Conga Composer saves Mama Cash time while eliminating human error

Mama Cash is a human rights foundation based in the Netherlands which has been working for 34 years to support grassroots organizations for women, girls and transgenders worldwide.

Stats/summary

• Dramatically improved grant document creation process, slashing time spent creating documents and eliminating manual errors
• Gained flexibility, adaptability and greater value in use of their Salesforce instance
• Benefitted from attentive, knowledgeable customer service with a solution-based approach

Challenge

The organization’s mission is to gather funds from larger donors and deliver those funds to grassroots groups all over the world through a grant application process in Salesforce. The Program Officer responsible for putting together grant applications has the challenge of aggregating the necessary information about the group in question from different data sources. The information is stored across various Salesforce Objects, Records and Opportunities, from which the complete application process originates. On top of the data relevant to the grant application, Mama Cash includes additional historical information on the group in question, such as the number of grants applied for, in which year(s), and what the outcomes were. To add a further level of complexity, Mama Cash has two types of grants that require slightly different write up documents.

Solution

This is where Conga comes in. After the Conga Customer Service team was consulted on the organization’s requirements, they used Conga Composer to create a button on the Account level in the group’s Salesforce instance. This meant that the user can view and choose the correct template from the Account level, and then the information can be pulled in at the click of a button. On the one hand, it allows the Program Officer to populate all the information from a specific record into the application itself, and on the other hand it enables the team to create an overview of the historical data for that account. The document template is automatically generated with all the fields already filled in with the relevant information. This automation enables the team to save hours in their days and eliminates any human error. Mama Cash employees consider Conga Composer as integral to their grant making process.

Other departments at Mama Cash also benefit from Conga solutions. The finance department needs to produce two types of documents from the grant making record. The first are financial reports with the amount of funding provided to a given group and who the funders were who provided it. This structure reflects Mama Cash’s Salesforce set up, where they link income to expenditure, so they know exactly what was funded by larger donors, what kind of grant making it was, and in which year their applications were successful.

The finance team also uses Conga Composer to produce contracts. Once the grant has been approved by two directors, finance receives a notification that they can generate the contract, which comprises of a table containing a variety of information pulled from the Opportunity. A single click of the mouse brings the fields into the document directly from the appropriate related records. The fundraising team also uses Composer to build out donor profiles.

Results

Conga solutions have bought Mama Cash multiple benefits. All teams save a significant amount of time, both in creating necessary documents, and in not having to correct human errors that occurred in the old, manual system. Employees have gone from spending hours putting together documents with data from various sources and records, and then having to make corrections if any mistakes were made, to being able to produce the same documents at the click of a button. This has resulted in considerable time savings and productivity improvements. The grant making team’s resources are often overloaded, so using Conga solutions alleviates stress for the team and gives them more time to focus on non-administrative tasks that support the agency’s mission.

Mama Cash employees highly valued their interactions with the Conga Customer Service team. Customer Service and Support are available not just to advise on the product, but on challenges the organization faces. Conga employees helped strategize and apply industry best-practices to resolve the non-profit’s difficulties. They helped decide where the button should be added and created it on the Account level in Mama Cash’s Salesforce instance. This allowed the organization’s employees to generate documents quickly and easily while pulling information from various records.