Bread for the City (BFC) has worked for over 40 years to provide essential goods and services – from food, clothing, and diapers to legal advocacy and medical care – to low-income residents of Washington, DC. The organization’s two centers serve approximately 31,000 DC residents annually in an atmosphere of dignity and respect. After wrestling with an inadequate legacy solution, BFC needed to move to a system that was easier for staff to use, integrated better with its accounting tool, and offered more robust marketing automation capabilities to fuel donor engagement. Salesforce was already in use elsewhere in the organization, so BFC decided to harness its powerful functionality for fundraising as well.
Transcript
Julia Eddy:
Bread for the City is a multi-service social services agency and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
Katie Jones:
Providing food, clothing, medical care, legal services, and more in an atmosphere of dignity and respect have become even more critical for our neighbors in need over the past two and a half years.
Jeffrey Goldstein:
This is a story of transformation and one that enables an organization like Bread for the City that serves the needs of over 300,000, it really helps them to realize operational excellence so that they can deliver more to the community for which they serve.
Katie Jones:
We wanted to help Bread for the City feel more confident in their data and streamline their operations so that they could serve even more people. Bread for the City’s development and fundraising staff could not really rely on the data they were holding in their legacy solution. A lack of integration between the legacy system and Bread for the City’s accounting solution meant that monthly reconciliations were very labor-intensive.
Julia Eddy:
Fíonta really rose to the top as the organization that we wanted to partner with on this implementation, and it became clear that they had a recipe for success.
Jeffrey Goldstein:
As always, Fíonta shows up as experts, and especially with the kind of work that needed to be done here and moving a set of systems over to Salesforce.
Katie Jones:
Bread for the City had an excellent understanding of where they needed to go and a willingness to update their business processes as needed. This openness to change made for a truly collaborative relationship and a much more successful project.
Julia Eddy:
We can have a more complete picture of people that we interact with. You could be a donor, you could be a client, you could be a volunteer, and all of that data would exist inside one record in Salesforce, so that’s really powerful.
Katie Jones:
Our vision for Bread for the City is that they continue to realize additional efficiencies in their own workflows. That’s going to permit their team members to focus on the relationship-building programs and services that are so essential to their clients. Definitely looking forward to helping Bread for the City scale its Salesforce solution as the organization continues to grow.
Julia Eddy:
There’s just a huge amount of potential, yeah, for innovation and for cross-collaboration across our programs.