Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a platform that – among its many much revered about strengths – gives brands the tools to strengthen their customer relationships and build brand loyalty.
But Salesforce itself has a large group of loyal customers, and among them is the American Red Cross, the humanitarian organization that provides disaster relief, emergency assistance, and education all across the country. The Red Cross has been a Salesforce customer since all the way back in 2009, and utilizes Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud.
“Once, a Red Cross supporter told me that when she was a little girl,” said its president Gail McGovern, “but she knew that whenever she saw that image of a red cross, it meant that help and hope were on the way.”
Key deliveries with Salesforce
The organization is a network of 270 locations and 36 blood service regions run by 21,000 workers supplemented by 300,000 volunteers. It responds to a disaster every 8 minutes which builds up to 60,000 disasters every year.
A lot of workers, people in disaster areas, and so many services rely on the robustness of Salesforce to reach out to its stakeholders and construct closer connections.
The clouds
Collecting key information across 150 partners around the country and over 250 field units, the Red Cross uses Salesforce Sales Cloud to manage relationships with its donors, volunteers, and service recipients. “Donors and volunteers are the heart and soul of our organization,” said Gail. “The closer we can stay with them, the more we can do for the public at large.”
When there is a disaster, the Red Cross provides food, shelter, as well as addresses other basic needs. Its use of Salesforce enables it to fundraise, support blood drive campaigns, emergency assistance, and transport of blood to hospitals.
There is a core team of Salesforce architects, admins, and program managers taking care of new Salesforce apps to support a broad range of services and campaigns.
Salesforce is also used to train volunteers via the cloud where they can also find useful resources, so that they can be ready and respond to a disaster at any moment. Volunteers are also able to use their phones to coordinate when needed using Salesforce. The platform “helps us stay connected to our most valuable resources,” said Gail, “the volunteers, partners, and donors that make what we do possible.”
Spreading the word on social media
According to one survey, one quarter of the public would use social media to let others know that they are safe during an emergency. In addition, the public would use social media to get updates, seek help, and connect with other people.
Using these insights of public behavior, the Red Cross plugged in Marketing Cloud to build a center dedicated to updating the public and monitoring situations on social media. The amount of valuable insight the Red Cross is able to discover helps them to decide where to put workers on the ground.
“Marketing Cloud gives us ways to measure the effectiveness of our community outreach,” said Gail. “It helps us to gather and analyze information so we can focus on turning what we learn into actionable strategies.”
Blood, Salesforce, and lives saved
The Red Cross is the largest provider of blood products in the country, collecting, processing, and distributing blood. In fact, it provides around 40% of the blood supply of the US. And because of the nature of what they do, it needs to comply with FDA processes. Using Salesforce, it can manage its relationships with healthcare providers.
The Red Cross provides training programs through Salesforce which include disaster preparedness, CPR, and first aid. Per year, the organization teaches close to 6 million people from professionals to young volunteers.
Through Salesforce architecture, ranging from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Community Cloud to Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, it developed its Red Cross Training Services. Like Salesforces’ famous approach, the training services take a user-centric approach by streamlining processes and automating others.
With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the organization can carry out both B2B and B2C operations while with Marketing Cloud they can send students on digital experiences to keep them up to date with training and certifications. In fact, they’re able to automate class schedules and instructor prep in Salesforce, as well as give self-service access to resources.
Data insight
As one specific example of the Red Cross-Salesforce partnership, they recently had a campaign called MIssing Types, with the goal of getting 370,000 new blood donors. The campaign challenged people to imagine that the letters A, B, and O went missing – the main blood types of humans and the ones in which they have shortages in hospitals. The campaign, which spread across websites and social media channels as well as billboards across big cities, managed to get 320,000 new donors to make blood donation appointments.
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