Nonprofit Data Management Helps Fight Human Trafficking

By: Karin Tracy, VP Marketing, Fíonta

Last month, July 30 was World Day against Trafficking in Persons, where the UN aims to create awareness about human trafficking and worldwide efforts to defeat this scourge.

Free the Slaves was founded in 2000 – a time in which slavery was outlawed everywhere, but not eradicated. Over the past 18 years, our society has come to understand that slavery and traffickers still exist around the world and that our daily lives and creature comforts can be tainted by horrific practices and products made possible by slave labor. Free the Slaves’ mission is to liberate slaves and change the conditions that allow slavery to persist. The organization assists communities to chart their own path towards sustainable freedom, providing capacity building for grassroots and advocacy organizations, as well as providing education and services directly to vulnerable communities.

With a small staff, Free the Slaves relies on its CRM to manage donors and prospects and to aid communication with its vast and global audience. The organization was previously using a legacy tool and, in addition to expensive licensing costs, had myriad difficulties with the system. Disconnected systems made them unable to accurately gauge user interests and interactivities. Processing online donations required manual data migration from the payment platform to their legacy system. And staff had little insight into development activity and no way to identify avid supporters other than solely through overall donation amount.

Free the Slaves worked with a Salesforce.org Partner, Fíonta, to implement the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and to migrate data from their legacy system. The data migration task included both a partially automated and partially manual, targeted cleanup of legacy data. Additionally, Dupe Blocker was installed and configured to manage duplicates and bad data from the previous system.

With some customization of NPSP and Sales Cloud, Free the Slaves was able to streamline its donation process by integrating the donation form via a payment platform (iATS) into Salesforce. Lastly, MailChimp was fully integrated with Salesforce so that the organization can see engagement metrics tied directly to the individual Contact within Salesforce.

In addition to reducing licensing costs by thousands of dollars every year, Free the Slaves is now able to easily identify major donors and prospects by multiple criteria, not just one data point, and acknowledge “soft credit” interactions. Targeted communications in MailChimp are supported by list segmentation and a 360-degree view of an individual and their interest areas.

Learn more about Free the Slaves on their website at www.freetheslaves.net, explore their heartbreaking and inspiring video library, or take action.

Fíonta is a Salesforce.org Premium Partner specializing in the implementation of Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, specifically for associations and other nonprofits.

Members of the Fíonta executive team will be at Dreamforce 2018 in the Salesforce.org Lodge. See you there!

About the Author
Karin Tracy has been a communicator and storyteller for as long as she can remember. Equal parts left- and right-brained, her creativity is matched with a high attention to detail and a love of data. She then joined the executive team at Fíonta following a successful 10-year stint as the owner of a graphic design firm, preceded by years of agency experience throughout the DC area. Some of her proudest moments at Fíonta have included her work with Greater Than AIDS and Women’s Refugee Commission. After 6 years managing Fionta’s award-winning web design and development team, Karin became a Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant and assumed responsibility for all corporate marketing initiatives and the development of Fíonta’s Pardot practice.

Karin lives in a renovated loft apartment in downtown Los Angeles with her husband, three dogs, and a cat who believes he’s a dog. In her spare time, you can find Karin at the gym or on a mountain, knitting or crafting, while listening to a novel or podcast. Karin also acts as a mentor to local low-income high school seniors as they apply to college and for scholarships through Kid City Hope Place.