Overview

Pepperwood Preserve, a conservation science and environmental education-focused nonprofit, approached Client Cloudcare with the desire to better honor deceased donors. The Client Cloudcare crew provided an elegant solution that honors a donor’s impact, instead of erasing it.

Introduction

Founded in 1979, Pepperwood Preserve consists of a 3,200 acre reserve that serves as a refuge for over 900 species of plants and animals. As leaders in ecosystem-climate research, Pepperwood’s staff produces critical research studies to help guide natural resource management and conservation planning in California’s North Bay region.

Pepperwood also offers a variety of educational classes and events to cultivate an ethic of conservation and environmental preservation, while honoring and respecting the Wappo people, the original inhabitants of the region.

The Challenge

As a small nonprofit, Pepperwood Preserve relies on donations from the public. Donor lists, donation outreach, and giving history all live within Salesforce and are managed by Pepperwood’s Karen Arrington with the help of the team at Client Cloudcare. Karen describes her job as “building, maintaining, and nurturing relationships,” so when confronted with a system that seemed to neglect some of those relationships, she desired a better process.

After learning of the passing of a donor, Karen had the job of marking one member of a couple as deceased. The information of the donor who passed was taken from the account and she was left with only the living member on the donor profile. This didn’t feel right as their giving history was as a couple; giving to Pepperwood was a decision they made as a pair. This spurred Karen to think of her process in general for donors who had passed. While Salesforce has a “deceased” button, “it was incredibly hard for [her] to learn that a donor had passed and just go in and check a box,” Karen explained. She wanted something that felt more like a ritual—a marking of their passing—which better represented their impact on Pepperwood.

Solution & Results

Karen turned to her Salesforce consultant with Client Cloudcare, Laura, who Karen calls her “thought partner.” She told Laura her problem and asked the beautifully proactive and collaborative question: “how can we make it work?”

Laura recognized the importance of the request and presented a solution to Karen. The Client Cloudcare crew configured a custom flow for a banner to appear when the necessary conditions are met — in this case, the condition being the “deceased” button is clicked. Now, when marked “deceased” there appears a banner on the client’s profile that reads “In Memoriam.” This banner serves as a marker for those that came to Pepperwood as donors, contributed to the mission, and would be remembered for their part in Pepperwood’s successes. Along with the banner, the Client Cloudcare crew had to address naming conventions within the custom flow, so that based on whether a single member or both members of an account were marked as deceased the name would change appropriately. This ensures that in cases of a household with more than one donor, once both members pass, the account returns to its original account name— remembering both donors.

The Client Cloudcare crew also did the work to ensure that with the banner, the history on the account is frozen. By including a validation rule to prevent edits to the account once In Memoriam is checked, they prevent anyone from accidentally changing anything. This is a step further in maintaining and preserving the history of these donor relationships. “It’s not often that I get to do something, that may not matter much technically, but will matter a lot personally” Laura said, “that’s part of what I really like about my job, sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. But seeing people light up when I find a solution for them—that’s gratifying for me.”

Conclusion

It’s powerful that technology can be used, not to make relationships just points of data to glean for insights or strategy, but to help us hold relationships more accurately.

The new solution speaks to something rather profound: that when we die, our impact isn’t erased, but is continued through support we gave, organizations we helped grow, or lives we changed. The new solution more accurately represents this; that though we can’t change what we did, neither can anyone else—we live our life and that impact extends beyond our time: in memoriam.

Client Cloudcare is a mission-oriented organization and continues to provide innovative, scalable Salesforce solutions for a variety of nonprofits. We offer individualized service to all our clients, through projects and managed services, with pricing up front. It’s a bit different from what you will find at the larger consultancies with their complex spreadsheet proposals, but we think we’re onto something new, as evidenced by our client’s feedback. Contact us today for more information or a one-on-one consultation.