Challenge

Good Friday Appeal has been fundraising for The Royal Children’s Hospital for over 90 years. Five years ago, it began working with Vertic to improve its scalability and increase its impact. Good Friday Appeal’s custom-built app relied on several disparate databases; Vertic consolidated these into a single Salesforce solution that linked to Good Friday Appeal’s payment gateway. With this solution, it gained better access to and transparency around donor records.

In 2020, its fundraising activities were severely impacted by the pandemic, and it saw donations cut by half. It became evident that adapting to the shift toward online donations would be key to its long-term success. Over the next two years, the organisation invested more in digital infrastructure as donors increasingly moved online.

Good Friday Appeal sought to make it easier for donors to give online while maintaining a personalized experience. Since it was historically a cash-based organisation founded on relationships, it wanted to offer the flexibility of cashless giving – even at in-person events – without losing the human touch. It needed a way to collect more data for insights into its donors so it could better support and thank them and enrich their entire giving experience.

As Good Friday Appeal scaled, it sought to reduce complexity, simplify its solution stack, and integrate payments better with Vertic’s fundraising management app. It wanted a payments solution that could help it scale while simplifying processes, provide access to digital wallet payments like Google Pay and Apple Pay, and make the donation process as smooth and simple as possible. And, because most of its fundraising activity is centred on Good Friday, it needed a reliable and secure platform that could handle the high volume of payments that come through in one day.

Solution

Vertic, Good Friday Appeal’s trusted partner, advised that it change from its legacy CRM to Salesforce’s non-profit solution, which would also allow it to work with Stripe as a payments gateway. Vertic helped Good Friday Appeal integrate Stripe with Vertic’s digital fundraising solution, NPSP+ and the Salesforce platform, enabling it to improve, streamline, and simplify its systems.

With Salesforce’s Non-profit Success Pack, Good Friday Appeal is able to insert donation calls to action anywhere throughout its website, allowing for better trackability and access to data, and enabling it to optimise its approach to fundraising. Additionally, the donation widget powered by Stripe gives Good Friday Appeal more administrative flexibility and control over design features.

By integrating with Stripe via Salesforce, Good Friday Appeal was able to begin accepting mobile payments via digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. It could also now support recurring gifts through subscriptions with Stripe Billing and Salesforce, providing donors with more flexible options for giving.

Results

Good Friday Appeal broke all prior fundraising records in 2022 by raising AU$22M+ – over 25% of which was processed through Stripe. Stripe was able to handle 44,000 individual transactions for Good Friday Appeal in a 24-hour period.

Vertic has also helped Good Friday Appeal make it easier and more convenient for donors to give by providing more payment method options and increased flexibility. Good Friday Appeal’s efforts to incorporate mobile payments via digital wallets were met with great success. Apple Pay and Google Pay saw widespread adoption, accounting for 22% of Stripe transactions, with the number of Apple Pay transactions topping the industry standard by more than 50%.

Good Friday Appeal has seen an improvement in efficiency across the board. By offloading the payments gateway to Stripe, which sends metadata to Salesforce, it can now use Salesforce as a single source of truth for all donations and donor details. This has streamlined the work of the small Good Friday Appeal team and its many volunteers. Whether dealing with reconciliations or donor issues, or simply seeking an overview of a campaign, Good Friday Appeal can access the data all in one place.

Going forward, Good Friday Appeal plans to continue consolidating and optimising its efforts to scale its reach and impact while simplifying and automating more of its processes with Vertic, Stripe, and Salesforce.

About Partner

Vertic, an Australia-based digital consulting firm and Salesforce and Stripe partner, empowers customer-focused and digitally ambitious organisations to transform themselves with relevance, empathy, and ultimately, organisational success.