Yellowstone Forever Improves Member Experience and Boosts Donor Retention with Omatic Cloud

Organization Background

Yellowstone Forever is the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park with a mission to protect, preserve, and enhance Yellowstone National Park through education and philanthropy. We spoke with Elle Winchester, Director of Annual Giving and Donor Engagement, and Kristin Park, Manager of Annual Fund and Society, about Yellowstone Forever’s use of Omatic Cloud.

Challenges

• Yellowstone Forever Onboards Salesforce CRM to Manage Large Amounts of Data: After years of functioning as two formerly distinct organizations, Yellowstone National Park’s official nonprofit educational partner merged with the park’s official nonprofit philanthropic partner to form Yellowstone Forever. Not long after this organizational merger, Yellowstone Forever onboarded Salesforce to manage its fundraising data. This powerful new CRM came with data management challenges, especially when importing data from external sources including Classy.
• Data Errors from Native Integrations for Salesforce and Classy: Importing fundraising data from Classy was a challenge for the team at Yellowstone Forever. Native integrations linking Salesforce and Classy often produced errors during imports that would take hours of manual work to resolve. In one instance, a data import error resulted in several hundred gifts coded as successful transactions when they were incomplete, causing Elle and her team to comb through gift after gift manually to correct each error. Duplicate records were also a persistent problem, as the native import tools were limited in their ability to detect donors by name. Even when everything was working properly, staff spent hours each week adjusting online gift data manually to ensure that data would conform to Salesforce formatting customs.

“The data in Classy was in a completely different format than how we wanted it to look in Salesforce” – Elle Winchester, Director of Annual Giving and Donor Engagement

• Difficulty Acknowledging and Stewarding Society Members: Many of Yellowstone Forever’s donations come from society memberships. Donors receive benefits like store discounts, exclusive event invitations, print publications, and more. To make sure members can access their membership benefits, the team needs accurate, up-to-date information on donation history. Data errors, including duplicate records, led to sending renewal appeals at incorrect times, delays in acknowledging new members, and sending multiple duplicate mail pieces to the same donor.

Solution

Yellowstone Forever brought in Omatic Cloud to manage data in Salesforce, transfer donation activity from Classy, and improve data imports.

• Data moves smoothly into Salesforce from a variety of sources. Online donations from Classy sync with Salesforce on a regular basis, without time-consuming tasks like exporting and editing spreadsheets. Any transactions from Yellowstone National Park stores, both within and around the national park, are captured in Square and then imported through a flat file and applied to the right record in Salesforce. The seamless flow of donation and sales data in Salesforce makes it easier than ever to track membership eligibility ; the team at Yellowstone Forever is confident that a constituent’s donation and sales records are accurate.
• Easy Data Imports into Salesforce: The flow of data into Salesforce extends beyond online donations and store transactions. When the team needs to add a large influx of data from an event, it is simple to import a spreadsheet of event attendees and move it into Salesforce, for easy tracking of invitations and RSVPs.

“As long as we can pull out a file, we can get it into Salesforce.” – Kristin Park, Manager of Annual Fund and Society

• Automatic Formatting for Consistent Data: Advanced transformation features in Omatic Cloud automatically format data from any source to custom rules set by the Yellowstone Forever team. By selecting strict formatting conventions for everything from phone numbers and street addresses to state abbreviations and capitalizations, the team can be sure that all its data in Salesforce is consistent and accurate, without hours of manual editing.

“When it comes to cleaning up data or turning it into an entirely different format, Omatic has been really helpful.” – Kristin Park

Results

• 4+ Hours Saved Each Week on Gift Processing: The Yellowstone Forever team has experienced a significant amount of time savings since onboarding Omatic Cloud. In the past, Kristin Park would have to export data, manually edit fields to match formatting customs in Salesforce, and conduct a multi-step process of flagging duplicates based on name, then email address, then home address. Omatic Cloud completes this complicated process in a single step. Now that gift and sales transactions move into Salesforce so easily, the team has extra hours each week to devote to mission-critical work. This is especially true during busy giving periods, like year-end.
• More Opportunities for Innovation at Yellowstone Forever: With better data and more time to focus on strategic projects, the team has been exploring new ways to improve the membership experience. For the first time in its history, Yellowstone Forever will be offering digital membership cards to donors . This complicated initiative involving tech partners and staff from across the organization would not be possible without the solid data management practices the team has cultivated since onboarding Omatic Cloud.
• Better Membership Experience and Improved Donor Retention: The streamlined data management process has improved the donor experience for Yellowstone Forever supporters. With fresher and more accurate data in Salesforce, it’s easier to steward donors. By cutting down on the time involved with data management, the team can process memberships, send acknowledgements, and share benefits much faster than before. In addition, by improving data integrity and accuracy, the organization can send renewal notices at the proper time. Donor trust has improved as well, with donors receiving proper communications tailored by accurate giving data.

“When you cut down the time to enter a gift, you cut down on the time it takes to thank a donor. I know Omatic has helped improve the overall donor experience, which in return helps improve our donor retention rates.”- Elle Winchester