Game changing integration: Fundraise Up and Salesforce help St. Anthony Shrine grow giving

About St. Anthony Shrine

St. Anthony Shrine is a Franciscan Catholic community that has been on Arch Street in downtown Boston since 1947. Known as "The Church on Arch Street," they offer Mass and sacramental worship, as well as programs for people across the city, including a medical clinic that serves women experiencing homelessness, a Franciscan food center with monthly community food distributions, a weekly homelessness-to-housing program, a Lazarus ministry that provides funerals and burials for people with no next of kin, and spiritual companionship with the friars.

The challenge

Antiquated forms, two systems and no way to thank every gift

St. Anthony Shrine had used a decades-old database since 2003, with its old giving forms for online donations. Cathy Jewell, who leads development operations and the Shrine’s mass appeals, was experiencing a lot of points of friction with their database.

The first was cost.

The second was working across two versions of the same database with different views. "It was frustrating because you couldn’t see everything in one place," she said.

The third was staff time: "We knew that it wasn’t the best of the best and that we could be doing things more efficiently."

The online giving experience was full of friction, too. Donors could only pay by credit card or ACH. There was no Apple Pay or Google Pay. The website’s give button sat in the corner and disappeared once the menu scrolled off the page.

St. Anthony Shrine needed a giving platform that could:

• Integrate with Salesforce, the new CRM the team was moving to
• Give donors a user-friendly, beautiful experience that told the Shrine’s story
• Cut the manual work behind gifts, receipts and stewardship

The solution

A giving experience built for donors, connected to Salesforce, that went live in under four weeks

The team chose Fundraise Up while planning the move to Salesforce, and onboarding was fast. "It was less than four weeks between my initial contact with Fundraise Up and us being fully up and running, which I think is pretty phenomenal," Cathy said.

The Shrine moved its giving forms to Fundraise Up before leaving its legacy CRM entirely, and its recurring gifts migrated smoothly.

With Fundraise Up, the Shrine now uses:

• A Sticky Button that keeps the option to give visible as visitors scroll, including on its most-visited page, the Unfailing Prayer to St. Anthony
• Campaign-specific photos and impact descriptions, plus personalized suggested amounts in place of static ones
• Apple Pay and Google Pay alongside cards and ACH
• Upsells to recurring giving, which they can turn on with a simple toggle switch
• Automated emails for every recurring installment, and tribute notifications for gifts made in honor or memory of a loved one
• The Donor Portal, where donors see their giving history and update their own payment details
• Gift Cart, launched with the fall appeal, where QR codes in direct mail and links in emails lead to a gift catalog

The Salesforce integration that changed their relationship with data.

Salesforce integration was a critical requirement for a new giving platform, "probably first and foremost," Cathy said. Fundraise Up’s native Salesforce integration posts every donation, contact record and recurring gift to Salesforce in real time, with no batch uploads or manual imports, so Salesforce stays the Shrine’s system of record.

For a team that spent years cleaning up its data so it could compare appeals year over year, that consistency matters.

Gift Cart that brought their story to life.

Cathy also rolled out Gift Cart for the first time with the fall appeal. The QR code in the direct mail piece and the links in their emails led to a page with a gift catalog, so donors could choose exactly what their gift would provide.

The catalog outperformed the standard appeal form nearly three to one. "I think it’s just been such a great tool for bringing our story alive, quantifying the impact for our donors," Cathy said. "People really love to see what their gift is doing, and it’s the perfect tool to show them that."

Part of the draw is how familiar it feels. "We’re all so used to online shopping," she said. "Our brains already have a pattern for it." Cathy is now building a catalog for the Christmas mailing and plans to add Gift Cart to more of the website, starting with the food center page.

The result

More revenue, more donors and stewardship that runs on its own

Year over year, St. Anthony Shrine’s online revenue is up 24% and the number of donors giving is up 18%. Cathy credits several things working together: a giving experience with less friction, an additional frontline fundraiser on the development team, and the move to Salesforce, which made it far easier to get information into the database.

Lapsed recurring donors came back.

After the switch, donors whose cards had failed began updating their own details. "I was really pleased to see how many people resumed their lapsed recurring donations because of receiving communications from Fundraise Up," Cathy said. "I knew right away, okay, this was the right move."

Every gift gets a thank-you.

Automated installment emails gave the team "a touchpoint every time they give," and tribute notifications reach the people being honored.

A gift catalog outraised the standard form nearly 3 to 1.

For the fall appeal, the gift catalog raised three times more than the standard appeal form. Since its fall launch, Gift Cart has brought in 18% of the Shrine’s online revenue. Cathy shares that donors already know what to do when they see a gift cart because everyone is already shopping online: "Add to cart, add to cart, checkout."

Staff time back for the mission.

Cathy estimates the move to Fundraise Up and Salesforce has freed up "hundreds of hours throughout the year and maybe thousands."