Seeing the forest for the trees: WeForest upgrades its Salesforce experience

Oct 16, 2023

sales, marketing and service

Established in 2010, WeForest develops science-backed climate solutions in the form of reforestation projects. Their vision? A world where communities and nature sustainably thrive together to stop global warming. At the time of writing, WeForest is regenerating over 51,000 hectares and growing 82 million trees across 3 continents. By 2025, they aim to reach a total of 100,000 hectares (100 million trees). To keep track of its many sponsors and donors and stay on top of fund allocation, the organization appealed to the Cloud Innovation team, now a part of delaware.

Client: Belgium-based climate-change non-profit WeForest
Challenge: Taking back control over the increasingly complex pipeline of sponsors, donors and projects
Solution: Improving the Salesforce experience and reaching the next level of digital maturity

The challenge: controlling 'the pipeline'

In its early days, WeForest used one big Excel spreadsheet, called ‘the pipeline’. Here, they kept track of sponsors, donors, and to which projects they were allocating funds. When the complexity of the projects increased and the number of sponsors and team members grew, this approach became unmanageable. The vast list of rows and columns was an open invitation to make mistakes.

When the complexity of the projects increased and the number of sponsors and team members grew, keeping track of everything in an Excel spreadsheet became unmanageable.

The solution: growing the Salesforce experience

WeForest had already been working with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud for quite a while. To upgrade the experience and finish ongoing development, the organization brought in the Cloud Innovation experts. The latter kicked off the process with several discovery sessions and a high-level audit to better understand the current setup and experience level.

The gathered insights were discussed with the WeForest team, and a customized roadmap was created. Weekly calls and onsite status meetings with all project stakeholders ensured alignment on progress.

The plan consisted of 3 pillars:

custom development, to align closely with the businesses processes
coaching
applying best practices to improve the user experience.

The consultants’ expertise isn’t just technical, but also focuses on sales and user experience. This allowed them to think along with us. So far, their advice has been very valuable.

Louise Tideman, Sponsorship Manager at WeForest

The result: Clarity, integrity and transparency

Today, WeForest uses Salesforce Sales Cloud’s standard functionalities for account and contact management, and for opportunity and pipeline management. To follow up on data, the standard reports and dashboards come into play.

The complete solution enables WeForest to follow up on sponsors, donors and external contacts, and to publish relevant data from the Salesforce environment directly on their public website. Furthermore, the platform enables them to:

• manage their data with integrity;

• be transparent towards sponsors, so they can see exactly where their funds are helping to regenerate forests;

• scale their organization and projects without worrying about the data.