Discover how Learners helped the nonprofit Road Dogs & Rescue.
Overview
Road Dogs & Rescue is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that rehabs and rescues bulldogs. The Los Angeles-based organization serves the Southern California area and relies on donations to provide dogs with medical care, training, and behavior modification. It also raises funds to spread awareness about volunteer, sponsorship, and adoption programs. Road Dogs & Rescue generated $1.06 million in revenue in the 2019 fiscal year and has over 310,000 followers on Instagram and over 110,000 on Facebook.
The Objective
Despite its remarkable achievements, Road Dog & Rescue struggled to track donor engagement across multiple platforms. It takes a village to rescue a dog, and Road Dogs & Rescue is fortunate to be surrounded by a community where members play multiple roles: donor, volunteer, adoptee, event organizer, and so on. It was important to take these relationships into account to nurture them. However, that required tracking various data points through its funding lifecycle. Road Dogs & Rescue need a well-integrated, cohesive, single source of truth.
The Challenge
Like other nonprofits, Road Dogs & Rescue experienced several operational challenges as a result of various fundraising campaigns. It uses multiple fundraising platforms, such as Classy, Kindful, Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, and Little Green Light. In addition, the organization used both Stripe and Paypal either directly or indirectly through fundraising platforms as a payment gateway.
- The organization's biggest challenge was donor information spread across all of these different channels, making it difficult to generate a 360-degree overview of donation operations and campaign attribution reporting.
- Because data existed in disparate apps, it was becoming increasingly hard to plan new fundraising initiatives, identify high-value donors, and carry out other tasks that would benefit the organization.
- Road Dogs & Rescue lacked a single source of truth for all the donor information required to plan, execute, and budget for campaigns. The organization couldn't see the bigger picture.
In short, Road Dogs & Rescue just wanted to consolidate donor information from all its platforms. The nonprofit decided to use HubSpot as its centralized platform for fundraising tracking.
Solutions to These Challenges
Learners quickly got to work on a custom integration for Road Dogs & Rescue:
Contacts Segmentation
The team first analyzed the nonprofit's data using clustering algorithms, a very useful tool from the data science toolkit. This helped segment the donors in various categories to define custom properties and personas based on actual data — Learners' usual approach when starting a new data integration project. The algorithms take into accounts a large number of records and attributes, which include static as well as engagement and transactional data points.
Data Migration
Then Learners decided on the best architecture to pull all the donor data into HubSpot. The team carried out a multi-dimensional data mapping across all the funding platforms and created a consolidated data dictionary that would normalize and reconcile properties across all its apps, including Stripe. That meant donor information, such as email addresses, names, donation preferences, donation history, etc., would be consistent on all the platforms.
Stripe Integration
It was important to add Stripe to the mix after realizing a lot of donations came through the payment processing solution. Learners analyzed all the payments and cash flows that reached Road Dogs & Rescue via Stripe and built a 'reverse recon logic' using Operations Hub to break down the lump sum amounts and attribute them to individual donors.
The staff at Road Dogs & Rescue is now able to see more details from the various donation sources and donors. Before this, they were getting consolidated amounts transferred every month into their bank account, but they did not have the visibility on how much exactly each donor was sending.
Operations Hub - Custom Workflows
Learners’ engineering team also wrote a custom Python script to take the transactions from different platforms and reverse engineer the totals into individual transactions and Stripe payouts. The main components included API calls to pull data, a function to parse out individual donor transactions, and a basic matching algorithm to do the recon. Finally, we added association logic to sure make all the donation transactions were properly matched to the donors already in HubSpot, or new ones were created as needed.
RevOps Dashboards
Learners’ set up various reports and dashboards for Road Dogs & Rescue and customized the reports for the specific use cases and analytics that the nonprofit was interested in. It showed campaign analytics of its fundraising campaigns and donation activity as deals activity in HubSpot.
The RevOps Dashboards for Road Dogs & Rescue included reports for Total Donations, Gifts Secured, Donor & Donation Growth, Fundraising ROI, and Donation Conversions by Channel.
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Manual Cleanup
The hardest part of this project? This entire process involved a lot of data cleansing and consolidation. It was a real labor of love for the Learners’ team to identify what the match algorithms couldn’t pick up. The team relied on the old and trusted method of brute force manual cleanup along with scripts to speed up repetitive items.
Results
Learners.ai applied a holistic RevOps approach customized for nonprofit operations. As a direct result, manual administrative work was reduced by 25%, allowing Road Dogs & Rescue staff to spend more time rescuing dogs than entering data. The nonprofit also has visibility into its donors that it did not have before.
This 360-degree view of donor and donation activity has allowed Road Dogs & Rescue to centralize data for better decision-making and campaign management. The organization can now work out of HubSpot to manage donations and day-to-day operations more effectively than before. Instead of logging into multiple platforms, Road Dogs & Rescue can rely on just one.
Road Dogs & Rescue is now considering consolidating all their donor management platforms into HubSpot. That includes using HubSpot Payments to collect donations directly from its fundraising campaigns. In other words, HubSpot can now completely replace Classy and Kindful and become the ultimate Donor CRM.
After seeing the benefits of HubSpot, the team at Road Dogs & Rescue started coming up with innovative ideas to streamline operations better and get more value out of HubSpot. Now that the amazing team at Road Dogs & Rescue had all become learners, it was a mission accomplished for Learners.
Learners also received benefits after working with Road Dogs & Rescue. Its team now understands how to optimize donations and donation operations for clients. There is now a native HubSpot app - Donatio - that any nonprofit or charity can use to consolidate all their donation platforms into HubSpot without the need for a large custom integration project.
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