How The Ocean Cleanup is connecting global fundraising with Salesforce and FinDock
The Ocean Cleanup is on a mission most people recognize on sight: to rid the world's oceans of plastic and stop more plastic from getting in. Behind that mission is a team of around 200 people, working on cleanup solutions around the world.
A donor base scattered across payment service providers
The Ocean Cleanup had already used Salesforce for years, primarily for partnerships and donor support. Individual giving was a different story. Donor data largely lived where the payment happened, directly with payment service providers such as Buckaroo and PayPal, with no central view in Salesforce to understand the full donor relationship or use giving history for future campaigns.
The Ocean Cleanup wanted to bring individual donor data into Salesforce and started rebuilding its Salesforce environment and moved to Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), creating the base to bring individual fundraising and donor data into Salesforce as well.
Bringing payments into Salesforce with FinDock
With that foundation in place, The Ocean Cleanup selected FinDock to connect its website donation experience to Salesforce, followed by bringing historic donor data into the platform.
“We already really like that we can see everyone in Salesforce. Based on the roll-up values, we can see how much someone has donated over time, their average gift, first donation and latest donation. It's very nice that we have this one place and have the context.”
One connected system, wherever a donation comes from
The Ocean Cleanup raises funds globally, and its three largest donor countries — the United States, Germany and the Netherlands — all bring different payment expectations. Through FinDock, The Ocean Cleanup connects Buckaroo, PayPal and Stripe to Salesforce, so donors always see the payment methods they're familiar with, without adding operational complexity in the backend.
Euro payments processed primarily through Buckaroo, alongside PayPal and Stripe for selected card payments.
US dollar payments run primarily through Stripe, with cards and ACH.
One-time and recurring monthly donations, with FinDock managing recurring mandates and routing payments to the right provider.
New methods, such as Stripe Link, added through FinDock without building a new integration from scratch.
“We wanted to turn Stripe Link on and see how people would respond, and already we see a lot of people using it. As new payment methods become relevant, we can add them through FinDock.”
The donation page itself uses FinDock's API, supporting the different providers and payment methods The Ocean Cleanup's international donor base requires.
Automating what happens around the payment
Having payment data available natively in Salesforce also lets The Ocean Cleanup build processes around what happens when a donation doesn't go as planned.
A dunning flow automatically sends a PayLink when a recurring payment fails, giving the donor an easy way to complete it.
Donations that are started but not completed are automatically closed after an hour, triggering a follow-up email while the intention to donate is still recent.
Plans are underway to expand the use of PayLinks to let donors update expired payment methods, rather than just retrying the same failed payment.
“A first version of the Dunning flow is live and we are looking to take it a step further and start using PayLinks to update the payment method itself, because if an expired card caused the problem, simply retrying that one payment doesn't solve it for next time.”
Giving supporter service the context it was missing
For the support team, having payment data in Salesforce means donor questions and changes can be handled from one system, with giving history right there for context.
“For our customer support team, it's much easier to manage supporter requests through one system rather than hopping around. And the same goes for reporting. We used to download reports from every payment service provider and build pivot tables in Excel. Now the reports are already set up in Salesforce. We refresh them, look at the dashboards and immediately have the overview we need.”
Growing recurring giving
Recurring giving is growing at The Ocean Cleanup. An impact calculator on the donation page has helped shift more supporters towards monthly donations.
“We can see our recurring donor numbers increasing, and of course we want to keep those donors for longer. Having all that data in one place means we can see how that base is developing and start thinking about what we can do to build those relationships over time.” Erika Träskvik
From payment data to personalized donor journeys
The Ocean Cleanup is using donation history to shape journeys, from welcoming a first-time donor to recognizing long-term supporters and following up when someone stops giving.
As the team continues developing its Salesforce environment, Erika also values having FinDock there to help navigate the different moving parts.
“FinDock support is always super responsive. They're quick to help and to tell us whether something is related to FinDock or Salesforce. That's great.”
For The Ocean Cleanup, bringing payments into Salesforce has created a foundation that goes well beyond processing donations, giving the team what it needs to understand supporters better, build stronger relationships and keep evolving the fundraising experience as the organization grows.
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