Goals
Update systems and business processes to better engage with donors
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) is the nation’s largest organization exclusively representing the Black College Community. Founded in 1987 and named for the U.S. Supreme Court’s first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall, TMCF provides students with the opportunities and tools necessary to achieve success in their journeys to college and into their careers. TMCF seeks to change the world….one leader at a time.
TMCF sought to fully leverage Salesforce in order to achieve its fundraising targets and inform sophisticated development efforts with centralized, high-quality data. This project included:
- Converting the existing Salesforce Sales Cloud instance to the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to better track relationships and engagement with key donors.
- Updating TMCF’s business processes to better leverage NPSP’s native functionality for donor management and fundraising.
- Partnering with TMCF to continue to support and enhance the TMCF’s Salesforce journey.

Challenges
New donor relationships needed to be tracked in a single system
- TMCF was using Salesforce Sales Cloud to manage account-level information and contact records but needed a way to better track fundraising and development data from a central source.
- Historically, TMCF’s primary source of funding had been its corporate donors, and the organization needed to put a system in place that could assist in developing and managing relationships with that critical donor base as well as with a growing number of individual donors.
- TMCF’s data needed overall review for hygiene and ongoing data storage. Management processes needed to be reviewed and updated based on best practices.

Solutions and Results
Salesforce NPSP enables TMCF to manage donors holistically
- Fíonta worked closely with the TMCF team to understand and refine business processes.
- Fíonta implemented and enhanced NPSP to meet TMCF’s needs for tracking both corporate and individual donors; upgraded to Salesforce Lightning.
- Added several years’ worth of individual donations and used GAUs and Campaigns to allocate and track funds.
- Implemented Apsona for data deduplication and document generation, and integrated existing MobileCause and Double the Donation solutions with Salesforce NPSP.
- Curated reports and dashboards to better visualize data and leveraged Guidance for Success on Opportunities to support internal users.
TMCF now has a reliable central source of data to power its development and fundraising efforts at scale, with ongoing training and refinement from Fíonta as needed to ensure that the TMCF team can maximize efficiency using the Salesforce platform.
