National Childbirth Trust (NCT) is a UK national charity that provides support to parents through the first 1,000 days to have the best possible experience of pregnancy, birth and early parenthood. Previously NCT was using a legacy system to manage its CRM and financial processes. Knowing that this wasn’t going to be able to support them into the future, they decided to look for another solution.
After considering a number of options, the NCT team made the decision to go with Salesforce. They chose FinDock as the payments solution on top as it enabled them to accept, process and reconcile payments quickly and conveniently in Salesforce.
“FinDock was an excellent option as it offered out-of-the-box Direct Debit and Gift Aid functionalities and was also able to manage the online payments for NCT,” says Hannah Cook, Head of Finance and Planning at NCT.
Offering more flexible ways to pay
The first phase of NCT’s Salesforce and FinDock project was to support its paid-for courses. NCT is funded through paid-for services, publically funded commissioned work, corporate partnerships and membership and other donations. A large portion of its income is through its very popular Antenatal and Postnatal support courses.
NCT processes around 35,000 course-related transactions annually — a quarter of which are paid in instalments. Something NCT needed to take into account was supporting parents’ spread costs, especially through the cost of living crisis. A solution was to offer course payments in instalments, reducing the burden on families.
“We would like to continue to offer other payment options to support parents, such as implementing Apple Pay and Google Pay and to take advantage of their ease of use. If someone wants to make a payment, they should be able to make it in their preferred way.”
NCT is using Worldpay in Salesforce via FinDock to manage course payments. The team has full visibility into how courses are performing and when payments are complete. Because the data is standardised in Salesforce, it can be used in reports and dashboards, and also in workflows – which means automations can be set up to notify team members if anything happens to a payment.
“Our finance team only needs to review payments every so often to ensure they are not blocked. Worldpay sends us notifications through FinDock, allowing us to easily see the payments and ensure they’re going through. This makes it much simpler for the finance team to manage,” explains Hannah.
Further efficiencies on the horizon
NCT is currently setting up direct debit and Gift Aid management in Salesforce via FinDock. This will help them streamline their payment-related processes even more and move closer to a single system solution.
“We are collaborating with FinDock to construct our direct debit infrastructure with BACS,” says Hannah. “FinDock’s Customer Success team has been a great partner in this and has been highly responsive to our requests.”
NTC will also begin to use FinDock’s Guided Matching tool in the coming months to ensure incoming bank instructions and files are matched correctly to Salesforce data.
Connecting data and providing better experiences
NCT’s mission is much bigger than raising funds – it strives to build a network of knowledgeable parents, who are committed to helping and guiding new parents and making the transition to parenthood a little easier.
“Our goal is to gain insight into how parents interact with our organisation as we engage with them in numerous ways. We want to provide support and provide them with the best possible experience,” Hannah explains. “Additionally, we hope to inspire and motivate them to become volunteers or supporters for other parents.”
While NCT’s journey with Salesforce and FinDock is just in its infancy, NCT is glad that they have partners which can support them grow with them into the future and help them realise their mission goals.
