Our work — The Norwegian Refugee Council
NRC: Enhancing global fundraising and enabling growth with smooth payments
The Norwegian Refugee Council improved its global fundraising by partnering with Fluido to implement a new payment solution. The cooperation led to more accurate and transparent payment processing, strengthening NRC’s fundraising growth and profitability — and ultimately enabling greater support for people forced to flee.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an independent humanitarian organisation helping displaced people build a new future. Founded in 1946 in Norway and headquartered in Oslo, they nowadays have field operations in 40 countries.
To support NRC’s humanitarian work, they collect donations from private individuals. There is a need for their cause, as NRC estimates that by the end of 2023, around 117 million people globally were displaced from their homes by conflict or violence. Instead of having separate national entities in each country, NRC operates private individual fundraising globally. This type of working model sets high expectations for their technology tools.
Need for solutions, not headaches
NRC uses one platform, Salesforce, to orchestrate the fundraising process globally. Although NRC was happy with the platform, the way it was set up wasn’t ideal. They also lacked documentation and best practices.
"We had a shared platform for all global fundraising, but multiple payment methods were available in each country. It's complex to manage payments in one country, and it's very complicated to manage them globally. We had many different payment methods and channels, and thus multiple ways to process payments"
Before, managing NRC’s payment channels wasn’t robust, resilient, or dependable. This caused problems, and NRC’s payment team had to put significant effort into troubleshooting and error fixing. For example, they might charge donors multiple times for one payment or miss payments altogether.
“We knew we had to fix the payment solution. As the payment industry is rapidly changing, being ready for the change, complying with regulations, and ensuring compliance is challenging. We knew we needed a product, not a headache,” Jamie says.
Working as one team
In February 2022, NRC brought on the Salesforce expert Fluido. Fluido started looking at overhauling the payment solution together with the NRC team.
NRC already used Salesforce’s standard NPSP package, an add-on app designed for non-profits to manage donors and donations. Fluido started with the Salesforce integration redesign and data cleanup, moving into developing the lead and marketing processes. At the same time as the implementation, the NPSP package got a major update on enhanced recurring donations, which was implemented.
Fluido quickly discovered that NRC could use a separate solution for payment management. They recommended a tool called FinDock, which manages one-time and recurring payments with a combination of banks, payment service providers, and payment platforms, and does all this in Salesforce. After looking at the tool together, FinDock was implemented into the system, too.
The new set-up went live in one country in May 2023, and the project with launches in other countries was completed in September. The impact could be seen straight away.
“When we went live in the first country, my colleague responsible for monitoring and cleaning up payments, came in and joked “what am I supposed to do now” as everything was running so smoothly”, Jamie says.
The project succeeded with open, transparent communication and trust among the people involved. Jamie is thankful that the relationship with Fluido worked great all along:
“We worked as a team, not as a customer and consultant. The Fluido people were always ready to identify and look for solutions for possible issues and think of ways to overcome those. They pushed us further and taught our team a lot, helping me ensure my team can get things done,” Jamie describes the partnership.
“We built a strong team, and trusted and depended on each other.”
More accurate payments, more profitability
A few years ago, NRC’s growth plans were halted because of the lack of a robust enough payment solution that can handle multiple payments and currencies. Now it’s a different story.
“We have great growth ambitions and now we have the solution to match pursuing those goals. We want to increase the amount of donors and expand into multiple countries. Two years ago we had those discussions but didn’t have the right tools. Now growth is back to the top of the conversations,” Jamie says.
NRC’s data quality and integrity are now at another level. They can be sure they are sending claims for all the payments and getting money in return. Their payment transparency has increased and payment processing is clearer, giving insight into possible errors. For example, they can catch unprocessed payments, ensuring they are not losing money.
All this means that NRC’s profitability and engagement with the donors is much higher. This means they have more funds to advance their cause and help people forced to flee.
Now that payment processes have been simplified and are more efficient there is more time to focus on donors and think ahead. Next, NRC looks into what AI could do to help their business. Together with Fluido, they are looking into using predictive AI for donor engagement. For example, they could feed donor insight into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud preventing donor churn in the future.
