Visitors to Pine Cove’s nine summer camp locations should expect to be impressed. There are jet skis, ropes courses and swimming pools. You can trot through the woods on a horse or sail across a meadow on a zip line. But the camp experience is about so much more.
“God transforms lives at Pine Cove,” said Cody Wilhite, Chief Analytics Officer. “We have people who come to Christ every year.” Wilhite credits the top-notch camp counselors who interact with the kids and families.
Many children attend on scholarships—totaling over $1.3 million of free outdoor fun in 2015 alone. So Pine Cove had relied on a hybrid system of Salesforce for registrations and Raiser’s Edge for fundraising.
But with no integration between the two, the 230 full-time staff and 1700 summer staff struggled to access information. The development and camp staff passed data back and forth manually. No comprehensive report was ever up-to-date in real time.
“How do we know that a camper is registered and that the family is a donor?” said Wilhite. “Well, that’s really hard when you’re in Salesforce and then you have Blackbaud The Raiser’s Edge over here on the side. We had to ask that question in multiple places because you couldn’t look at the whole picture of somebody.”
As a result, Pine Cove hired a full-time analyst for 14 weeks a year to develop a detail report about the campers coming to visit. If there’s a first-time camper in the cabin, it’s important to check in on his stress level. For a military scholarship recipient whose father is deployed, the counselor would know she might need some special attention. For a family who’s given a major financial donation, the report granted an opportunity to express gratitude in person. For each session of youth summer camp, the analyst would repeat this same crucial report.
Clearly, Pine Cove needed everything in one database. Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge, however, are incompatible. Issues such as inconsistent dropdown values, constituent connections and campaign structures can be minefields during a data migration.
The case of Pine Cove was further complicated by a highly customized integration with an online registration system, as well as the need to deduplicate across decades of data. To navigate these challenges, Julie Loyd, KELL’s Solution Architect-Data Lead, provided advice and customizations.
Julie’s first step was installing the Nonprofit Success Pack. She then integrated Pine Cove’s registration and fundraising data. Through years of experience in Raiser’s Edge migrations, KELL has fine-tuned a process to transform data for the Salesforce environment.
With KELL’s help, Pine Cove can now access a 360-degree view of constituents. All staff can see campers, families and donors. Generating lists based on program interactions is a simple task. The detail report that used to take 80 hours of staff time per camp session now pops up at the touch of a button. The data can be quickly spliced in four different ways.
“This is the advantage of getting our registration information and our development data integrated and put in Salesforce,” said Wilhite. “It’s absolutely wonderful. It’s changed our world when it comes to being able to interact with people.”
The new system equips counselors with information to treat campers in a way that reflects gratitude for their support and sensitivity to their life experience. The database sits in the background, letting staffers focus on stewardship of a truly transformative camp experience.