Ability to raise
AU$10,000
almost immediately
Connecting donors
with beneficiaries
Campaign tracking
in real time
How Girikon used Salesforce to help children’s charity GIM Foundation widen its social impact.
“In a nutshell, Yiannis and the team helped us navigate the whole process and develop a solution that really fits with our unique giving options.”
Maheen Imam | Marketing Manager at GIM Foundation
Girikon assisted GIM Foundation integrate Salesforce across its fundraising platforms and website, giving the non-profit the tools to improve its service offering.
GIM Foundation’s mission to overcome poverty and injustice for vulnerable children is simple, but not straightforward.
GIM has multiple fundraising initiatives on the go at any one time, and the team is quick to establish new emergency appeals for areas affected by conflict or disaster. Recently its work has included countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine.
But its previous donation platform – an out-of-the-box solution – was not serving the foundation’s requirements.
The platform’s lack of data organisation and hierarchy made it challenging for GIM staff to have a single view of its constituents, or generate accurate reports to identify major donors. It also forced GIM’s small team to spend a lot of time manually entering data and generating tax invoices.
The need to upgrade its systems with Salesforce was clear, and that’s where Girikon stepped in.
Aiming for change
The non-profit, whose mission derives from Islamic teachings on social justice and caring for orphaned and vulnerable children, approached Girikon in late 2021.
“Most of our marketing used to be done on the ground, face-to-face,” says Maheen Imam, Marketing Manager at GIM. “But over the last few years, the organisation has realised it’s not sustainable to mostly rely on offline marketing.”
That realisation led to a process of digitisation, during which time GIM identified the need to switch systems.
“Previously, we used a separate, third-party platform for donations,” says Maheen. “But we couldn’t customise it and it didn’t suit our needs. So we spent six months conducting research into whether we could use another third-party platform to host our donation forms.”
“We had already begun using Salesforce as our CRM, but we hadn’t yet considered managing our campaigns through direct integration with Salesforce.”
In essence, GIM needed to integrate Salesforce across multiple donation pages and a separate website platform.
To accomplish this, GIM approached the Melbourne-based arm of Girikon, a global Salesforce implementation partner. The Girikon team was more than ready to provide a custom Salesforce solution that suited its unique needs.
“GIM came to us with a problem, and we gave it a technical solution. They didn’t want anything standard or out of the box,” says Yiannis Loupis, Managing Director at Girikon.
“We took a two-phase approach, using a hybrid-agile model.”
“In the requirements-gathering phase, we partnered very closely with GIM to understand what was needed and how we could structure its campaigns and appeals in Salesforce. This was a chance to do some thinking around how we would approach the problem, and develop a solution prior to starting any development.”
“For the development phase, we had bi-weekly sprints, frequently reviewing the solution with GIM. This allowed us to iterate quickly on all their feedback and ensure the solution was exactly what they needed.”
A helping hand
The partnership between Girikon and GIM remains strong, and Maheen has nothing but praise for Yiannis and his colleagues.
“We’re a dynamic organisation with unique giving options,” she says. “Girikon gave us confidence that they would develop a custom solution that would enable us to not only manage our relationship with constituents, but also handle our campaigns through Salesforce. It’s much more cost-effective than the previous third-party platform.”
“Yiannis and the team helped us navigate the whole process and develop a solution that fits our needs. As expected, there have been teething issues with website maintenance and integration, though not with Girikon’s implementation. But having the Girikon team on hand for support has been very helpful. They’re very responsive.”
Maheen goes so far as to say that the Girikon team feels like an extension upon GIM’s own staff.
“They’re hands-on and always ready to respond to any questions and dilemmas,” she says. “I admit my technical skills are quite limited, so it helped that the team was always very hands-on. Overall, the experience was great – I cannot fault the team.”
When a late-night issue arose after launch, the Girikon team was on hand and ready to respond straight away.
“We really appreciated that,” says Maheen.
Yiannis says that across all of Girikon’s projects, one thing remains constant: the personal touch.
“Most of our clients are small and nimble, and sometimes don’t have the technical ability to make those decisions,” he says. “So we try to take the ‘tech’ out of conversations and focus, without dumbing it down, on the core of what we’re trying to achieve – in this case, social impact.”
A worthwhile investment
For Maheen, the lasting lesson has been about how transformative the right upfront investment in change can be.
“We’ve spent quite a bit on Salesforce development in the past year, but we’ve already seen the benefits of it in terms of automating some of our work and improving organisational efficiencies. This means we can focus more on delivering impact for vulnerable children globally.”
One of those benefits is being able to respond quickly to the world’s needs because any changes to donation campaigns can be reflected on the website instantly. Thanks to that, GIM could launch emergency appeals such as raising over AU$10,000 almost immediately for people impacted by the flood in Pakistan.
An ongoing impact
Having achieved strong results with Salesforce Solutions, GIM is on its way to achieving full automation of its donation processes, which will free its small team from unimportant admin tasks.
By doing so, GIM aims to be able to not only connect more deeply with its donors but also connect its donors with their beneficiaries on the ground, thus amplifying its social impacts.
With Girikon’s involvement, GIM now has considerably more flexibility and oversight when setting up appeals and campaigns. It’s a change that makes their efforts to raise funds for vulnerable and orphaned children globally all the more impactful.
