Salesforce in practice: guest registration at Utrecht Ronald McDonald House

 Personal commitment

I am a fan of the Ronald McDonald philosophy. From experience, I know how much the volunteers mean in extremely difficult situations of families. It has been over 20 years since my brother and sister-in-law were guests at the Ronald McDonald House in Utrecht. My eight-year-old nephew had leukaemia, which hit their family hard. My wife and I visited them with our then young family. It touched me deeply how comforting the shelter of the Ronald McDonald guest house was.

 Utrecht House

The Children's Fund has now been live on Salesforce CRM for over three years. Huis Utrecht also maintains its relationships via Salesforce, and support from all kinds of organisations and donations from friends is well managed. The guest house for parents of sick children is run by volunteers and largely relies on donations from individuals and companies. Guest registration was still done in a separate application, not connected to Salesforce.

Huis Utrecht has been managed by Agatha Kleis. With a background in hotel management, Agatha initiated, among others, the Business Breakfast Club (breakfast with a mission). A logical desire was to integrate guest registration with CRM.

 Challenge

One challenge here was privacy and AVG legislation. The number of volunteers registering guests is hefty, it would become very costly to have them all working directly in Salesforce. Moreover, that adds to the privacy and usability challenges. How can registration be done in a reliable, discrete, cost-effective and user-friendly way?

 Solution

g-company - in close cooperation with the Ronald McDonald Children's Fund and Huis Utrecht - found a good solution to this challenge: via online forms, volunteers can register guests in Salesforce. Salesforce uses an objective algorithm to select which room is allocated for which parents, sometimes with their families. Via a secure link, the information is processed and shared. In addition, room management and financial administration is managed in Salesforce. There is now an overall view of all guests within the CRM.

Most organisations have multiple processes that are not supported in an integrated way by a central system. It pays to identify these and think through what added value can be gained by collaborating on a platform and recording all data only once.

 Result

The details of guests, the parents of sick children, are now also in the database and aftercare is thus even better facilitated. Moreover, former guests can, appropriately and through well-designed 'customer journeys', give something back to the Ronald McDonald House that so lovingly welcomed them, if they so wish. From personal experience, I know that this need can be strong. At Ronald McDonald they know this too: there are thousands of volunteers in the Netherlands who put their heart and soul into helping to make life a little more bearable for parents with sick children during a leaden period of their lives.

Want to know more about guest registration, or how further added value can be achieved with the Salesforce platform? Feel free to email or call me about that: balt@twopurpose.com | 0652869224.

Read here more about the Salesforce CRM implementation for Ronald McDonald Children's Fund