How a Humanitarian Organization Utilizes Salesforce and AppExchange to Help Millions Displaced by Crisis
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is probably the largest nonprofit you’ve never heard of. The organization focuses on helping individuals who have been displaced by conflict and other protracted crises in countries around the world. Helping approximately 9 million individuals a year, NRC is utilizing Salesforce and AppExchange apps to begin to build strong relationships with donors and unlock the scalability required to accomplish their mission.
Cloud Compliance Privacy Suite, available on the AppExchange, was the first AppExchange app leveraged by the 75-year-old humanitarian organization. After seeing how impactful the app was in ensuring privacy compliance for their private donors, NRC began a long and successful journey of extending Salesforce with AppExchange technology.
We caught up with Brage Haugan Storkersen, Analysis and Performance Advisor at NRC, to learn more about how Salesforce and AppExchange help the organization to improve the lives of millions who were forced to flee.
Tell us about NRC and your role with the organization.
Brage Haugan Størkersen: With 15,000 humanitarians working worldwide, our focus at NRC is on helping people displaced by conflict or other protracted crises. We help individuals who are forced to flee within their own country, as well as individuals fleeing to escape their own country. What’s unique about our organization, though, is that we focus on targeting hard-to-reach individuals. For example, there could be a displaced community who need help in Colombia, and we may have to travel upriver by boat to reach them. We also work in active conflict zones, like in Syria, where we provided aid to the people escaping bombed homes. We don’t take sides, what we do is provide critical life-saving things like food, security, water, and sanitation to the people that need it.
My role is within the marketing department, which we call external relations because it also impacts corporate partnerships, individual donors, and so on. Specifically, I work on the tech stack for our marketing department; I’m the admin for both Tableau — our data visualization software — and our Salesforce CRM software. I handle new development in terms of adding functionality, either by developing new software or locating it. AppExchange has helped us extend our Salesforce functionality in so many ways.
When did your Salesforce journey begin?
Brage Haugan Størkersen: Our journey started about two years ago, while we were still using a different CRM software. We realized we were spending all this money on server costs, and the software wasn’t meeting our requirements. At the same time, we already had Salesforce instances running within our organizations. Once we conducted a vendor evaluation, we realized we needed a CRM software that was adaptable and scalable; that’s when we first saw the potential of Salesforce.
The implementation process took us about six months, but once our data was moved to our new Salesforce org, we were able to start tackling business goals pretty quickly.
Since making the transition to Salesforce, we’ve iterated and integrated several new aspects both in terms of payment integrations and functionality, including a variety of AppExchange apps.
What challenges have AppExchange apps helped you solve?
Brage Haugan Størkersen: The very first AppExchange app we leveraged was Cloud Compliance, because privacy was and always will be an absolute priority for us. Cloud Compliance ensures that all of our private donors have a secure online experience and that we meet the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation compliance standards. With the app,if we don’t need a piece of data, we don’t store it. We’ve also been able to manage over five hundred thousand individual consents while reducing the time spent handling data portability and right-to-be-forgotten requests by about 60%.
Another app we use to solve challenges is the 360 SMS app, which enables us to have an SMS chat function on our website that doesn’t require much manual input on our end. But the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) has been the app we’ve leaned on the most.
Most of our private individual revenue comes from recurring donations, and the automation built into the NPSP ensures we’re able to fully manage our memberships and donations without ever missing a step. We’re able to automate all of the future opportunities that surround a recurring donation object — this helps us to maximize the incredible generosity of our donors. The contact merge feature has also made life easier for us by allowing us to centralize contact information for donors and other external contacts. NPSP has saved us countless hours on manual input.
Finally, we also leverage Mailchimp Integration App to drive our email marketing campaigns. Since we do a lot more than simply send out monthly newsletters, we push our Salesforce data into Mailchimp so that our email team can ensure all of our individual campaigns stay up to date and optimized. It saves our email team a lot of frustration.
How will Salesforce and AppExchange help you meet strategic goals in the future?
Brage Haugan Størkersen: Salesforce and AppExchange apps are going to play a major role in the future of our organization. We’ve already seen how apps can help us manage the funds we receive from institutional donors like governments. But those grants are earmarked funds meaning they must be used according to the grant rules including what we can use the donation for, and in what areas. We’re extremely grateful for each and every donation we receive, but the restrictions can naturally hamper our ability to respond quickly to an emerging crisis. That’s why donations from private individuals are essential for the growth of our organization. Donations from private individuals, people just like you and me, are completely unrestricted. Our long-term strategic ambition for NRC is to have at least 20% of our funding come from unrestricted funds, but meeting that goal will be challenging. Luckily, Salesforce and AppExchange apps can help.
We are becoming more focused on reaching individual donors from around the world. Recently, we’ve expanded into Sweden, Norway, and Germany, so utilizing a CRM system that can scale globally is absolutely essential. Having the ability to extend Salesforce with AppExchange apps offers us an extremely high level of scalability. AppExchange apps enable plug-and-play functionality that help us adhere to different cultural norms, tax rules, and localizations in countries around the world; this will allow us to better connect with individuals in countries around the world.
Conclusion
To NRC, every donation received offers a chance to help desperate people displaced by crisis. Salesforce and AppExchange apps enable the organization to extend their outreach to countries around the world, ensuring they are doing everything possible to help those in desperate need.
Check out Nonprofit Success Pack and the other AppExchange apps being leveraged by NRC on the AppExchange.
Support the Norwegian Refugee Council on their mission to help displaced people by donating today.
