Case study: Health org sees impact through Salesforce

“The possibilities are really opening up now that FitSTEPS for Life has program and donor management both centralized in Salesforce.” - Wendy Lowry, project lead

Cancer Foundation For Life’s mission is to enhance the quality of life and survival for individuals living with cancer. They do this through the program FitSTEPS for Life, which is a free, individualized exercise and nutrition program designed to improve the physical and mental functioning, quality of life, and survival of people living with cancer. In addition to providing this free and unlimited rehabilitation, they want to test whether adding exercise to a patient’s regimen will improve recovery rates. And they need reliable data to do this.

FitSTEPS for Life has just two administrative employees overseeing thirteen exercise centers where more than 15,000 referred patients have participated in over 400,000 exercise sessions since 2001. They first engaged Idealist Consulting back in 2011 to implement Salesforce for program tracking, and recently adopted the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3.0 to integrate donation processing into Salesforce. Here’s their story.

First, Adopted Salesforce for Program Management

Back in 2011, FitSTEPS for Life was primarily interested in finding a technical solution for program management and appointment-tracking. Project Lead Wendy Lowry saw that the paper and spreadsheet-based tracking system was unsustainable, especially when working with multiple locations. They applied for the Salesforce Foundation’s Power of Us Program, and started using Salesforce to record patients’ visits and research data. They also focused on building a system for following home based participants who do not have access to an exercise center which increased their ability to serve more geographic areas.

They opted to keep their fundraising data in Giftworks for the time being. But the long-term plan was always to go paperless and centralize.

Next, Integrated the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3.0 for Donor Management

In 2014, nearly three years after the initial Salesforce launch, FitSTEPS for Life hired a new Development Director, and the time was ripe for integrating more deeply with Salesforce. The new director wanted to centralize data as much as possible, so they opted to drop Giftworks and move donor management into Salesforce.

To do this, they updated to the latest version (3.0) of the Nonprofit Starter Pack, and integrated this with their previously-built program management system. With the help of Idealist Consulting, they migrated their data over from Giftworks.

Part of the reason for making this shift was that Lowry and her team started to notice that there was significant overlap between participants who donate and also contribute to the program, which created duplicate records in the different systems. Now they have donor management and program management in one place.

Expanded capacity for reporting and analysis

Since Lowry and her team have been using Salesforce for several years at this point, they know the basics of Salesforce and can hit the ground running.

They can do many reports and perform data analysis that just weren’t possible before. For example, Lowry is uncovering all kinds of possibilities through the Campaigns object: she can now segment based on data from what time of year donors give, what campaigns work best, and more. These reporting capabilities make it much smoother to report key data to organization leadership, and they can tweak future efforts based on what works.

What’s next

While they are still doing some clean-up between the existing participant data and new donor data, Lowry is excited about soon seeing clearer trends between participants and physicians. As a free program that depends on physician referrals, FitSTEPS for Life is gaining greater visibility into these referrals and how they impact donation trends. Every step of the way, Lowry and her team are building their system for scale, envisioning a day when other programs or hospitals might be interested in implementing a similar approach. But most of all, FitSTEPS for Life is thrilled to be able to give a full report on constituent engagement, from program to donation.