Heart and Stroke Foundation: Financial Program Support
Background...
The Heart and Stroke Foundation (HSF) has national, provincial, and provincial area offices who fundraise in support of the Foundation through various channels, and began migrating its fundraising websites to the Blackbaud TeamRaiser (CMS) / Convio Luminate CRM platform in 2014.
The sites were previously built on legacy platforms whose website configurations were based on regions (provinces, countries, ...) and only allowed 1 merchant account per region.
HSF created single merchant accounts per province which led to several manual processes to reconcile the fundraising programs' revenues.
Challenges
The national fundraising websites were created as individual provincial sites within the platforms, and HSF received their fundraising revenue in its individual provincial merchant accounts, along with each provincial and area offices' website fundraising revenues.
The original platforms didn't have a structure to segment the revenue per program, and Finance created campaign codes for each program that were added to an available field in the websites’ CRM.
HSF has over 200 yearly fundraising websites and the Finance and Support teams had to merge the merchant disbursements, program revenue, and refund reports to reconcile the funds per program, which took roughly a week to complete all programs.
Solution
The new Blackbaud CRM platform offered an integrated Blackbaud Merchant Service (BBMS) and Payment Gateway Service (BBPS) that could be administered within the CRM platform.
Researched the payment processing configuration options and discovered HSF could configure merchant accounts per program and per region for their national, provincial, and area offices.
Recommended and received obtained buy-in from Finance and the Program teams, and helped Finance create merchant accounts for all national and provincial fundraising programs.
Set-up and administered the merchant and payment gateway accounts within the platform, and created Reconciliation, Donation and Refund report templates per program.
Results
The National Finance team's reconciliation workload dropped by approximately 65%, from 5 days to 1-2 days.
The Support team's combined reconciliation workload dropped by nearly 70%, from 2-3 days to less than a day.
The provincial and area offices now have a real-time snapshot of their monthly revenue without running multiple reports.