Het Vergeten Kind: prepared for donation spike during 3FM Serious Request
The challenge
During the COVID crisis, the foundation's work received wide public appreciation as it worked even harder to help vulnerable children, many of whom had seen their situation deteriorate since being isolated at home.
Therefore, the foundation was chosen as the centrepiece and recipient of 3FM Serious Request's annual fundraising campaign. More than 400 marketing initiatives have been launched since the announcement in September, with the campaign peaking in December 2022. During the week before Christmas, 3FM DJs will play 24-hour requests from the Glass House in Amersfoort to raise money for The Forgotten Child, so that the foundation can continue its important work and bring light into the lives of 100,000 forgotten children.
Able to handle large peak loads
"Donations need to be processed quickly because if people have to wait longer than 10 seconds for a particular page to appear on the screen, they will stop and say, 'I'll do it later,' and then forget to come back."
Prepared for contingencies since 2016
Fortunately, the existing infrastructure in Salesforce was already in place. "Everyone talks about the 'digital journey', the digital transformation and the move to the cloud," Peters explained, "but The Forgotten Child already initiated that by working with us in 2016. We actually prepared them for this moment years ago. We didn't know that at the time, but if they hadn't worked with this Cloud and Salesforce, they would probably still be working with an old system or Excel, and wouldn't be able to handle or facilitate this huge challenge."
As the 3FM campaign would place a huge workload on their existing website and Salesforce integration, Forgotten Child sought help to ensure they were fully prepared to handle the large publicity and fundraising opportunity.
"At the start of the campaign, I was glad that we were already using the Salesforce platform. During previous big campaigns, we already knew that the platform (Salesforce & Marketing Cloud, ed.) could handle peak loads."
Optimisation through thorough testing
The team went into Salesforce and checked everything by running dozens of tests with web agency Trybes. For example, what if 500 donations were sent at once? How about a thousand or two thousand? Trybes also created new forms for 3FM, since the fundraising campaign itself would run the appeals and ultimately own the data, although The Forgotten Child would receive the donations and data. Since The Forgotten Child also had Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a sophisticated marketing machine, donors would be automatically enrolled in a buyer journey, even if they donated only 1 euro.
Lex Dekker, the Salesforce squad leader at TwoPurpose, explained: "When someone makes a one-off donation, it triggers a customer journey with the ultimate goal of making them a repeat donor: That is someone who is very passionate about the cause, donates regularly, and wants to follow the stories of the children being helped. By implementing Salesforce not only for their CRM but also for marketing, The Forgotten Child was set up for success from the start."
"To the next level"
"Many organisations use Salesforce, even small non-profits, but Salesforce's Marketing Cloud - that's a different story," Peters explained. "It's really a high-end product, something Spotify and Amazon use, so having this great product can really help The Forgotten Child go to the next level," he added.
Having already automated much of its CRM and fundraising, the foundation has more capacity to do the actual things it is there for and can focus more on its core business - helping children.
