How Make-A-Wish uses Salesforce

Navin’s remit extends across all digital products within the organization, including “business functions that help us reach and deliver children's wishes,” he explains. Salesforce is the main product that  Make-A-Wish relies on, alongside the foundation’s website and apps — for which it uses a digital asset management system. 

“Salesforce is our key CRM tool and source of truth,” Navin says. Information from those who contact Make-A-Wish—including wish families, wish children, donors, and volunteers—is all housed on Salesforce, which is key to Make-A-Wish’s business processes. “All of our other products link into and out of Salesforce, so it needs to be up to date,” he explains. This includes financial tracking, funding, and allocation.

The foundation started using Salesforce in 2019, and has since invested increasingly into the platform to create wish products for wish-granters. This allows them to track wishes as managed products, with an inventory of gifts that can be searched and assigned from within Salesforce. “It will allow us to be able to scale up the amount of wishes that we can deliver,” Navin explains.

Make-A-Wish combines the power of Salesforce and Own

Without Salesforce, Make-A-Wish couldn’t track how money for wishes is spent and would lack the detail to deliver the amount of wishes it delivers.

Knowing this, Make-A-Wish launched Salesforce with Own. This preceded Navin’s time at the charity, but he is aware that the charity previously used a CRM to export data to Salesforce via a third-party company. This company recommended Own as the go-to backup tool for Salesforce. “That’s how Make-A-Wish started the relationship,” Navin says.

“Having Own—and insisting on backing up our data—is critical for our business,” he notes. It’s easy to see how a world without Own would be a world with less wishes fulfilled for its children, were something to go wrong. While Navin has thankfully not experienced data loss or corruption events at Make-A-Wish, he did experience this at a previous organization.

Avoiding a worst-case scenario 

Were Make-A-Wish to lose access to data for a month, week, or even a few hours, the impact would be difficult to quantify.

“Ultimately, it would mean that those thousand children in our wish pipeline would have  their wishes severely delayed,” Navin explains. 

Some of the children Make-A-Wish help classify as a rush wish: someone with a prognosis of less than six months left to live. “If we were to lose or lose access to that data, we wouldn’t be able to deliver wishes to those children,” Navin says. “That would have repercussions beyond just the organization not having data.”

In the event of data loss or corruption without Own backing up Make-A-Wish, the organization would have to rely on the data it’s moving toward its data lake. “Some data would be available to retrieve,” Navin says, “but we would have to go back through text messages and other forms of communication” to try to piece together the rest.

“Say someone got a message from 30th July, and Salesforce states that the last message was from 10th July,” Navin explains. “Then it would be quite a manual process” to retrieve the remaining data. With Own, where retrieval of all necessary data is a smooth, seamless process, they can avoid this kind of situation altogether.

Most valuable Own use case? Invisible support

Sometimes the best products and tools are the ones you don’t even notice.

“Own gets on with what it needs to in the background—we don't have any issues with it,” Navin says. “As someone who works with SaaS products, that's always a good thing. You don't really notice it, and you know that it's there when you need it.”

And when does Make-A-Wish really need Own? “It’s an integral part of our products, because all that data needs to be stored and backed up,” Navin says. “If anything then did happen, we would need to kind of revert. That’s key.”

Salesforce also introduced Nonprofit Cloud, where Make-A-Wish plans to migrate its data. “It uses the same core functionality as Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud,” Navin says. “Having our data backed up is a key part of this migration project.”

“The key thing about Own is that it does what it says it will do, and we’ve not had any problems with it since I've been here” he says.

Efficient Salesforce Development at Make-A-Wish

The development team at Make-A-Wish builds custom solutions on Salesforce, for which they need a reliable sandbox seeding tool.

These solutions include “implementing a stock management tool, using opportunities as wishes, and designing wishes from beginning to end,” Navin says. The organization’s development team works on improving workflows, API integrations, and reporting in Salesforce, “so custom build reports get sent out or linked to for various stakeholders throughout the organization.”

In line with an agile methodology, the team looks at long-term enhancements, typically via two-week sprints for minor object enhancements. Bigger projects may cover multiple sprints. “That's where the custom builds that my team would do fall into,” Navin says.

Projects like migrating onto Nonprofit Cloud also require additional planning involving business analysts. “They'll go around the organization finding out from developers not just what current problems are, but about what developers are trying to achieve so that the analysts can anticipate potential future problems,” Navin explains.

What developers may present as solutions business analysts would look at through a bigger lens — more holistically. “We wouldn't be able to do that without having expertise in Salesforce,” Navin emphasizes.

Striking the balance between quality code and quick innovation

Development teams can find timely delivery challenging—but also ensuring that what they’re delivering has been tested. “QAT [quality assurance testing] might block it, and then you're left with that balancing act as to how big different priorities are,” Navin says.

“We work in a must, should, could, won't way,” he says. “The musts are the ones that teams ensure get done. And then they move on to the shoulds. But there needs to be buy-in from the organization in order to move those things forward.”

Make-A-Wish’s development team began to score tickets to try to better manage their workload, “whereas before my team would just try and do as much as they could,” Navin says. “Moving toward a scoring of each issue means both the organization and the team know how much effort is needed.” 

How Own Accelerate  for Salesforce quickly delivers more business value

Own’s sandbox seeding tool, Own Accelerate, helps Make-A-Wish deliver more business value, quicker than without Own.

“We do development within sandboxes,” Navin says. “Nothing would go into production without those sandboxes.” Having complete access to up-to-date tools and processes is critical for Make-A-Wish to test effectively. “Otherwise, testing in a blank sandbox would work, but once you’re working with real data, it breaks,” he says.

Sandbox seeding ensures the quality of what is released to production, with fewer coding errors. “Since I've been here, my team has never pushed through anything to production that had a bug in it,” Navin highlights. His team also helped third parties fix bugs in their own work. “My team is very good, and I'm assuming that all their tools at their disposal are helping them achieve that,” he says.

Using Own means Make-A-Wish can seed sandboxes “very quickly,” Navin explains. “I don't hear anything about it, and if people don't complain about something,  it means it's working. Because when something isn't working, they will complain — very quickly and very loudly.”

Fulfilling organizations’ wishes to go further

Without Salesforce, Make-A-Wish fulfilled approximately 7-800 wishes per year. The organization has since doubled this figure and is aiming even higher.

Navin recognizes that without templates and automation, the charity couldn’t scale. “It's not just doing more,” he says. “It's doing more with the same amount of money.”

Ultimately, Salesforce and Own help Make-A-Wish “achieve more and reach more children,” Navin says, “without increasing our base cost.” This is everything a charity dedicated to enabling the life-changing wishes of very sick children could hope for.

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