SCIAF’s vision was to achieve the dream of every fundraiser, full end-to-end visibility of what’s working and what’s not and how to optimise, without having to resort to sticking everything in one tool and everything being mediocre.

Their best-in-class suite of applications included Beacon, a fantastic charity-focussed CRM, as their central source of truth, and Fundraise Up, a leading online fundraising platform. The challenge was that there was no out-of-the-box, first party integration between the two.

In order to build a 360º view of their donor journeys, they needed to combine the wealth of data with the other information held in the CRM, which was being used as their central source of truth.

At Suru, we deeply understand nonprofits, have an extensive technical understanding of the work, and we focus on outcomes which are not technical but related to the strategic goals of the organisation.

Unlike high-level consultants, who help you see where you want to go to but leave you to figure out how to get there, or implementers, who will create exactly what you've instructed without giving strategic thought to the implications of technical decisions, Suru has a wealth of nonprofit focussed strategic and technical expertise and can address the full range of the problem and solution space from strategy to implementation.

First, Suru helped SCIAF to clarify what they wanted in terms of outcomes. The request for proposal laid out the functionality of the intended solution. As part of our Roadmapping process, which precedes every Suru project, we looked at the outcomes that SCIAF wanted to achieve. In so doing, it became apparent that certain situations, including key areas like claiming of Gift Aid and segment attribution, weren’t going to be addressed by the proposed areas of functionality. Working in accord with their key principle of Partnership, and through connectedness with the needs of the organisation, Suru evolved their requirements and so the work gave SCIAF a greater long term ROI, and avoided extra pain and expense down the road.

From here, Suru worked out what was technically possible and talked with the vendors on SCIAF’s behalf. Having established what was technically feasible, Suru presented the available options with implications for the outcomes of the project, and discussed the business case of each.

Our cloud engineers designed the integration infrastructure for a near real time integration; running on AWS using automated flat file CSV exports from Fundraise Up transformed through serverless functions and imported directly into Beacon using their API. Our business analysts developed a data schema to allow rich representation of Fundraise Up data within the CRM schema to achieve the goals. Our CRM team configured Beacon to receive that information in a way that addressed the needs of the SCIAF fundraising team.
The whole process is now fully automated, with no manual work involved.

We’re also responsible for testing — our system testers guided SCIAF through the acceptance testing, helping their team to understand how the integration works and the outcomes and impact within their roles.

Both platforms, Fundraise Up and Beacon, were involved in live fundraising. As such, SCIAF needed a zero downtime solution to the rollout and migration, with no duplication or loss of data. Suru managed the migration and rollout of the new system, leaving the fundraising team free to continue their important work.

SCIAF now has a fully integrated data platform inside their CRM, with fresh data populated from their core fundraising platform sitting alongside donor information from a range of other channels.

The result is that the fundraising team is able to quickly assess the impact of their fundraising campaigns, identify channels that are effective, and improve approaches that are missing targets. Importantly, this is done with no additional manual work to get the data in the right place, leaving the team free from wrangling data between platforms, to focus on the important work of fundraising.