Case Study Sneak Peek: Vs. Cancer
When Vs. Cancer approached Idealist Consulting to help them integrate Classy’s peer-to-peer fundraising with their instance of Salesforce, we were extremely excited to team up. Founded in 2013, Vs. Cancer empowers athletes of all ages to fight against childhood cancer. Athletes from youth leagues to professional teams fund childhood cancer research and make donations to hospitals. In just three years, Vs. Cancer has helped 58 children’s hospitals and 40,616 children.
The Challenge: Unscalable Systems
When they came to Idealist Consulting, Vs. Cancer was using Classy for their reporting, fundraising, and development needs, and Salesforce for managing their donor relationships and for internal operations. But these two important tools weren’t connected, so Vs. Cancer struggled to track how they were administering grants to their network of children's hospitals.
Their original process was too complex and incorporated many moving pieces.
“We had to keep going between Classy, spreadsheets, and Salesforce to determine how much teams had raised, which team it was associated with, and what cause or hospital it was going to. We needed something to tie all the pieces together so we didn’t have to keep bouncing between Excel spreadsheets to figure out our data.”
--Chase Jones, CEO and Founder
Vs. Cancer realized they needed a significant systems upgrade when, as a young nonprofit running on a tight margin, they miscalculated some donations and overgave to one of their recipients. Since they were managing donations through manually referencing Google docs, spreadsheets, and their online platforms, they had made an understandable human error. Vs. Cancer is deeply committed to responsibly representing donors, stakeholders, their community of athletes, and the network of children they serve. They knew they needed a more reliable system.
The Solution: Start with Classy, then Scale
For Vs. Cancer, Classy was an integral part of what they did, but it didn’t do everything (and was never designed to). Excellent at raising money and inspiring their audiences, it didn’t provide the workflows Vs. Cancer needed to carry out their mission from start to finish. For this reason, they looked into Salesforce.org to help them fill in the holes and bring them the rest of the way.
Specifically, Vs. Cancer needed Salesforce to enhance their communication and reporting:
“We looked at Salesforce to help us be a better organization when it came to communication with leads, donors, etc. We weren’t okay sending someone an email that said, ‘Thanks for raising money.’ We wanted the specifics! ‘Thank you Bobby for raising $400; that’s going to benefit the Writers in the Schools program at Seattle Children’s Hospital.’ We wanted to get down to the nitty gritty information, and that's where we turned to Salesforce.”
Now, with the help of Predictive Response, Vs. Cancer is sending hyper-focused emails and notifications to fundraisers and donors to inspire giving and keep them engaged. They’re also putting targeted content in front of prospective audiences, and can more accurately and persuasively communicate who they are and what they do.
Are you curious how Vs. Cancer built up their system to reach their goals? Want to hear how they’ve promoted user adoption? Want to see what they’ve accomplished? Go to the full case study to find out!
