Discover how charity: water uses Cirrus Insight to track donors and increase communication.

1. Tracking Donors & Increasing Communication:
A Case Study

2. Introducing charity: water
charity: water is non-profit organization
focused on bringing clean and safe drinking
water to the 663 million people on the
planet who don’t have access to it. They
work on projects in 24 countries to bring
safe water to those who need it.
The organization is designed to run like an
efficient tech-startup. All public donations
go towards clean water projects.
I talked with Egu Ramanathan, a Stewardship
Associate, at charity: water about their
experience onboarding and using Cirrus Insight.
Egu Ramanathan, Manager,
Stewardship Associate

3. Why charity: water Picked Cirrus Insight
charity: water was originally using a different
app for inbox productivity, but decided to
reevaluate after switching their organization
to Salesforce.“We wanted the best tool to log
notes and track donor engagement,”
Ramanathan said.
IT took the lead on figuring out which app to
use, but the whole team agreed that Cirrus
was the preferred tool based on the Book
Meeting feature, depth of Salesforce integra-
tion, presentation of information, mobile app,
and reputation.
Historical sync was essential for immediately
getting all their past emails into Salesforce.
The ability to not only see Salesforce info, but
edit it from the inbox was also a big win for
the team.
“The team went with you all [Cirrus], and we
don’t regret it!”

4. Value of Historical Knowledge
“If you’re going to invest in Salesforce,”
Ramanathan said, “the automation of
tracking donor activity is hugely valuable
for efficiency and transparency.”
The development team had struggled
with, “creating a systematic process to
track leads in the past.”
With Cirrus, the team was able to sync Salesforce and Gmail meaning all communica-
tions could be tracked and historical knowledge could be saved for later reference.
That knowledge comes in particularly useful transitioning relationship managers.
Instead of worrying about dropping the ball, new managers can reliably get up to
speed immediately.
The calendar tracking abilities of Cirrus have also come in useful when tracking
meetings for founder of charity: water. Small coffee meetings are able to make their
way into Salesforce to keep a full track record of past conversations.

5. A Cirrus feature that has made an
exceptional impact on increasing
communication, while maintaining a
small team size, is Campaigns.
Cirrus helps users bring in Salesforce
lists and Salesforce templates to create
Cirrus email templates.
Improvements in Donor Communication
“The easy ability to send personalized emails, for say 50 donors takes much less time,
and allows for more communication,” Ramanathan said.
Already this increased capability is helping out in the office. Every January, charity:
water sends out a massive amount of communication with new and recurring
donors from December, which is when they raise roughly 60% of their donations for
the year.
In the past, they’ve usually only been able to keep up with top donors by emailing
them one to one, but with Campaigns they’ve been able to dramatically increase the
amount of communication with donors.
“We look forward to seeing the fruit we bear from the increased outreach.”
Cirrus Insight has helped the charity: water team make the most of both their
donors’ and their own time, and has become an essential app for the organization.