Dream Centers Case Study

Dream Centers + EBQ

EBQ enables Dream Centers to accelerate Pardot adoption and personalize donor communications.

The Challenge

Dream Centers is a rapidly growing organization with far-reaching goals, particularly when it comes to expanding their development and marketing teams’ capabilities. Their vision for marketing automation was to introduce more personalization into donor communications and gain a better understanding of individuals’ interest in their organization.

“We have small capacity, but we have a lot to do. We need to fight for our donors, and one way is being more personable and knowing more about them,” said Caitlyn O’Connell, Donor Care Specialist at Dream Centers.

The nonprofit decided to upgrade their marketing automation platform from Mailchimp to Salesforce Pardot, a more robust tool that would give them more personalization functionality and a smoother integration with their Salesforce CRM.

Pardot was a strategic investment for the development and marketing teams—one that they knew would pay off in the long run once they were able to master the platform and utilize the tool effectively.

“We have a foundation that we want to grow, and we have large but attainable goals. Our programs are growing, so we need our marketing and development teams to grow as well,” said O’Connell.

With several upcoming events on the horizon—ones that were now virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic—Dream Centers needed to get their Pardot up and running fast.

They were looking for a way to implement Pardot quickly, clean up their donor data, and learn how to use Pardot’s powerful automation features.

The Solution : Pardot Implementation & Training

Dream Centers turned to EBQ, a Silver Salesforce implementation partner, to implement their Pardot platform and provide training and technical support.

EBQ’s team training program walked the Dream Centers staff through creating landing pages, forms, and email templates—the deliverables included along with their implementation package.

“One of the key factors was staff involvement. You want to make it easy on your staff while learning a whole new program. The EBQ team stepped in and helped keep us on the same page and gave us the tools to do that,” said O’Connell.

The EBQ staff, made up of a Project Manager and Consultant, answered any technical Pardot question that came up. The Dream Centers staff learned how to segment their lists of thousands of donors to personalize their outreach, as well as clean up all the contact data they had collected over the last decade.

The nonprofit’s development and marketing teams were feeling more confident about using Pardot after hands-on guidance through the technical setup and email creation process.

The Results

EBQ’s training helped the nonprofit accelerate adoption of their new Pardot platform. With their annual Ladies Tea event fast approaching in mid-April, Dream Centers leveraged Pardot’s automations, personalization features, and seamless Salesforce integration to attract and manage event signups.

Through Pardot and Salesforce, Dream Centers can now track visitors who have been going to their website but who aren’t prospects yet, then associate their visit data with a prospect account once they sign up for the webinar event.

“Going from an actual event to now doing it virtually, we haven’t missed a beat with Pardot. Now we’re heavily relying on the forms and landing pages to incorporate into our webinar page,” said O’Connell. “I don’t think we’d be able to put any of these pieces together as quickly as we were able to with EBQ. We wouldn’t have been able to use Pardot in the months of March and April if it wasn’t for the training that we did.”

Dream Centers knows Pardot is a large and sophisticated platform—especially for a growing organization—but the nonprofit views their decision to use Pardot as an investment in their future.

“We’re making the investment so our team can grow, so that our donor base can grow. Pardot somewhat felt like clown shoes on a toddler at first, but now thanks to EBQ we’re growing into it and able to run with it,” said O’Connell.

Looking ahead, Dream Centers already has ideas in the works for further personalizing and streamlining their donor communications.

I don’t think we’d be able to put any of these pieces together as quickly as we were able to with EBQ. We wouldn’t have been able to use Pardot in the months of March and April if it wasn’t for the training that we did.

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Dream Centers + EBQ

EBQ enables Dream Centers to accelerate Pardot adoption and personalize donor communications.

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