Uncovering a Hidden Gem: An Effective Fundraising Solution for the Swiss Market
Klaas Jansen
Account Director @ FinDock | Helping partners and customers with Payments on Salesforce
Traveling back from a nonprofit event in Geneva last week, I reflected on all the great conversations I had with people working at nonprofits in Switzerland.?
During the event, I had the privilege of presenting how nonprofits can optimize and innovate their fundraising with Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Cloud using FinDock.?
Speaking with attendees, I was surprised by the current status quo solutions in Switzerland and how the small number of solutions dominating the market have data silo’s outside the Salesforce platform and a licensing model which charges a percentage of the donation.
I decided to put this article together to highlight a proven alternative for fundraising on Salesforce (Nonprofit Cloud + FinDock), which many Swiss nonprofits are already taking advantage of but is also new to many.
Let me take you through some key points which arose during my conversations and share how FinDock can support organizations in these areas.? (grab a coffee - there are a couple (of good ;) points))s)
One of the key advantages of FinDock is that it is natively built on the Salesforce platform. This means that nonprofits can avoid the hassle of dealing with data silos and clunky integrations. Your Salesforce 360 customer view is enriched with transactional payment data (online, bank transfers and direct debits), and actionaly in the heart of your CRM, which means you can use the power of the platform to increase engagement with your supporters.?
Recently Salesforce.org acknowledged the added value of FinDock for their Nonprofit Cloud proposition. For the first time in history they included a non Salesforce application in their nonprofit offering, presenting the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud FinDock Bundle. A great endorsement from Salesforce of which we are grateful and proud.
Talking to numerous people at the event, one of the recurring things I heard was: “A non Swiss solution for fundraising won't focus on all the Swiss specific payment methods”. However, this is a significant misperception as making Salesforce locally relevant by adding the specific payment methods is at the heart of what FinDock does.
“We want to give our donors as many options as possible and keep our costs and efforts with new digital payment methods low.” - Unicef Switzerland
FinDock offers Swiss payment methods including TWINT, QR billing, Post Finance, and LSV+ Direct Debit which can be switched on and managed directly within Salesforce. This means that Swiss nonprofits can offer their donors a variety of convenient options for making payments, which can help to increase donation rates.?
Furthermore, FinDock supports innovation in payments, like crypto payments, making it a great choice for nonprofits looking to test new payment methods. Besides the Swiss payment methods mentioned, FinDock also supports many local and global payment methods. See our factsheet for all supported payment channels and methods.
FinDock Giving Pages is a donation page and form builder inside Salesforce allowing users to quickly build customizable, branded and responsive donation pages which are hosted on Heroku by FinDock.? Create donation pages in under an hour, natively in Salesforce with point and click tools - no coding is needed, so no external agency is needed. We have multiple customers using it and praising the ease and time to market of our pages.
“With Giving Pages, we can achieve what was taking us 1 day, in 1 hour.” Zoé4Life - Switzerland
Besides Giving Pages, we also offer our payment API for nonprofits that want to use their own donation forms and connect these to Salesforce.?
A major advantage of FinDock is its capacity to help nonprofits to operational efficiencies. With the capabilities to manage recurring giving, import and match bank statements in Salesforce and the possibility to configure custom workflows and automations, nonprofits? decrease their manual and administrative workload, giving them time back to work on more value adding tasks. In fact, on average, FinDock nonprofit customers reduce time spent on reconciling payments in Salesforce by 70%!.
There are many organizations who are enthusiastic about our powerful toolset and the time they save. Not even mentioning the impact on data quality that our solutions like Guided Matching have.?
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“Before FinDock, it used to take us two weeks to get caught up with?processing donations after the Christmas break.?But this year, it took us 2 days, even though donation income is growing.” - Wycliffe Bible Translators - UK
One of the common nuisances I heard in Switzerland was the typical pricing model that is used for fundraising solutions on the Swiss market.? At FinDock, we have a clear pricing model, and we do not take a percentage of the donation. Our licensing fee exists as a monthly base fee for nonprofits, together with a fixed fee per transaction based on the number of transactions annually processed. Would you be interested in learning more? If so, feel free to contact me - I am happy to compare our pricing with your current license fees.?
To continue on pricing, we do not calculate extra costs for our support. This is included in our license fee. So no additional support tiers or anything. We value all our customers and partners. And they speak highly of our Customer Success team. Our customers, partners help shape our future and the future of our product, and so we work hard to make everyone successful on our platform
“The spirit of the relationship is one of collaboration which we appreciate a lot.” Save the Children - Germany
Many nonprofits I talked to were raising funds locally, and using local payment methods together with credit card and PayPal which suited them. However I also talked to organizations that were thinking about, or already actively raising funds in other countries outside the DACH region. FinDock supports local payment methods and banks across Europe, whether that’s Bollettino Postale in Italy, BACS in the UK, SEPA in all European countries, but also Sofort, Bancontact, iDeal and more. Check our Factsheet for all the details. It’s relatively straightforward to set up for international fundraising - after configuring FinDock in your Salesforce environment, enabling the desired payment methods, you can launch localized Giving Pages and start your campaign (we know there’s a lot of planning behind this but we’re giving you the tools to make it a whole lot easier :))
“Giving Pages has allowed us to easily enter new foreign markets. Translating, localizing, and personalizing pages has never been so easy.” Veganuary - UK
OK, so I’ve listed a lot of positives to try and shed some light on the capabilities and the benefits that FinDock offers Swiss nonprofits,? but I also want to be transparent on what FinDock doesn’t bring to the table (yet?). As Salesforce starts with their ‘forward looking statement’, you do need to know what is already available in FinDock, and also what not.?
What we still need to work on for the Swiss market…
Our Giving Pages enable you to configure and publish donation pages in record time, however, we don’t offer the option to create Crowdfunding or Peer2Peer pages. We do however have partners that built these functionality on our Payment API.?
While FinDock supports TWINT, we cannot currently support TWINT+. However, we are open to conversations about possible partnerships in this area. And we have customers that are listed in TWINT+ that import the donations made there in our data model in Salesforce using a CSV file.?
OK so that completes my article on “Why FinDock for Nonprofits in Switzerland. Overall I believe FinDock is a great alternative for payments/ fundraising management on Salesforce in the Swiss Market. Do you agree?
Please reach out to me or your system integrator if you want to learn more about FinDock and what it can do for your organization.?
Klaas Jansen - FinDock
* all customer quotes are collected at our FinDock Customer Impact Study 2022