Supporting the Supporters for Meals on Wheels.

Which volunteers are donors? How many hours do your donors volunteer? Simple questions – but no easy answers without a centralized system for your supporters.

Services

The Challenge

Meals on Wheels Chicago partners with the City of Chicago to help deliver essential services to the homebound. Their work feeds more than the body with messages of caring while providing the recipients with a connection to the outside world. In some cases the only one.

To support their efforts, MOWC recruits both individual and organizational volunteers. They also solicit financial and in-kind donations from chefs, businesses and the generous of heart. Through their dedicated efforts, the small team was managing to support thousands of people. But they didn’t have a 360-degree view of each supporter. Data lived in a variety of spreadsheets, smaller legacy systems and external systems that just couldn’t be integrated effectively. Volunteer and donor management was a struggle for this small but busy nonprofit.

The Solution

With limited human resources, MOWC needed a nonprofit CRM with strong, integrated functionality for giving a consolidated view of each contact, including their donations of time, materials and money. And to ensure that their reporting and 360 degree view of the individuals and organizations was useful, we needed a data migration plan to look at their historical data to identify what needed to be mothballed, cleaned up and/or transformed before migrating.

*For data security purposes, all screenshots below show demo content.

How We Got There.

Though a small team without a dedicated IT person, MOWC had the internal tech savvy to be ready to handle the ongoing management of Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). They were able to take advantage of the Salesforce “Power of Us” program that provides 10 free Enterprise level licenses that we configured to reflect how they interact with their people, organizations and process elements. We paired with a compatible flexible form software (Formstack) and integrated Salesforce with their existing Quickbooks Online to eliminate the manual work that was previously required to move information across systems. With these in place, and data consolidated and migrated, their new infrastructure enabled that end-to-end view of each supporter – along with aggregated information in reports to share with their Board and funders.