Making technology simpler so the team could focus on what really matters
For a membership organisation, good technology should make things easier. Members should receive the right information. Renewals should happen when they’re supposed to. Events should be straightforward to manage.
At the Charity Retail Association, too much of that work had become manual. Salesforce, the website and event systems weren’t properly connected, so information had to be updated in different places and colleagues spent valuable time keeping everything aligned.
The challenge wasn’t simply to improve Salesforce. It was to make the organisation easier to run.
Organisation
Charity Retail Association
Sector
Nonprofit, membership and charity retail
Services
Salesforce transformation, integration, automation, training, ongoing support
Key platforms
Sales Cloud, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Success Pack, Eventbrite
Nonprofit, membership and charity retail
About the Charity Retail Association
The Charity Retail Association represents and supports charity retailers across the UK, campaigning on issues that affect the sector while providing research, training, events and opportunities for its members to share knowledge and best practice.
Its roots go back to the early 1990s, and today the organisation plays an important role in supporting the charities and people behind the UK’s charity retail sector.
That means membership sits at the heart of what the organisation does. The systems behind it need to make those relationships easier to manage, not create more work for the people looking after them.
The challenge
The situation
The CRA team was dealing with a problem we see surprisingly often. The individual systems weren’t necessarily the issue. The problem was that they weren’t talking to each other.
01
The website and Salesforce operated separately, so information wasn’t always updated when it needed to be and colleagues had limited visibility across departments.
02
Membership renewals were tracked manually, creating additional administration and increasing the possibility of renewals being missed.
03
Event information had to be added to the website by hand, creating another process to manage and another opportunity for information to become inconsistent.
04
Without central dashboards and dependable reporting in Salesforce, colleagues relied heavily on spreadsheets to understand what was happening across the organisation.
There was no single dramatic failure. There was simply a growing collection of small, manual tasks that were taking up too much time.
What would have happened if nothing had changed?
For a nonprofit or membership organisation, manual administration carries a particular cost. Every hour spent checking spreadsheets, copying information between systems or manually processing renewals is an hour that could have been spent supporting members and furthering the organisation’s work.
As membership and event activity grew, the administrative burden would have grown with it.
Renewals would still need monitoring.
Events would still need updating in multiple places.
Teams would continue working with incomplete views of the same information.
Leadership would remain dependent on manually prepared reports.
None of those problems would necessarily stop the organisation functioning. They would simply make everything harder than it needed to be. And over time, that’s a significant problem.
Our approach
We started with the people doing the work
Before deciding what needed to change technically, Sweet Potato Tec worked closely with colleagues across retail operations and member services. We wanted to understand where time was being lost, which processes caused the most frustration and what information people needed to do their jobs properly.
That distinction matters. It’s easy to automate a bad process. The harder part is understanding whether that process should exist in the first place. By working through those questions with the CRA team, we could design the Salesforce environment around the way the organisation actually operated rather than expecting people to adapt themselves around the technology.
1
Connecting Salesforce with the wider organisation
2
Less administration. Better information.
Once information could move reliably between systems, many of the everyday frustrations began to disappear. Teams gained access to shared, up-to-date information instead of maintaining separate versions of the same data. Membership processes became less dependent on manual tracking. Event information moved between Eventbrite, Salesforce and the website with less intervention. Reporting improved because information was captured more consistently and made available centrally.
3
Making sure people were comfortable using it
A successful Salesforce implementation doesn’t end when the technology works — people have to feel comfortable using it. Training was part of the project from the outset, helping CRA colleagues understand the new processes and build confidence in the platform.
From manual administration to a connected member experience
Connecting Salesforce, the website and Eventbrite to simplify operations, automate key processes and give the CRA team the information they need.
Scope of work
What Sweet Potato Tec delivered
Salesforce, the website and event systems operated separately. Membership renewals and event processes required significant manual administration, while reporting relied heavily on spreadsheets. The work addressed each of them, and the reasons behind them.
- Salesforce transformation
- Salesforce and Eventbrite integration
- Workflow automation
- User training and adoption support
- Salesforce and website integration
- Automated membership renewal processes
- Improved reporting and data visibility
- Ongoing Salesforce and website support
Key integrations
Eventbrite
CRA website
WordPress / Drupal website technology
Salesforce capabilities
Sales Cloud
Experience Cloud
Nonprofit Success Pack
Reports and dashboards
Flow automation
The outcome
The difference it made
Today, the Charity Retail Association has a much more connected digital environment. Salesforce, the website and Eventbrite work together rather than operating as separate islands of information.
For us, that’s what digital transformation should look like in a nonprofit organisation. Not more technology for the sake of it — technology that quietly removes unnecessary work and gives people more time to concentrate on the reason the organisation exists in the first place.
- Shared, up-to-date information across teams
- Less manual administration
- Reduced opportunity for human error
- More efficient membership renewal processes
- Better connected event management
- Improved reporting and organisational visibility
- A scalable digital foundation for future development
“The experience has actually made an IT project a joy.”
What happened next
Support that continues beyond go-live
Sweet Potato Tec has continued supporting the organisation beyond the initial implementation, managing Salesforce updates, maintaining and improving the website integration, troubleshooting issues and making further improvements as requirements have evolved.
That ongoing relationship means the platform can continue changing alongside the organisation rather than gradually becoming another legacy system that people learn to work around.
Could your nonprofit spend less time managing systems?
If membership data, events, reporting or everyday processes are spread across different platforms, there may be a simpler way to bring them together.
Sweet Potato Tec helps charities, nonprofits and membership organisations design Salesforce around the way their people actually work.
Let us make your technology work harder for your organisation
Tell us what you are trying to improve, where your current systems are holding you back and what success would look like.
We will arrange an initial conversation to explore your requirements and determine whether Sweet Potato Tec is the right partner to help.