Balanced Effect is a proudly female-owned and led, B Corp certified Salesforce Partner dedicated to helping purpose-driven organisations realise their mission. We sat with their CEO Lauren Stewart to understand how Balanced Effect puts Salesforce to work whenever MoveData integrates information from connected third party data sources.
Why do you use MoveData?
Many charities use a range of off-Salesforce products to engage with their audience. For us, third party platforms like Raisely, Funraisin’ and Grassrootz will always be part of the fundraising mix.
It is extremely important we get all that valuable donation, fundraising and regular giving data into Salesforce. Without this a huge chunk of customer information is missing, and if you are doing this only periodically then it becomes very difficult to use Salesforce to its full potential. So much of how charities deliver against their mission through communications, reporting, and engagement relies on these data sources reaching Salesforce live and accurately.
We recommend MoveData to our clients because it manages all of this and more. It is set and forget, affordable, well-supported, and having this data integrated frees up time and opens new functions in Salesforce.
What do you do with the data?
Lots of things. MoveData supports NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud which means we can set up tooling and functionality in Salesforce with relative ease. Some examples which come to mind are:
Business Intelligence
The progress of an appeal or fundraising activity can be monitored live in Salesforce, which means the right communications can be sent to the right supporters based on their giving history, segmentation and other interactions. This ensures marketing automation tools are continually pulling through the right data to include, exclude or provide variable copy to supporters in your communications. In most scenarios we will use UTM and other identifiers, and pull this information from the donation form into the relevant Salesforce records. This gives charities the ability to know exactly how different mediums are converting, and adjust their strategy in real time to the one which is most effective over the course of the campaign.
Being Proactive with Regular Gifts
The end-user experience through something like Raisely is superior and more maintainable than anything offered on-platform in Salesforce. MoveData is able to pull through errors which we proactively monitor, and gives clients better visibility about who is failing, when they are failing and why they are failing. This then informs marketing journeys to re-engage customers and / or task creation for internal staff members to action.
Finance Reconciliation
Using MoveData we can easily map and calculate detailed financial information from the source platform through to Salesforce. This will often include fee and tax information charged by the platform and payment gateway, as well as other supporting information like the date of the payout, transaction identifiers and so forth. We build reporting overlays over the top of this which allow clients to quickly balance funds by date received and bulk reconcile to the transaction level inside Salesforce.
Peer to Peer Fundraising
MoveData’s peer to peer functionality is extremely intuitive to fundraising. Our clients who are running events or campaigns are able to see via the campaign details and hierarchy who has created a fundraising page, who has donated to which page and what the supporter has shared regarding their target and description all within Salesforce. We wrap these into actionable segments (team leaders, team members, individual fundraisers, their associated engagement levels and so forth) and feed into campaign-specific marketing automation and other journeys.
How do you maintain client integrations?
Most of the time there isn’t much maintenance involved. This is because we configure platforms and implement MoveData at an organisational level, meaning that a set of rules established for one initiative should be universally applicable across all initiatives and therefore “just work” ongoing.
Where clients do add new custom fields / objects or need new business logic added to their integration this is quite easily achieved through Salesforce Flows which MoveData interfaces heavily with. We use flows to transform information before MoveData enters it, look up relevant information that is already in the system to inform decisions, and have a trail of what happened with every line of data imported.
Who should consider Balanced Effect?
For non-profits looking for a Salesforce Partner, our main differences are:
- Personalised Attention: as a specialised consulting firm, you’ll never be treated like just a number; you’ll always have a dedicated team member committed to your success.
- Dual Expertise: we uniquely combine hands-on Salesforce proficiency with practical fundraising experience. In our view, both are essential for delivering effective and impactful solutions. We’ve often rescued projects where other partners had technical Salesforce skills but lacked the crucial fundraising context, leading to less effective implementations.
