UNICEF Switzerland

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, to defend their rights, and to help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence. To accomplish its mission, UNICEF relies on a number of different income streams including public donations.

In Switzerland, UNICEF is responsible for raising funds from the Swiss and Liechtenstein market. To ensure they can continue to engage with their constituents in a way that’s relevant today, and of course, in the future, they decided to undertake a CRM project with Salesforce, and are now live with the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), Marketing Cloud, and FinDock.

“With FinDock and Salesforce, we now understand why people donate, and by which methods they donate.”

UNICEF Switzerland’s CRM goals were to become more donor-centric, to increase efficiencies across the organization, and to improve the daily operations of its teams with automation and real-time data. And while Salesforce supports many of its goals, FinDock was a key ingredient to support payments management – a core feature of fundraising today.

Designing the payment experience

UNICEF Switzerland leverages a number of fundraising channels and tactics to raise funds. For online donation capture, the organization uses the FinDock Payment API to connect its front-end website experience to its preferred payment processors and then to channel information received from processors back to Salesforce.

Donors can choose to donate via PayPal, Twint, Direct Debit (FinDock), credit card or cryptocurrencies (Worldline) for one-time donations, and for recurring donations, they have a choice of credit card (Worldline), PayPal, or Direct Debit (FinDock). All donation information is captured in Salesforce via FinDock in real-time which offers immediate insights into campaign impact and enables the UNICEF fundraising team to quickly react as needed.

Adapting to new payment methods

The fundraising team at UNICEF Switzerland is continuously looking at how it can meet its donor’s needs. For payments, this meant adding Twint as a method, which is now available for all FinDock customers in Switzerland.

“Twint is relatively new to the Swiss market, but already it’s the second most popular payment method for UNICEF Switzerland’s online donors,” says Sascha Gomringer, Database Manager, UNICEF Switzerland. “It was an important feature for our team and FinDock made it possible, we are very pleased with the results.”

More recently, UNICEF started offering cryptocurrencies as a payment method also, and the results are looking good. “What is already apparent is that the average donation with crypto is significantly higher than all other payment methods,” shared Sascha.

Connecting traditional methods to modern processes

Direct Mail has always played an important role in UNICEF’s fundraising history and indeed it still does. With FinDock’s Payment Request Generator, the fundraising team can create and track ESR payment slip numbers in Salesforce to support campaigns targeting over 500,000 prospective donors with ease.

Now, when a donor makes a bank transfer using a payment slip, the team at UNICEF can reconcile data in Salesforce using FinDock’s Guided Matching tool, ensuring that donor and fundraising data is correct and up-to-date. This helps the team not only better understand the impact of their campaigns but it also supports in creating a 360 view of donors in Salesforce.

Sometimes, of course, there are nuances. And for UNICEF, this meant also figuring out a way to identify donors who use payment slips from 20+ years ago to make donations today. Again, using FinDock’s Guided Matching tool, UNICEF Switzerland was able to configure logic to match these old reference numbers to the right donor ID in Salesforce today. Even if it took a donor a decade to act, the fundraising team can still account for this.

Donation information and insights

For UNICEF Switzerland’s fundraising team, donor insights are hugely important to understand which efforts are driving results and where improvements can be made.

“With FinDock and Salesforce, we now understand why people donate, and by which methods they donate,” says Sascha. “We also have visibility of the cost for different payment methods. It helps us make informed decisions as an organization.”

And UNICEF’s accounting team also places a big emphasis on the importance of data. “The accounting team now has the tools they need to ensure that data from bank statements is matched to the right donor in our CRM, and if there is a mismatch, they are guided through a process to correct that. We have full visibility and control with FinDock,” explains Sascha.

Improved payment operations

FinDock empowers the team at UNICEF Switzerland with actionable information to help improve payments management and donor engagement. Because FinDock is 100% Salesforce native, data captured is actionable across all of Salesforce allowing UNICEF’s fundraising team to build intelligent workflows and drive further efficiencies.

“With FinDock, if a payment doesn’t go through, we know about it,” says Sascha. “For example, with Direct Debit, if there is a failed payment, the fundraising team gets notified and they can contact the donor directly.”

A key reason UNICEF selected FinDock alongside Salesforce and Marketing Cloud was that it would enable them to manage end-to-end fundraising within one system.

“We wanted one system for everything,” explains Sascha. “With Salesforce and FinDock we don’t need to move between systems, this helps us save time and energy and really improves the user experience for our team.”