Concordia Theological Seminary

Concordia Theological Seminary is an institution of theological higher education of The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod. The school was using two programs to engage new donors, manage alumni, and meet fundraising goals, but those programs didn’t work with Concordia’s other systems, creating a highly siloed data environment and generating a lot of manual tasks. Some tasks were overly laborious and time-consuming — or not even possible.

Concordia’s chief information officer, Bill Johnson, looked to Salesforce to help align the seminary’s systems, processes, and data. In particular, he looked at Elevate’s Giving Pages, which allow administrators to set up pages to accept donations. Administrators can customize each page for their organization and campaign, and they can have as many pages as they want that flow seamlessly into Education Cloud.

“Setting up Giving Pages is where I saw the immediate ‘wow.’ Before that, I went to my advancement and accounting teams first, and then went back and forth with the website team to get the buttons where they needed to be,” said Johnson. “With Elevate, I just entered the name, colors, and the campaign, and then it was done. I knocked out what would have been a two-day process in 30 minutes. The hardest part was trying to figure out what background image to use.”

Johnson says that everything is easier with Elevate and that there are many advantages. “The interface is simple and clean. It just works. It doesn’t have to be complicated.” Matching recurring donations, for instance, is easier than with his old system. “I’m not even sure we knew how to do that with the old system,” he said. Giving Pages also processes recurring gifts automatically, which has been another time saver for Johnson and his team, who had been processing them manually with their other system.

The Concordia team continues to find new functionality that they didn’t have before, such as the ability to automatically notify the donor of an issue with a recurring donation as well as the direct integration with their donor management system. This not only improves productivity but simplifies communications among departments. When asked what he liked the most about Giving Pages, he responded, “It’s simple, elegant online giving. It does what it’s supposed to, right, and out of the box.”