Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Robin Leonard, Partner at Xenai Digital about their Salesforce consulting and Marketing automation for Not for Profit clients.
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:19 More about Xenai Digital?
- 02:01 About Robin
- 04:50 Xenai Digital’s work with Not for Profits
- 05:47 Xenai Digital solutions
- 08:21 Xenai Digital Strategy
- 10:58 Xenai Digital Not for Profit Clients
- 13:19 Final Thoughts
- 16:42 Learn more ahout Xenai Digital
Links and Resources:
- More info about Xenai Digital
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange
Today, I welcome Robin Leonard, a partner at Xenai Digital. So, Robin, welcome.
Robin Leonard
Hi, Tammy.
Tammy Ven Dange
Thank you for joining me today.
Robin Leonard
Yeah, great to be on your show.
More about Xenai Digital?
Tammy Ven Dange
Well, tell me more about Xenai Digital.
Robin Leonard
Yeah, Xenai Digital is actually rebranded from AF Digital. AF Digital was a multi-cloud Salesforce consulting partner with offices in Philippines and Australia, across Australian states.
In December 2023, AF Digital got acquired by Digital Alchemy and rebranded into Xenai Digital.
So, we’ve really been around for, this is our 13th year as a Salesforce partner, but as Xenai Digital as a brand, it’s really fresh in the market and it’s from this year only.
We’ve really relaunched the service offering to be aligned also with our parent company. So, our parent company, Digital Alchemy, they provide enterprise marketing and data automation services.
They do really, really innovative projects with their enterprise top-tier clients, helping them leverage their data to drive automation through marketing. And they’ve got this great strategic service.
So, we’ve really embraced their capability and it’s really across data services as well, which includes things like Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform, bringing all that data together and then surfacing it through Data Cloud.
That really aligned well with AF Digital’s mission. We were always very CX-orientated. Digital Alchemy are very much data and marketing automation global powerhouse.
And through them, we’ve now got this really great end-to-end capability to help our clients with their digital transformation.
About Robin
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay. And how did you get involved in Xenai?
Robin Leonard
Yeah. So, I co-founded AF Digital together with Pauline Pangan. So, I was the CEO for AF Digital for 12 years.
In the acquisition, we decided to switch roles, which was a great breath of fresh air for me. And Pauline’s really leaned into the CEO role for Xenai Digital. So, Pauline’s running Xenai.
My role at Xenai is partner. So, I’m responsible for bringing new organisations into the business. And also, I’m a billable consultant.
So, I work with a lot of clients on advisory services, specifically around data strategy, enterprise architecture strategy. As they go through those big decisions, I’m really there to help guide those clients on those decisions and help them plan out how they actually get value out of their technology investment.
Xenai Digital’s work with Not for Profits
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay. Well, my clients are Not for Profits. So, let’s talk more around the kind of work that you do with Not for Profits.
Robin Leonard
Yeah. So, we’ve been working in the Nonprofit space for a very long time. It’s our number one industry.
It’s our specialisation. And the way we work with Nonprofits is we come as a consortium. So, we’ve banded together with other partners that specialise in the Nonprofit industry.
And together, we provide an end-to-end transformation service. So, we’ve chosen to partner with AlphaSys, who is the leading Nonprofit cloud partner in Australia, if not the world, working with the new Nonprofit cloud that’s been released by Salesforce. They’re really charging the way forward into the future with these clients.
So, we’ve partnered with them as their marketing and CX delivery arm. So, together, they’re doing the core transformation, and we’re doing the marketing automation, the transactional messaging, the lifecycle automation, which is a really exciting mixture.
And we’ve worked in several clients like this before, like UNICEF.
We came at UNICEF as a consortium, and we very successfully and rapidly transformed their tech stack from a set of different systems into a Salesforce single customer view.
Now, UNICEF, for example, are doing these amazing things with their marketing automation platform, leveraging all of that amazing data.
They’re doing things like, it’s simple, but it’s really powerful as, say, if you’re a regular giver and your credit card declines, it’s just providing an omni-channel experience to make sure that person reactivates their new credit card and continues to give to that mission.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of great things that we can do with this technology, and I’m excited about how to use it for this industry.
Xenai Digital solutions
Tammy Ven Dange
Now, I know you do it with the Marketing Cloud. I think you also do it with the Experience Cloud as well.
Robin Leonard
Yeah, that’s right. Experience Cloud is very much part of the core stack. So, we do a few projects with Experience Cloud.
Usually, it’s customer portals where, say, supporters will log in and view their donation history. That’s a very common use case. But, yeah, generally, with Nonprofit Cloud, that’s really driving the web experience as well.
We would leverage a lot of personalisation, which is the Marketing Cloud personalisation product that sits on the website, and you can tailor those experiences so they’re very much personalised.
So, say, if I’m a regular giver, it won’t throw me pop-ups to ask me to become a regular giver. It will recognise that I’m already doing that, and it will ask me to increase my donation or to get involved in other contributions to the mission.
Tammy Ven Dange
Now, I know most people will think about, if they’re familiar with Salesforce at all, they’ll think about the Marketing Cloud as being something that only fundraisers use. Do you see other use cases for the Marketing Cloud in the Not for Profit sector?
Robin Leonard
Yeah, yeah, many. And I think a lot of organisations get it confused because they think marketing is only for fundraising. It’s called Marketing Cloud, but I’ve heard a lot of nonprofits really gather around and consider it to be more like a communication cloud.
Nonprofits have a lot of different types of relationships. They have clients that they may deliver services to. They have fundraisers.
They have government bodies. They have volunteers. They have all sorts of different types of relationships, sometimes with one person, they can have multiple different types of relationships.
Marketing Cloud is a great way to automate the experience.
So when we think about customer experience, we use the word customer because it’s the most commonly used, but I prefer to think of it like a human experience, and you’ve got multiple different personas. You’ve got partners, customers, and employees, and an employee may differ.
So you may have a volunteer. You may have a fresh graduate. You may have a probationary employee. You may have an alumni.
They all have a different relationship with the organisation, the same as your customers, which would be your supporters or your clients.
And then your partners could be your suppliers. It could be government bodies. It could be associations. It could be referral partners.
There are all these different types of relationships, and if you think through the life cycle, every one of those humans that interacts with the organisation, they have a start and an end, you know, and all the way through, there should be automations that make sure they have a consistent experience with the brand.
It’s not dependent on people to manually administer those relationships. It should be an automated, intuitive experience that’s, like, personalised to how they relate to the organisation.
So, yeah, going back to your question, Marketing Cloud is the technology that we use to deliver those experiences for all of those humans, and it’s like fundraising is the part that brings the money in, but there’s so much other stuff that you can do to make it a seamless experience and deliver value without adding cost of payroll, which is really the number one cost in most organisations.
Xenai Digital Strategy
Tammy Ven Dange
So are you, as a consulting company, also doing the consulting side, like the customer journeys? Do you help them map that out first before you configure a system to meet those requirements?
Robin Leonard
Yeah, that’s right. There’s a lot of work that goes into the strategy around what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
We like to prioritise based on ROI, and it’s a lot of nonprofits don’t really think about, you know, the direct contribution to revenue from these kind of activities, but they really should, and that every journey is an automation.
Every automation has a life cycle. There’s a cost to set up an automation. There’s a cost to maintain it, and it might run for three years, five years, whatever.
But all the way through, you’ve got to be maintaining, testing, supporting, optimising, improving, and it really is an investment for quite a while.
So we think of it like every automation is like buying a boat where you have the upfront cost of the boat, and then it’s 10% per year to maintain that boat, keep it moored.
And that’s the thinking that you have to put behind these journeys is I can’t just set them up willy-nilly, and I have to be very careful to set them up so they’re easy and low cost to maintain, and I have as much reusability as possible.
So there is a huge amount of work that we do up front with the clients and ongoing to just keep prioritising and manage that approach.
The other angle, especially in the nonprofit world, is every organisation does annual campaigns. That’s a massive part of how they operate.
They’ll do a tax appeal campaign.
A lot of them will work with third-party agencies and ship their data off, get the agency to do the fundraising across different channels, maybe multiple partners, maybe a telemarketing partner, maybe an email marketing partner, maybe like an on-the-street type fundraising partner.
They generate those funds and it’s really hard to move away from them. But in the process of working with them, there is an increased data breach risk.
So that’s really the area I’m most kind of concerned about helping is how do we still allow them to deliver those experiences, to generate those funds, those annual campaigns, but in a secure, automated, on-platform, highly secure environment where supporters can trust that organisation to keep that data secure and personal.
Xenai Digital’s Not for Profit Clients
Tammy Ven Dange
So, Robin, who are some of your Not for Profit clients that you have right now?
Robin Leonard
Yeah, so we’ve got some really amazing clients. UNICEF, who I’ve already mentioned, and we’ve been working with them as a consortium together with AlphaSys, really helping them through their transformation. That’s been very successful and they are an amazing client to work with.
Cancer Council Victoria is a really successful Nonprofit, enterprise-sized client. We’ve also teamed up with AlphaSys and TCA in a consortium approach. And so that’s going through a massive transformation across Salesforce, including Snowflake as well.
Novita is another client. They’re a NDIS Nonprofit client in Adelaide. And with these guys, it’s so simple.
What we’re doing is because the NDIS registration process can take some time to get that funding approved, so when clients apply for, say, a service, they pull them into a lead funnel, and then we manage that relationship with them until they get funded using Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud.
So that’s very much a different use case of Marketing Cloud being used for a really good purpose for a Nonprofit.
And finally, I want to talk about Open Doors, which is a Christian charity.
We’ve been working with this client for about seven years, and most recently we’ve helped them shift away from manual segmentation during their tax appeal into building an automated segmentation strategy using NPSP and Marketing Cloud.
Now they don’t spend so much time every year rethinking their segments and then doing it all in Excel. Now it’s very much an automated process with default segments that they can leverage for various use cases in Marketing Cloud.
So that’s been a really great example of the kind of things you can start to do with Data Cloud is to build up those segmentation strategies and activate them in Marketing Cloud to create that kind of like best practise annual appeal type campaign.
Tammy Ven Dange
Some great use cases for how you can use that suite of Salesforce tools in different ways in Not for Profit. So thanks for sharing that.
Robin Leonard
Thank you, Tammy.
Tammy Ven Dange
Robin, is there anything else you’d like to share?
Xenai’s ideal client
Robin Leonard
Yeah. I think, I mean, the kind of organisation we’re looking to work with is really a mid-to-large-tier organisation that has committed to a transformation.
What we see is a lot of organisations, they will buy Salesforce and they’ll invest heavily in the tech, but they won’t support it with the resources internally to do that transformation.
And organisations, they chip away at their Salesforce, but they don’t really see the full value and they can’t really, at the end of the day, justify it.
So we’re really looking for clients that are not accepting that as behaviour and saying, look, let’s really make sure this is a strategic investment that we see a return on and we have the appropriate amount of investment around the platform that we can then see proper value over time. Because there’s just a balance.
You’ve got to have the people and the technology investment. You can’t just have the technology. It’s like buying a Ferrari and not having a driver.
I know that’s a very commonly used metaphor, but it couldn’t be more true.
And as we see organisations mature with their awareness of what’s required, we do see them starting to make these investments where they go, okay, I need a Salesforce lead in my business. Oh, I need a support team in my business to make sure production works.
I think that’s the difficulty because you’ve got large organisations that are starting to shift that way.
Small organisations, they still need the same things, but they don’t have the resources.
So that balance between the two, that’s the challenge. But we’re here to support. We’ve got offshore resources – if you are okay working with offshore resources. We’ve got a global team where we can keep it relatively low cost in terms of getting the work done, but also guide you on the most efficient and safe way of doing that transformation.
Tammy Ven Dange
Such a good point. I know way too many Salesforce clients that are under-utilising the Marketing Cloud because their staff just don’t know how to get the best out of it.
And so they try to use it like MailChimp.
They haven’t been formally trained on it. And they’ve spent a fortune in comparison to these alternative solutions, but they’re just not getting the return on investment that they could if they actually were properly trained and had the support they needed to utilise it properly.
Robin Leonard
Exactly. That’s exactly right. And the thing is it’s unlimited.
You can set up one automation or you can set up a hundred automations. It doesn’t really affect the cost of the price. I mean, there is a bit of a utilisation component, but really you can set up an unlimited amount of automations and each one of those is compounding and it’s from the date you set it up.
It’s like if every month that one makes $10 and that one makes $20, then every month that’s going to go and you just add more and more and more, but balancing the cost to build them and the cost to maintain them as well.
So it’s a real art form, but it’s also the future. In five to 10 years, all organisations will have automated communications to all of the humans they interact with.
It’s like whether we do it now or in five years, it’s just a matter of competitive advantage.
Tammy Ven Dange
Yeah, good point. Robin, if people want to find out more about your company or to reach out and touch, maybe have a conversation with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Learn more ahout Xenai Digital
Robin Leonard
Yeah, so you can visit our website. It’s xenaidigital.com.au or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Exciting Announcement
Robin Leonard
Tammy, I do have one more announcement I’d like to make, which is really exciting.
Just yesterday, it was in the news. Xenai Digital has made a strategic alliance with Icon Agency. Icon Agency is a PR, communications, marketing agency.
They also do a lot of websites and the digital experience side of digital marketing. We’ve partnered with them. They do a lot of work in the nonprofit sector.
So if any clients need PR, communication, digital transformation on Salesforce, we can support them end-to-end now.
Tammy Ven Dange
Wonderful. Well, congratulations on that new alliance.
Robin Leonard
Thank you.
Tammy Ven Dange
Robin, thank you so much for joining me today and telling us more about Xenai Digital.
Robin Leonard
Great. Thanks so much for having me, Tammy.