Southern Smoke Foundation

May 7, 2025

Transforming crisis relief and donor relationships with Salesforce and FinDock

Introduction

Southern Smoke Foundation provides essential crisis relief grants and no-cost mental health counseling to food and beverage workers across the United States. Since its founding, the foundation has delivered $14.5 million directly to individuals facing unforeseen hardships, demonstrating a profound commitment to community well-being and resilience.

Challenges: Excel Sheets and Missed Opportunities

Before adopting Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and FinDock, Southern Smoke managed critical programs and fundraising efforts primarily using Excel sheets, Google forms, and multiple disconnected platforms. According to Lindsey Brown, Co-Founder and Executive Director, this fragmented system posed significant risks of human error, offered limited visibility into donor relationships, and lacked efficient reconciliation between donor data and financial records.

Key issues included:

  • High risk of inaccuracies and data duplication
  • Inefficient donor management and missed donor engagement opportunities
  • Difficulty accurately reconciling financial data between fundraising and accounting systems

Reflecting on the decision to transform their systems, Lindsey shared:

“One thing that really helped us was looking at some other nonprofits who were successfully using Salesforce. Understanding how they were making the most of the platform enabled us to embrace the initial complexity, while moving towards clarity, efficiency, and long-term benefits.”

 

Why Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and FinDock?

Southern Smoke needed a centralized system robust enough to handle both their program management and fundraising operations seamlessly. Initially hesitant due to perceptions about Salesforce’s cost, Lindsey discovered Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud was financially accessible, due to the Salesforce Power of Us Program.

CentralApp, a trusted Salesforce implementation partner recommended by Salesforce and other nonprofit organizations, guided Southern Smoke to FinDock, a solution that is built directly within Salesforce to optimize payment processing and donor relationship management.

As Jade Keenan, Implementation Consultant at CentralApp, explains:

“FinDock allows us to spin up very curated and intentional donor pages quickly and mindfully within the Salesforce architecture to allow us to take advantage of the full Salesforce suite and technology while still making an easy user experience to accessing these technologies.”

Vision & Solution: Tailored for Impact

Southern Smoke implemented Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud during the summer of 2024, strategically aligning their programs and fundraising efforts within one unified platform. With FinDock, they gained advanced capabilities for managing giving pages, recurring donations, and streamlined financial reconciliations with QuickBooks.

Notable improvements include:

  • Customized giving pages that fundraising staff can quickly create and self-manage, particularly useful during urgent campaigns such as hurricane relief efforts, enabling precise donor tracking, efficient allocation of restricted funds, and a seamless donation experience.
  • Enhanced visibility into donor histories and engagement patterns, enabling proactive relationship building, more personalized donor outreach, and a smoother donation experience that fosters greater donor trust and satisfaction.
  • Streamlined financial reconciliation processes, significantly reducing manual input and minimizing discrepancies, which has streamlined donation operations and contributed to a more consistent, hassle-free donor experience.

Lindsey particularly highlighted the launch of the Southern Smoke Bottle Club, an innovative donor program managed through FinDock Giving Pages, which rapidly attracted 86 members – nearly reaching their annual target within the first year.

Describing the effectiveness of FinDock Giving Pages during critical fundraising periods, Lindsey noted:

“I’m loving these pages. So many people are raising money on our behalf for the hurricanes, and this makes it so easy.”

Impact: Record Growth and Operational Efficiency

Adopting Salesforce and FinDock has led to measurable success:

  • A record-setting first quarter of fundraising in 2025, closely aligned with enhanced donor engagement and operational efficiencies
  • Significant reduction in manual administrative tasks, freeing up staff to focus on strategic, relationship-building activities

Southern Smoke’s integration has effectively enhanced both their crisis relief delivery and donor experience, setting a robust foundation for future growth.

 

Future Outlook: Continuous Improvement and Expanded Reach

Southern Smoke continues refining their use of Salesforce and FinDock, exploring enhancements such as personalized donor acknowledgment letters tied directly to campaign-specific giving pages. The team remains committed to leveraging technology to deepen donor relationships, expand program reach, and sustain the critical support provided to their community.

Southern Smoke Foundation exemplifies how Salesforce and FinDock can profoundly enhance nonprofit operations, creating donor payment happiness and driving both mission impact and donor engagement to new heights.

Background

The National Trust is the UK’s largest conservation charity, caring for more than 780 miles of coastline, 250,000 hectares of countryside and hundreds of historic houses and gardens. Membership fees keep that work alive, but their in-house CRM system was struggling to keep up with today’s scale: 5.37 million members, 265k renewals a month and almost 3 million payments. Mounting technical debt, manual renewals and siloed finance systems were eroding both efficiency and member experience.

To turn things around, the National Trust chose Salesforce with FinDock. The summary below, shared by Claire, shows how they set their goals, delivered the new stack, unlocked rapid benefits, and what’s next on their digital roadmap.

Planning & Goal Setting

The National Trust realised its incumbent CRM system was no longer fit for purpose: this limited membership propositions, had a high cost in technical debt, and led to a poor member experience.

To reverse the decline, the team set a clear objective: improve operational efficiency, enhance member experience, and set foundations for 10-year growth. They drew up a clear checklist:

  • Salesforce native
  • Enterprise scale, API-first
  • Maintainable by in-house staff with no further technical debt

After weighing the options, they selected Salesforce as the new CRM and chose FinDock as the native Salesforce payments engine. Together, those platforms promised an enterprise-scale, API-first architecture capable of supporting their ever-expanding membership while laying robust foundations for the decade ahead.

The Implementation Process

With clear goals, a defined MVP scope and tight internal alignment, the National Trust kicked off delivery by engaging a selected implementation partner to support the Salesforce + FinDock rollout. The programme integrated core Salesforce Service Cloud, CPQ, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Data Cloud and payments in a single stack.

At its peak, 160 people worked through about a thousand user stories across 22 business journeys, full data migration, and after three years of work—went live January 2023, turning the transformation vision into reality.

Go Live & Benefits

Going live unlocked a range of benefits:

  • Smooth cut-over: transition from slow, manual CRM to a scalable solution built on Salesforce and FinDock for all memberships and donations.
  • Faster Direct-Debit batch runs: 77 % faster batch processing – a Direct Debit run now takes 3 hours compared to 13 hours previously.
  • Back-office gains: improved Gift Aid processes and Direct Debit mandate handling, with plenty of room for planned growth.
  • Friction-free checkout: launch of Google Pay and Apple Pay simplifying online renewals and donations.
  • Responsive support: “FinDock support is real time, very responsive and industry aligned,” giving teams rapid assistance and confidence as they scale.

Looking Ahead

Claire says they are now seeking better, more adaptive and flexible membership and gift-membership optimisations so members can enjoy richer benefits online and choose models that fit their lifestyles. The National Trust is in a strong position to review and renew current ways of working and adapt in a world that’s changing fast.

On the technical side, the Salesforce + FinDock stack gives them a scalable platform architected for further growth, positioning the charity to roll out new channels and payment methods quickly and to support an ever-growing member and supporter base over the next decade.

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.