Not-for-profit ‘matchmaker’ Good360 which matches critical goods to Australian charities has invested in data and analytics to improve the speed and scale of its work.
Digital Nation Australia spoke to Alison Covington, founder and managing director of Good360 in Australia about the organisation’s investment in NetSuite, Magento and Salesforce as part of its digital transformation journey.
Since launching in 2015, Covington said that the organisation has matched $250 million worth of goods across 30 million items to charities, which has largely been driven by its cloud-based technology platform.
“When we started in 2015, we were just a couple of people. But we built NetSuite knowing that we wanted to be a much bigger organisation as we grew. It was probably a much bigger system that we needed, but we sort of thought like build the jet plane and we'll have the seats on board for when people join and then we'll scale and we'll grow,” she said.
Covington said that NetSuite has been critical in providing the data to provide the right items to the right charities at the right time.
“All our data is in inside NetSuite and that's important because we can cut up that data and know where our charities exist, which postcode, states, what cause areas they are. Many of our partners, who want to do good, may want to donate to charities in a certain region or a certain cause area. That's important to have the technology, to be able to look at that impact and be able to say to our partners, ‘This is the work that we can do’.”
Despite NetSuite’s data and analytics capabilities, Covington said the organisation turned to Salesforce for its CRM.
“We’re just in the middle of commissioning [Salesforce]. That's a much more sophisticated CRM system. There are some capabilities within NetSuite, but it hasn't matched the needs of what the team need in terms of the CRM for sales. But also too in our fundraising capabilities, we will have a much deeper fundraising and marketing deployment in Salesforce and that will meet our capabilities to scale,” she said.
Finally, Good360 opted for a highly customisable version of Magento for its e-commerce platform.
“Our version of Magento actually allows our charities to register, it's more than a shopping cart. We have membership registration coming in through Magento. Customers like an individual can't come onto our version of Magento and shop online. It's only available for a member-based registration, and then we also have different member tiering. It's very highly customised for different size charities get to see different things based on their member tiering.”