From manual to auto with World Bicycle Relief

Creating seamless integrations between Third-Party Aggregators and Salesforce with Propel Integration Partners

In developing regions of the world, millions of people walk for miles each day just to survive. Distance is a barrier to attending school, receiving healthcare, and delivering goods to market.

World Bicycle Relief mobilizes people through the power of bicycles.

World Bicycle Relief delivers specially designed, locally assembled, rugged bicycles for people in need. Their efficient, innovative, and scalable model empowers students, health workers, and entrepreneurs in rural developing regions with life-changing mobility.

A bumpy ride: the challenge of Third-Party Aggregators

To keep their life-changing mission on track, World Bicycle Relief relies on donations collected through online donation platforms known as Third-Party Aggregators (TPA’s) or Payment Processors. These platforms, which are leveraged by many nonprofit organizations, include Enthuse, Raisley, RaiseNow, JustGiving and many more.

“Since TPAs are marketplace based, they build local regulations into their services and garner local attention,” said Jeff Bosken, Director Finance and Administration at World Bicycle Relief. “WBR leverages these attributes to take advantage of market trends while following local regulations.”

While their benefits are significant, including increased engagement, brand awareness, and donations, they also have their challenges.

• Manual integrations: The data collected through TPA’s, including donation amount and donor information, is essential to nonprofits, and should be ideally captured in a CRM to create a single source of truth. Unfortunately, every TPA and Payment Processor has its own unique quirks, and integrating with Salesforce or other CRM’s can be a time-consuming and manual process—especially when dealing with multiple TPA’s.
  
  
• Limited staff resources: As with all nonprofits, World Bicycle Relief is running a lean machine. Managing their multiple TPA’s, each with their own integration processes was time-consuming and prone to human error. It also meant precious staff resources were being diverted from mission-central activities to deal with TPA integrations.
  
  
• Data-driven insights: Due to the manual nature of TPA’s and the consequential resourcing issues, World Bicycle Relief was spending more time entering data than analyzing data.

Automation for the win with Propel Integration Partners

Looking for an innovative solution to their TPA woes, World Bicycle Relief reached out to Propel Integrations for help.

“Third Party Aggregator processing is an ideal candidate for automation,” said Neil Hagen, Senior Integrations Architect at Propel Integration Partners. “A structured source data, in this case CSV, that needs to be transformed and loaded into standard Salesforce Objects, was a perfect challenge for our Traction Propel team.”

“We get to spend our time analyzing the data vs. entering the data.”

Propel Integrations, an Integration Managed Service, offers managed integration solutions for organizations wanting to focus on their mission, rather than manage their integration middleware architecture and services. For World Bicycle Relief, who wanted to enable their teams to focus on mission rather than data entry, Traction Propel was a perfect fit.

“Propel allows us to focus on our core competencies by eliminating the need to integrate platforms on a 1x1 basis or taking time with lengthy manual upload processes," said Jeff. "We get to spend our time analyzing the data vs. entering the data.”

The platform, coined The TPA Managed Solution, enables World Bicycle Relief to sit back and let Propel Integration Partners do the heavy lifting. The TPA Managed Solution seamlessly integrates all TPA data into their Salesforce NPSP daily, improving staff efficiency, reducing human error and freeing up time for World Bicycle Relief to focus on what matters most: mission.

Keeping the wheels turning

Since implementing Propel Integration Partners’ TPA Managed Solution, World Bicycle Relief is data-entry-free and poised for growth. Processing approximately 600 donations per month, the solution has cut processing time by more than 60%.

“Our processing time has been cut by more than 60% by using Propel.”

“Working with the Propel team has been an excellent partnership,” said Jeff. “The Propel team takes the time to understand our business needs and works in close collaboration with our team to deliver results.”

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