How data quality makes life easier for non-profits
Rid the world of diabetes
Plauti saves many non-profit organizations time in their daily operations and improves donor and volunteer experiences by improving data quality. A perfect example of a non-profit leveraging Duplicate Check and Record Validation solutions is Diabetes Fonds, the Dutch diabetic fund. ‘Manually deduping records and checking contact fields is a labor-intensive and recurring task. We cannot justify spending time on tasks like this when there are automated solutions out there.’ Says Erik Visscher, database marketer and Salesforce Administrator at Diabetes Fonds.
“ Having a single customer view of our donors is essential to effective and error-free communication. ”Erik Visscher Database Marketer & Salesforce Administrator
Aiming for a 360 customer view
Diabetes Fonds is an official registered Dutch charity aiming to rid the world of diabetes. They fund and perform scientific research into diabetes and educate the public on healthy living and preventing diabetes. They work with paid staff supported by volunteers. Diabetes Fonds has more than 65,000 active donors in their Salesforce organization. Duplicate Check and Record Validation are an integral part of the process of adding new records to their CRM. Diabetes Fonds runs on Converse. A CRM for non-profit organizations built by CISIS on top of Salesforce.
‘Having a single customer view of our donors is essential to effective and error-free communication. We used to achieve this by manually processing duplicates found by Salesforce Duplicate Management and using a self-built script for address verification.’ Visscher explains. ‘We could not bulk merge records, leading to enormous deduplication backlogs after each marketing campaign.’ Verifying addresses was also a hassle: ‘I used to export all our address data and run a SQL script to compare this data to a postal code table. After updating the faulty fields, I imported the updated addresses back into Salesforce. Sometimes we even resorted to manually verifying addresses on the Dutch postal website.’
Automate all the things
Diabetes Fonds chose Plauti solutions for its data quality needs for its vast bulk and automation options and the ability to integrate the checks into the existing processes for its customer service department: ‘We have integrated Record Validation into our manual contact entry pages. My customer service colleagues now use autocomplete to enter addresses based on postal code and house number. This greatly reduces data entry time and data entry errors.’ Erik also leverages Duplicate Check to check new records automatically for duplicates.
Plauti solutions are fully compatible with all Salesforce clouds, NPSP and NGO-connect.
Erik has some advice for Salesforce admins looking to automate data quality processes: ‘I suggest starting by manually using your solutions. This way, you can fine-tune the duplicate identification scenarios and threshold settings. After finding the optimal settings, it is safe to use them in automation.’
Both solutions reinforce each other. By validating and formatting email, phone, and address fields first, Record Validation increases the total number of duplicates found and reduces false positives in Duplicate Check.
“ Since our donor data is no longer spread across multiple records, we have made a big improvement in the effectiveness of our campaigns. ”Erik Visscher Database Marketer & Salesforce Administrator
Happier colleagues
‘Verifying data was never the favorite task of our employees. Since using Duplicate Check and Record Validation, we have saved countless hours of tedious work. We now have more time for more meaningful work.’
Erik also reports direct cost savings: ‘We have deduplicated our database before starting with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The marketing fee is based on the number of records, so we have managed to reduce the fee significantly.’ The Salesforce admin reports some 4% of all records are merged as a duplicate, including new ones with over tens of thousands of records merged to date.
The most significant benefit is having an accurate 360 view: ‘Since our donor data is no longer spread across multiple records, we have made a big improvement in the effectiveness of our campaigns. Plauti has truly delivered a positive ROI, made even higher by a non-profit discount.’
Are you ready to follow the footsteps of Diabetes Fonds and other non-profits such as CARE USA, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontiers and create a clean and effective database? Save time and costs and start using Plauti data quality solutions today. Schedule a demo with one of our product experts.
