing receive supporter emails. Adoption fees land as income records separate from donations, so they never enter a Gift Aid claim.
We also linked each sponsorship Gift Commitment to the sponsored animal's record. When the Animal Shelter Manager marks that animal as adopted, Flow sends the sponsor the good news and offers a new animal to support. Finally, legacy notifications now sit in Nonprofit Cloud as Planned Gifts, with stages from notification through estate administration to receipt. Expected values feed the finance team's legacy income forecast.
The Impact
- Unified Supporter Record: We migrated supporters, gifts, sponsorships, and legacies from Raiser's Edge NXT into Nonprofit Cloud, reducing duplicate supporter records by 40%.
- Adopters Into Supporters: We brought opted-in adopters into supporter communications for the first time, increasing donations from adopters by 22%.
- Stronger Sponsorship Retention: We automated sponsor updates when sponsored animals were rehomed, reducing sponsorship cancellations by 30%.
- Faster Reconciliation: We moved Direct Debits, card gifts, and Gift Aid into one payment process, cutting monthly reconciliation time by 60%.
