Washington Conservation Action

About Washington Conservation Action

Washington Conservation Action (formerly Washington Environmental Council) is a nonprofit, statewide advocacy organization that has been driving positive change to solve Washington’s most critical environmental challenges since 1967. Their mission is to protect, restore, and sustain Washington’s environment for all.

The Problem

Washington Conservation Action (WCA) used Salesforce for their primary database but they were on an aging version of a Salesforce template that was no longer supported. WCA’s sibling organization, Washington Conservation Voters (WCV), used Luminate to manage data.

Neither database was meeting their needs. Broken reports, data integrity issues, and the inability to use modern applications meant they were spending too much time on manual work-arounds or applying duct tape to their technology and not enough time achieving their organizational mission. And because data about any given supporter was divided across two CRMs, it was impossible to get a complete view without a lot of extra work.

WCA wanted better tools for all of their core engagement activities — managing volunteers, communications, online and offline advocacy, cultivating donors, managing events like their auction, and tracking supporter engagement. And they wanted a true 360-degree view of their supporters while maintaining the ability to separate interactions with each organization.

The Solution

To start, Percolator worked with staff in every department to understand their needs and define what a successful project would change about their work. We also took great care to understand the opportunities and challenges that moving both organizations into a single CRM would entail. We then recommended a set of integrated applications and customizations to meet those needs and worked with WCA to prioritize them for a phased implementation.

During implementation, we started by migrating WCA to a new Salesforce instance with NPSP 3, including a carefully orchestrated transition to ensure minimal downtime for staff and zero downtime for donors and volunteers. We introduced new, integrated applications for donation processing, email, and event management, and got the entire team trained and working in the new instance.

Then, we started making improvements and preparing for the introduction of WCV data — for example, making sure that staff could easily see which org a donor had first interacted with, and summarizing giving histories both by organization and combined. Finally, Percolator migrated WCV’s data from Luminate to what would now be the master WCA/WCV database, again ensuring a smooth transition for staff and supporters.

The Results

WCA now has a fully-integrated technology stack with Salesforce at the center. Email, volunteer, action, contribution, and event activities show up in each contact record in Salesforce with no manual intervention on the part of staff. With our app StepUp, WCA has dashboards which help them evaluate their supporter engagement efforts across the board and they can target and customize communications and other outreach by individual engagement level.

The new system has provided profound efficiency gains, greatly reducing the time it takes to do things like send emails and process donations. And because it’s better meeting the needs of WCA’s staff, adoption is way up. Technology is enabling engagement instead of costing time.