How the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund managed a skyrocketing donor base and raised more money with cloudStack Services

 

Ensuring donor management and fundraising software scales with rapid growth

The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund (DWF) was founded in 2018, and since then it has amassed thousands of supporters and created multiple programs such as Legacy Schools, Legacy Spaces, Artist Ambassadors and Youth Ambassadors.

DWF’s goal is to improve the lives of Indigenous people by building awareness, education and connections between all peoples in Canada. DWF calls on all people in Canada to take part in reconciliACTIONs, meaningful actions that move reconciliation forward. To date, DWF has reached over 5,000 educators through the Legacy Schools program, 40+ Legacy Spaces partners, reached over 33,000 newsletter subscribers, 9,500 individual donors and growing.

But as Reilly Goldsmith, manager of donor and partner engagement, explains, with meteoric growth comes challenges. Specifically, DWF was struggling with its donor management and fundraising software to stay efficient and build lasting personal relationships with its growing donor base.

She says as the organization began to grow, its pain points with their donor management system also increased.

There was no recurring donation functionality to track gifts that donors pledged over a period of time. The use of personas and relationship between constituents and accounts didn’t satisfy all DWF was looking to track and report to stakeholders. And, as a Canadian charity where tax receipting capability is critical, there wasn’t a straight-forward receipting option that satisfied the Canadian Revenue Agency’s requirements.

DWF was running tax receipt reports on a weekly basis, using a process that was needlessly complicated. “We really needed a system that our team could truly understand how to use so staff could take ownership of their data and processes within the system,” Reilly says.

DWF found a partner in Salesforce, a cloud-based software company, and implemented the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), an easy-to-use fundraising and constituent management application on the Salesforce platform.

And Salesforce found the perfect nonprofit consulting partner in cloudStack Services, to implement Salesforce and its NPSP for DWF as part of Salesforce’s nonprofit cloud.

Reilly says after making the decision to go with Salesforce, the hunt was on for the right Salesforce Implementation partner.

DWF needed a partner who could meet its extremely tight timeline of getting up and running with Salesforce. DWF’s donor management software contract was expiring, and one of its busiest months was around the corner. The partner also had to provide ongoing, one-to-one support as it grew into the platform. After a deep dive into all the options for implementation partners, cloudStack came out on top.

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