How Diabetes Fonds Manages Data Quality in Salesforce

Plauti helps non-profit organizations spend less time on data entry and more time on their mission, by keeping donor and volunteer records clean. Diabetes Fonds, the Dutch diabetes charity, uses Plauti to find and merge duplicate donor records and to verify contact details as they come in.

"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.

Aiming for a 360-degree donor view

Diabetes Fonds is an officially registered Dutch charity working to rid the world of diabetes. It funds and performs scientific research into diabetes and educates the public on healthy living and prevention, with a small paid staff supported by volunteers. The organization manages more than 65,000 active donors in its Salesforce org, running on Converse, a nonprofit CRM built by CISIS on top of Salesforce. Finding duplicates and verifying contact data are now a built-in part of adding new records to that CRM.

"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," Erik 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."

Automating duplicate checks and address validation

Diabetes Fonds chose Plauti for its bulk and automation options, and for how easily the checks slot into the existing workflow of its customer service team: "We have integrated address 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 has new records checked automatically for duplicates as they are created.

Plauti works across all Salesforce clouds, NPSP, and NGO-Connect. Erik's advice for Salesforce admins looking to automate their own data quality process: "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."

The two capabilities reinforce each other. Validating and formatting email, phone, and address fields first increases the total number of duplicates found and reduces false positives when merging records.

Time saved and costs reduced

"Verifying data was never the favorite task of our employees," Erik says. "Since using Plauti, we have saved countless hours of tedious work. We now have more time for more meaningful work."

There are direct cost savings too: "We 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." About 4% of all records are merged as duplicates, including new ones, with over tens of thousands of records merged to date.

The most significant benefit is having an accurate 360-degree 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."

Diabetes Fonds is one of several non-profits using Plauti to keep donor data clean, alongside CARE USA, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontières.