Cancer Wellness Support
Cancer Wellness Support was founded 15 years ago with a mission to provide people undergoing cancer treatments, their care providers, and...
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Cancer Wellness Support was founded 15 years ago with a mission to provide people undergoing cancer treatments, their care providers, and families access to complementary therapies such as yoga, art therapy, counseling, and over twenty other services. As a non-profit, Cancer Wellness Support is funded by two online Op Shops, as well as fundraising events and donations from the communities they serve.
As operations have grown over the years, the systems that Cancer Wellness Support had in place no longer served them. An outdated membership database left them open to data security issues, not to mention the long hours the staff would spend compiling monthly reports for the board. They had a basic website, and a couple of scarcely used Facebook pages. It was time for a change.
When Vent Thomas joined the organization, he was tasked with the goal of finding a new database solution that would increase efficiencies in managing their clients, carers, and therapy deliveries.
He first focused on identifying the problems that needed to be solved and understanding what the organization needed from a new system.
What Vent discovered:
- They needed a system to manage the membership portfolio with automated renewal reminders, onboarding, and tracking.
- Managing donations, volunteer hours, and fundraising event bookings was labor-intensive and prone to errors.
- Cancer Wellness Support lacked the ability to track therapy deliveries across the membership and manage therapist invoicing effectively.
- Monthly reporting to the board was laborious and stressful for the staff.
With a limited budget to work with, Vent considered other all-in-one solutions but chose ActiveCampaign for its flexibility, automations, custom reporting, great support, and the security of their data.
Streamlined Processes Through Automation
Cancer Wellness Support has over 50 therapists and 80 volunteers servicing over 600 members across the Blue Mountains and Penrith Valley regions in New South Wales. One of the major time-consuming activities they had in the past was tracking memberships, keeping members up to date, and getting them renewed properly. That’s all now handled automatically by ActiveCampaign, resulting in an increase in memberships and renewals. ActiveCampaign handles the initial renewal email that goes out, members click to renew, saving valuable time for the staff.
“ActiveCampaign handles reminders for those who have not yet renewed. We’re able to track where we’re at with our membership status,” Vent continues, “we don’t have to spend a lot of time chasing people and it saves a huge amount of time for us.”
As a result, Membership is up, and so are donations, which is another primary source of income for Cancer Wellness Support.
When the first Covid lockdown happened, Cancer Wellness Support was able to spin up a Shopify online shop within 2 days. Now, with the ActiveCampaign Shopify integration, Cancer Wellness Support captures sales data for their op shops, tracks all of their therapy deliveries, and is able to ensure therapists are paid properly. The integration also provides key data insights which enable Cancer Wellness Support to understand where they might need to make changes in the business to better serve their members.
“One of the things we love about ActiveCampaign is the ability to integrate and capture data and take action from other systems that we use. This was part of our reason for choosing ActiveCampaign because it does so much for us. It has such great expandable capabilities.”
Another huge value add for the staff was how much time they save in providing monthly reports to the board.
Prior to using ActiveCampaign, when Cancer Wellness Support needed to provide reporting it took staff members hours of time to compile the data. They were digging through paperwork and manually putting together the numbers in Excel spreadsheets. “It took one staff member over a week each month to put together those reports,” Vent commented. “With ActiveCampaign Custom Reporting, we don’t do any of that manual work anymore. All we do is call up the reports, and there they are.”
“Systems that have been implemented over the last 18 months using ActiveCampaign have saved approximately 300 person-hours per month and increased accuracy of our data by over 70%. Staff stress levels have also reduced dramatically – all of our reporting is now fully automated.”
The results for Cancer Wellness Support are clear:
- They are now able to administer fifty therapists and utilize the data from the system to improve services to clients.
- Renewing membership is now easy and convenient through secure online renewals.
- Cancer Wellness Support is now seen as an exemplar for other organizations, evidenced by a large increase in requests for partnerships and joint ventures.
A solid return on investment
One of the “ActiveCampaign is really working” “ah-ha” moments for Vent was when Cancer Wellness Support decided to enter some business awards.
“Entering your marketing program for a business award is a great process because it forces you to take a look at what you’re doing. It forces you to take a look at your metrics, where things are working, where they are not. It became clear that ActiveCampaign has paid huge dividends for us.”
- Membership is up by 30% YoY
- Op Shop sales are up by 25% YoY
- Donations are up by 14% YoY
- Volunteer inquiries are up by 32% YoY
“All this translates to $500,000 in additional revenue where our total marketing costs (incl. our online systems) are $80,000 per annum. We consider that to be a pretty good return on investment.”
To find out more about the custom reporting, integrations, and automations that Cancer Wellness Support uses, try ActiveCampaign for free, and explore our Customer Experience Automation (CXA) page for more information.
