St. John Ambulance Canada
Mission: Enabling everyone to improve their health, safety, and quality of life through training, education, resources, and service to the community. As Canada’s leading first aid charity, St. John Ambulance (SJA) empowers all Canadians to save lives by providing first aid training, supplies, and courses to communities across the country.
Organization size: National office + 10 SJA Councils
Number of Volunteers: 10,000 with a goal of 15,000
Number of MISSION CRM users: Approx. 50
Evolved from: Dynamics 365
Executive Summary
SJA carry out their mission through community service, first aid, CPR, mental health and opioid poison response training. Community Services volunteers are the lifeblood of SJA and serve in 300+ communities across Canada.
Today, more than 10,000 SJA volunteers contribute over 1 million hours of community service each year in the following five Community Programs:
- Medical First Responders
- Emergency Management Program
- Therapy Dog Program
- Youth Programs
- Other volunteer roles
Business Challenges
In order to achieve their vision, SJA had key business challenges they wanted to tackle and transform their operations onto a single, unified platform:
- Disparate systems and decentralized processes: 10 SJA Councils and the National office had disparate volunteer management and engagement solutions across the country – including Dynamics 365, third-party systems, Excel or paper! SJA lacked a standardized approach to address the 5 unique intake and management processes associated with volunteers for its Community Programs, requests from event organizers, and administration and coordination of events. Without standardized, scalable processes in place on a single platform, SJA was stymied in building its capacity.
- Unable to mobilize and deploy across Canada in times of crisis: without a centralized database, it was impossible to mobilize emergency response volunteers across Canada in times of crisis such as COVID-19.
- Lack of self-service & communications ping-pong: Lack of self-service created ping-pong communications between SJA and volunteers. This included: time-consuming tasks manual effort via emails and calls supporting intake, engagement and event processes. In turn, this created significant communications gaps and stale data.
- Untapped revenue sources: COVID-19 highlighted the fact that in trying times SJA needed to tap new revenue sources as donations are critical to continue to keep programs running and appreciate volunteers.
- Siloed data & manual reporting: Disparate systems produced a huge challenge of prodding Councils to manually share data so National could painstakingly create mission-critical reports and calculate service Awards.
The MISSION CRM Solution
A holistic solution to revolutionize and unify volunteer management, fundraising, financials and reporting built within Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, including Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure.
Deliver Effective Programming
Implementation of Microsoft’s Volunteer Management and Engagement products (VMVE) to unify 10 SJA Councils and National to create a centralized home for volunteer management and event coordination processes, facilitating internal and external communications processes seamlessly for one source of truth. Development of an iOS and Android App: the VMVE and more right in a volunteer’s pocket! The App (VMA) empowers volunteers and SJA staff to engage on-the-go and in real-time: with built-in SMS functionality to facilitate communications in disaster scenarios.
Know your Donors and Supporters
Implementation of Sylogist MISSION CRM’s donor management and fundraising system across Councils and Branches to provide a holistic view of volunteers and supporters in one place.
Our implementation included MISSION CRM’s pre-built integration with Business Central with a templatized approach to configure MISSION CRM’s integration for SJA National and 35 Provincial Councils/ Branches so revenue can seamlessly flow from MCRM’s robust sub-ledger into the general ledger. And empowering fundraising with online giving pages and pre-configured receipting email templates and workflows.
Accelerate Mission Outcomes
With unified data, Sylogist MISSION CRM developed and deployed:
- Custom Power BI dashboards to track event participation, volunteer qualifications and hours
- A suite of 30 MISSION CRM Power BI dashboards surfacing key insights into donor/supporters and efficacy of fundraising efforts
Societal Impact SJA Can Now Make
Unlocking exponential capacity to onboard more volunteers and deliver programs
Now, SJA can focus on its ultimate goal: to onboard thousands of volunteers so they are ready for the next emergency and deliver programs. Cloud-based, scalable and automated processes unlock untold efficiencies in staff productivity, reduces workload and ping-pong communications, making realizing their goal a reality.
Unlocking ability for volunteers to self-serve & easily engage
Many SJA volunteers are shift workers unlike SJA staff who are 9-to-5, so being able to self-serve via the Volunteer Portal is a game-changer. Volunteers can see all available events, sign-up, seamlessly send/receive communications, update information/documentation and see their participation history. And the mobile App facilitates engagement on-the-go and on-site at events.
Rapid mobilization and deployment for national emergencies
By replacing disparate solutions with a unified approach, SJA can coordinate a cross-country response and mobilize and deploy during emergencies from a central database of volunteers.
Unleashing engagement opportunities & driving donations
Donations are critical for SJA to appreciate volunteers and keep its programs running. Post-event, requestors receive a triggered email with a link to MISSION CRM donation page asking for a gift to thank SJA for its services, which is seamlessly processed and receipted.
With MISSION CRM, SJA has a holistic picture of their volunteers and supporters in one place empowering them to build and execute a fundraising strategy and facilitates peer-to-peer and crowdfunding campaigns at the Branch level.
Unifying data for insights and impact
Today, Community Services and IT can glean insights as to what is happening across the country in real-time.
Turn-key events experience opens the door to expand the mission
SJA’s event request application brings efficiency to the management of events for the requestor and SJA’s coordination of volunteer participation. SJA believes this elevated experience to request/receive services will result in increased requests, a greater sense of requestor satisfaction and affinity with SJA.
Future Prospects
As the Implementation Partner for St. John Ambulance, MISSION CRM couldn’t be prouder to play a role in enabling everyone to improve their health, safety, and quality of life through SJA volunteers nationwide. We welcome you to join us in supporting SJA today.