Case Management: Tracking Service Delivery and Ensuring Goals Are Met

By: Catherine Moore, Senior Consultant, Heller Consulting

The Canadian Cancer Society in Saskatchewan (CCSSK) is a provincial division of a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission is the eradication of cancer and the enhancement of the quality of life of people living with cancer.

The Society has been using Salesforce since 2010 and their Salesforce ecosystem has evolved overtime to include the Salesforce Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds, as well as a large selection of apps from the App Exchange. With exceptional customer service at the root of the Society’s engagement strategy, Salesforce Case Management has played a significant part in the Society’s Salesforce implementation. Capturing the details of all constituent interactions was a key part of the Society’s CRM vision of 360-degree view of its customers and supporters – and cases have been a key component to achieving this vision.

The Society has close to 20 case record types to manage various programs, processes and constituent inquiries, ranging from the simple requests for a copy a tax receipts to much more complex process. One example of a more complex process is the Society’s use of cases to handle end-to-end program management for a cancer support program.

Sometimes getting to and from cancer treatment is hard. The Canadian Cancer Society’s Financial Assistance program provides financial support to those who need help covering the cost of transportation and accommodation when travelling for treatment appointments in other cities. The amount of support depends on household income and expenses related to treatment.

The Society uses Case management in Salesforce to manage the intake, the means-testing to determine eligibility, and the approval and payment of specific expenses up to the annual allowable maximum. Combining Salesforce case management capacity with multiple custom fields, including complex formulas to calculate payments has allowed the Society to take this program from a series of spreadsheets and manual processing to a largely automated process.

At the end of 2013, they needed to more effectively connect their participants, donors, volunteers, and cancer survivors in their signature fundraising event, Relay For Life. The existing system created challenges that impacted their efforts to serve their constituents, and was providing a less-than-optimal experience for everyone involved.

To start their efforts to address these challenges, the Society first took a step back from the “software features” of their system, and focused on the specifics of what they wanted to achieve. They looked at the way each participant would meet, join, and interact with their programs. They then specifically defined the journey each category of constituent would take as they progressed through the organization, evaluating what would make each step of the experience easier and faster for participants both inside and outside the organization, creating explicit “engagement journeys” for each audience.

With a comprehensive engagement plan assembled, the Society was able to match their needs to the powerful functionality within Salesforce, and create a robust set of solutions that would allow them to best serve their constituents, while allowing detailed reports to show the effectiveness and engagement across the various programs in at-a-glance dashboards. The Society’s multi-channel engagement centre was born. The engagement centre offers inbound and outbound calls and emails, web-to-case, social customer service, and more.

Find out more about how the Canadian Cancer Society was able to achieve its vision for 360-degree constituent visibility and create this engagement center focused on nurturing richer constituent relationships in a webinar on July 26 at 2:00pm EDT/ 11:00 am PDT. Join Salesforce.org, the Society and their implementation partner Heller Consulting to learn how they leveraged a robust case management strategy to benefit multiple programs within their engagement center.

About the Author
With over 15 years in the nonprofit sector, Catherine has experience setting strategic direction in technology, marketing and fundraising, and enjoys enabling business transformation through human, technical and business process innovation. Catherine got her introduction to the nonprofit sector as a founding member of the Colon Cancer Alliance. Together with a group of 40 advocates from around the globe, Catherine leveraged technology to start a movement, and the first colorectal cancer specific non-profit was born. Prior to working with the Society, Catherine worked in the broadcast industry in the US and Canada after receiving her MBA and MS in communications from Boston University and a BA (Honours) in Psychology from Queen’s University.