When it comes to inspiring young leaders through immersive cross-cultural experiences, the nonprofit Amigos de las Americas leads the way.
April Hearne, Amigos de las Americas’ managing director of marketing and communications, sits on a fundraising team responsible for fundraising to support this programming. As an AMIGOS alum herself, April understands the importance of these experiences, and the ways they help develop future leaders.
However, coming into her role at the organization, she quickly realized that many of the fundraising tools AMIGOS used weren’t necessarily intuitive to a younger generation fundraising for their immersion experiences. In fact, they were hindering the process for volunteers and causing headaches on the administrative side.
April turned to CauseVox to help inspire and activate her volunteer fundraisers, to much success. She also utilized CauseVox’s Zapier integration to streamline the team’s workload and effectively leverage their time. Due in part to these technology tools, her team was able to raise more than $500,000 through 33 separate campaigns in 2018; engaging hundreds of students, alumni, and other volunteers in the process.
If you’re thinking about using CauseVox + Zapier to streamline your fundraising, check out April’s story.
Trials & Solutions
Modernizing AMIGOS’ fundraising systems was one of April’s first tasks as she transitioned into her role at the nonprofit’s National Office in Houston. Issues related to systems integration and tracking multiple payment methods left her feeling as though her team was spending the bulk of their time on back-end issues, and not on direct fundraising.
She knew AMIGOS needed to find a fundraising platform that maximized staff time and, just as importantly, didn’t break the bank.
Since a significant portion of AMIGOS’ fundraising is peer-to-peer thanks to robust support from students and alumni, April turned to CauseVox for a solution. The Zapier integration, which allows users like April to import data from CauseVox to over 750 applications, was the icing on the cake.
“The CauseVox integration with Zapier makes this process easy for us on the peer-to-peer side of things. We integrated everything in house and relatively quickly,” said April.
CauseVox + Zapier Saves Resources
Once April and her team decided to use CauseVox, they got to work creating the fundraising websites. Within a few months, they had 26 sites up and running, and as of this posting, the organization manages a whopping 33 sites and embed forms. “We’re ramping up new campaigns all the time.”
You may be wondering: How can a small team manage so many websites?
According to April, it’s all about the technology. Using CauseVox with Zapier, AMIGOS can automate many tasks that were once time-consuming and cumbersome. April notes three processes, in particular, that have been particularly helpful:
- Their donation data is pushed straight to their fundraising CRM system (Salesforce)
- Internal notifications are sent automatically and immediately once someone makes a donation.
- Data is cleaned up with Zapier as it’s being transferred to the CRM.
Plus, April needn’t re-create a zap for each campaign. “Once you’ve built the main zap, it’s a piece of cake to clone it for new campaigns,” she explained.
Because this all happens automatically, April save times and the money she would have once spent on an outside developer.
“This Zap is Great”
What does a Zap look like? April was excited to share her favorite Zap; one that transfers and collects the data, while cleaning it up on the back end.
The process looks something like this:
- AMIGOS receives a new donation data from CauseVox, triggering the Zap
- Phone number formats
- Country name formats
- Use a Google Sheet to find or create a row on a list of state abbreviations
- Lookup a Google Sheet row to find a state abbreviation
- Currency formats
- Donor’s first name capitalized
- Donor’s last name capitalized
- Street name capitalized
- City name capitalized
- Send an internal notification email with key donation information using Mandrill
- Find or create Contact in Salesforce
- Create Opportunity in Salesforce connected to the existing or new Contact record
In seconds, all the information collected from the transaction is exactly where it needs to be!
April noted, “This zap is great because it not only pushes donation data to Salesforce automatically and reliably, but it also cleans the data as it goes. That means we need to spend less time manually cleaning our data.”
The Potential Is There
The immense potential of the CauseVox + Zapier integration truly surprised April. “With the Zapier integration, if you can dream it, you can probably do it.” Whether you’re looking to format, filter, or send emails, the functionality is there.
Although April is already using CauseVox + Zapier, she’s still looking for ways to streamline her processes even more. In the future, she’s excited to incorporate a system for automating the documentation of check donations, which will include creating a record in Salesforce and generating digital receipts.
The sky is indeed the limit!
“By expanding our fundraising resources and campaigns, we can now provide more ways for our supporters to donate while also reaching new audiences who might not know about our work and mission. This allows our donors to make it possible for more young people to join our programs. I’m inspired to come to work every day and continue sharing what we do with as many people as possible!”
If you’re looking to manage online fundraising campaigns, automate your most tedious, time-consuming tasks, and bridge your separate platforms in the process, there’s no better solution than CauseVox and Zapier.
Now is the time to streamline your workload and inspire supporters at the same time!
To learn more about using Zapier with your existing CauseVox account, check it out here.
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