The Ten Oaks Project connects and engages children and youth from LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, and queer) identities, families and communities through summer camp programs and activities! Data integration between business systems is a big challenge but huge opportunity to streamline business for a small resource-strapped organization.
The Challenge: Like many Canadian charities, Ten Oaks collects online donations via CanadaHelps. They get approximately 60 donations per month, and even more in months when they have a fundraising event that uses CanadaHelp’s Peer2Peer platform. Although CanadaHelps keeps a record of everything and automatically sends donors tax receipts, they needed a record of each donation in their CRM (Salesforce) so they can access info quickly and look for data and trends about donors and donations. This will lead to Ten Oaks running better fundraising campaigns and raising more money for summer camp programs! The challenge was to create a better integration between CanadaHelps and Salesforce so that when a donation comes in via CanadaHelps, it’s automatically pushed to Salesforce.
Results: The team achieved a working version of the tool by the end of the weekend. The API didn’t provide access to the donation info as needed so the team had to work around this. While the team spent some time working with API but it was only to actuate test transactions. To extract donation data, the team mimicked a user login session and downloaded the data. They separated the extraction from the transformation and load in anticipation of the upcoming API, but once they had access to the tabular data, it was fairly easy to load into SF using the API. It is a node app running on a short interval looking for new data and upserting as needed. The team presented a working demo by the end of the weekend.
From Hannah: The team at RHOK were able to create an integration hack for the Ten Oaks Project that will allow us to save dozens of hours each month. The integration is between our CRM and CanadaHelps, and we know it will be a huge timesaver for other nonprofits too.
