Wereld Natuur Fonds

Wereld Natuur Fonds (WWF-NL) is part of the international WWF which has grown into a worldwide network of conservationists, donors and volunteers that work together with businesses, governments and local communities to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature. This is a complex challenge, as the world around us continues to change at such a rapid pace. 

Fundraising today is also complex, as donors become more individual in their interests, expectations and transactional preferences. To effectively engage and rally support today and in the future, WWF-NL needs to be able to understand its donors and supporters – it also needs to streamline processes so that it can scale. 

Centralizing systems and donor data

Before moving to Salesforce and FinDock, WWF-NL was using 13 disparate systems and tools. In 2018, WWF-NL decided to move to Salesforce, leveraging Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, along with FinDock to support payments management. 

“With our previous solution, it took considerable effort to deliver a connected donor journey – our infrastructure needed to be centralized and simplified,” says Paul Zevenboom, Head of Digital, e-Commerce and Consumer Data at WWF-NL. “We’re very happy with our decision to select Salesforce to support us in engaging donors in a much more personalized way. FinDock plays a crucial role in the payment piece of that story.” 

Personalizing donor engagement at scale

With its new connected system, WWF-NL can now launch and deliver more relevant and timely donor engagements, all powered by data in Salesforce. 

“WWF-NL can be relevant to everyone, regardless of age, areas of interest or method of contribution,” explains Paul. “We have more than 995,000 people in our Salesforce org, all with different mindsets and interests, and different stages of their relationship with us. If our main campaign message is ‘help us,’ we need to be able to send that out in different forms and channels to different audiences, driven by different strategies. Salesforce and FinDock play an integral role in making this possible.”

What’s more, the WWF-NL marketing team can now respond in a much more agile way.

 “If you want to act on something happening right now, you need speed, and we have that speed now,” says Paul.

Managing payments from multiple channels in Salesforce

WWF-NL fundraises across multiple online and offline channels with all donor payment data finding its home in Salesforce. “Our donors should be able to decide how they want to pay and to use those exact methods; FinDock enables us to do that,” shares Paul.

In the last two years the organization has been leveraging Guided Matching to help the fundraising team and finance department to identify missed payments and inconsistent data from different sources, including Acceptgiro, Tikkies, Bank Transfers and Direct Debit. 

“We set up a number of complex Guided Matching rules with FinDock that allow us to quickly match incoming payments in Salesforce,” explains Paul. “We also set up rules to help us manage payments without references. With FinDock, we have full visibility and control over the entire process, so we figured it out relatively fast.”

The organization also leverages FinDock’s native direct debit tool to process 300,000+/- of recurring donations each month, reducing the number of external services it needs to support payment processing. 

Last year, WWF-NL took part in the radio-program Glazen Huis, one of the largest fundraising events in the Netherlands, where it leveraged tools from FinDock to ensure donations were processed in a timely way and that data was centralized in Salesforce. 

“During the campaign, we used FinDock’s Tikkie functionality so that donors could make fast and easy payments,” says Paul. “We now use Tikkie, which is a really popular method for payments in the Netherlands, for generic campaigns and also for more personalized engagements, where we generate personalized QR payment requests and send them to specific donors. This is an example of how we are integrating modern payment methods into our fundraising program with FinDock.”

Leveraging automation to increase efficiencies

Overall, WWF-NL is now managing millions of euros from different sources right inside of Salesforce and can automate processes involving payment data because FinDock is built natively on the Salesforce platform. 

“Since a lot of our processes are automated, our organization now functions in a more efficient way,” explains Paul.

As WWF-NL continues to expand and grow, automating time-consuming tasks gives the team time back to focus on getting to know its supporters and creating interesting and engaging campaigns which WWF-NL has become known for. All with the aim to bring more harmony and to connect people to the world they live in.