Being our first time hearing of Salesforce, Yiannis and Mokshith really helped us get our head around what it is and what it's capable of doing. We came to them with many problems we needed solved for our Advocacy Service, and we were able to get an outcome that works great for our needs. Our day-to-day operations have been streamlined by cutting out a lot of back and forth to the students using our service with a tailor-made form that addresses all the information we require upfront, rather than later through many emails. Compared to the system we were using previously, Salesforce and Girikon together, allow us infinite opportunities to improve our service. We are continuing to work with Girikon for other projects our broader business needs and are sure the outcomes will be successful too.
The team are engaging and knowledgeable of the product. They are capable of providing advice and recommendations for “non-technical” people 😊. The team are responsive and continue to support us on our Salesforce journey, no matter how big or small the question. We look forward to continuing to work with the team.
Girikon has been our trusted Salesforce advisor for 2 years. We needed a partner who really understood our unique challenges, and with their extensive experience in consulting for the not-for-profit sector, Girikon helped us get closer to the finish line.
Girikon was excellent in suggesting and implementing what’s a simple process but actually has a number of underlying processes that we now use to better forecast and report over time. If I were to say, there’s probably Agile project management at its finest.
As we were the first higher education institution in our region to adopt the EDA with the Student Success Hub (SSH), there was a lengthy scoping phase for this project. Girikon were excellent in assisting us with discovering our needs and how Salesforce could meet and exceed those needs.
Girikon's attention to detail and willingness to find integrated solutions with our existing platforms was outstanding. The level of resources they provided to the engagement always made us feel prioritized as a client and kept the project on track. Overall it was the quality and level of project management that stood out across the engagement to make it so successful.
Our experience with the Girikon team has been fantastic. They helped us develop a custom Salesforce solution to integrate our new website with Salesforce, right before the launch of one of our major annual-giving campaigns. They helped us develop a custom API to integrate our new website with Salesforce, set up our campaigns and streamlined the overall campaign and donor management process. As a small not-for-profit with limited resources, Girikon has become our go-to Salesforce partner. Thanks Girikon!
Thanks so much to everyone on the team for getting Phase 2A completed on schedule.
I appreciate the cooperative spirit and the attention to detail that enabled us to streamline the entire process in order to achieve success and to meet our goals.
I couldn't be more thrilled to work with such a terrific group of people, and I'm looking forward to working with you on the next 2 phases of the project!
With many thanks,
Very happy with Girikon, as they finish the project working us a team and they got really engaged with our needs and specifications. The communication was excellent and i am more then happy to recommend Girikon to anyone for salesforce projects. Keep up the good job!
Girikon have provided a great 'end to end' solution with a minimum of fuss and hassle. The iterative manner by which the project evolved has ensured a 'fit for purpose' outcome. Thank you!
“Outstanding Communication”
It was an absolute pleasure working with Girikon. In all the projects undertaken from us, they have been very helpful in building solutions for our ORG. Also, they have very competitive prices. We Will definitely hire them again for any future projects.
Short term initial engagement with real benefits from the product and solutions scoped and delivered. Good experience with an educated & passionate Salesforce implementation partner.
The team at Girikon were knowledgeable with Salesforce, it's limitations and how best to leverage the resources available to achieve the best outcome. Engagement was flexible and the team continue to support our business.
Yiannis and the team listened carefully to what I needed to achieve and delivered on time and in budget. I look to working with them again in the future.
Girikon team are professional, knowledgeable with Salesforce product and meet objectives in a timely manner. They are a pleasure to work with..
The team at Girikon, they were very professional and detailed in every way! They spent a good amount of time identifying our scope and meticulously understanding our processes before we wrote a single line of code. When they presented a schedule, they stuck to it and the after development support has been top-notch. The Devs have great personalities and I have enjoyed spending time with them building the structure that supports my business. These guys are the best and we already have additional work slated to do with them. We have found a partner for life in Girikon!
From day one, I noticed several differences between Girikon and the previous firms we had worked with. The major difference was the daily communication. I was not only able to jump on a phone call once a day to answer any questions, bounce my ideas to the team and receive progress updates, but also received a daily progress report with upcoming work items.
A project handed off a project to the Girikon team will most certainly be a quality delivery on time and within budget!
We have been extremely impressed with all of our projects with Girikon. They have helped streamline our internal processes, and made our daily work environment a better place to be. Our work together has reduced the amount of tedious “plug-and-chug” work, helped us to innovate new processes, and allowed us to focus on helping our clients.
We at Go! Go! World have had the pleasure of working with the team at Girikon on a very niche project involving multilingual Salesforce B2C implementation.
With brilliant analysis, planning and execution Girikon, not only delivered what we needed but also added value by recommending additional features that we did not previously think possible. Their work ethics and requirement understanding is top-notch and we are absolutely looking forward to working with Girikon for future projects.
I can highly recommend the Girkion Team. They have been amazing since my first contact with them via their website to our Go-Live Date
Girikon were a very diligent team that helped setup our quick-start Salesforce implementation to enable us to have over 250 accounts, over 1,000 contacts and a number of opportunities transferred and then configured for our requirements.
They listened to our requirements for an effective sales engagement process to be implemented, whilst ensuring integration from Pardot was effective for a streamlined process from lead to opportunity. Our team, whilst small in numbers, are scattered around the world, so being able to implement an effective solution that could be trained quickly for users and have them aligning their use was really effective from Girikon
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