Cleaning for a Reason: Automation Leads to Improved Program Outcomes
Cleaning for a Reason provides free home cleaning to patients battling cancer. When cancer makes life at home difficult, our trusted network of residential cleaners, cleaning industry volunteers, and community volunteers come together to support cancer patients and their families.
THE CHALLENGE
As a growing organization attempting to match patients to maid services on an international level, Cleaning For A Reason was becoming overburdened by paperwork and was looking to improve their response time for their patients. Cleaning For A Reason has recruited over 1,200 maid service organizations over the years and every time a new partner came on board, a huge paper trail was created for all of the forms. Patients would then be entered into a separate system and someone would have to manually match a patient to a cleaning service. Another huge administrative burden was the fact that Cleaning For A Reason was having to process and keep track of monthly donations for each maid service organization – with 1,200 cleaning partners that meant over 14,000 transactions to receive and track each year just from their service partners. Before Salesforce, they were using at least seven different databases, as well as Excel spreadsheets, PayPal and QuickBooks to manage their program.
OUR SOLUTION
Streamline Patient Applications and Maid Service Inquiries To achieve this goal, we created a portal that both patients and maid service organizations can access to fill out an online application. All of the information from the online applications comes into Salesforce in real time and is easily viewed and analyzed via customized reports and dashboards. For the first time, the organization can now pull up real time, accurate statistics on number of patients served, number of patients awaiting a match and number of maid services recruited and active. Automate the Patient Matching Process The online applications also set off various triggers that automatically try to match a patient with an available maid service based on their zip code. While this process is happening, email alerts are automatically sent to the patients and to the maid service organizations to let them know where they stand in the process and whether or not a match has been found. Staff is also alerted so they can stay up to date on pending matches. With the automation, patients are now able to be matched and can receive services with a much faster turnaround time, allowing the organization to serve even more women undergoing treatment. Integrate Online Payments & QuickBooks To effectively manage Cleaning For A Reason’s high volume of monthly donations, we also wanted to create an efficient and fully integrated online payment model. First, we implemented Click & Pledge to process all online donations and recurring service partner payments. The next step was to integrate Salesforce with their accounting system, QuickBooks. Now, maid services are automatically charged monthly, those charges are automatically attached to the maid service account in Salesforce and are also automatically brought into their accounting system. All other online donations are also automatically created in Salesforce and QuickBooks, allowing the Cleaning For A Reason team to raise more money so they can match and serve more patients.
RESULTS
“Working out of one database is incredible. The beauty of Salesforce for us is that it allows us to record, track and analyze the data in real time. It really created a tremendous amount of efficiency for us in the office. A lot of these processes were completely manual. As a small nonprofit, we don’t have an IT person. I’m it and with that being said, I know that I can contact Urgensee and I’m going to get an answer. I’m going to get a resolution to my problem and I’m going to get it fast and that is incredibly important.” – Cleaning For A Reason’s Executive Director, Lynn Frankenfield
