The Salvation Army Switzerland deepens relationships with supporters through a CRM-based loyalty program

On a recent day, Michael Stern was working in a Salvation Army Switzerland thrift store when a customer approached him. The shopper thanked Stern—and the entire organization. Yes, the customer was grateful for being able to buy secondhand goods. But he also shared that his brother had gone through a Salvation Army-funded drug rehabilitation program that changed the course of his life.

“At the Salvation Army Switzerland, people are our focus,” says Stern, CRM marketing campaign manager and head of the loyalty program's customer service, who periodically works in the thrift stores to better understand customers. “We do everything possible to show a human life is worth something.”

Salvation Army stores empower people with barriers to employment, and revenue from the stores helps meet basic human needs and community services.

To support that effort, the Salvation Army Switzerland worked with the software solutions consultant iSolutions to create a customer loyalty program based on Microsoft Power Apps and Dynamics 365. The new program, called BrockiCard (“brocki” is short for secondhand shop in German), empowers the nonprofit to create a deeper relationship with customers and supporters, run stores more efficiently, and use data to make decisions on when, where, and how to scale. The changes keep store revenue steady—or help it grow—which is critical to the nonprofit. After all, thrift stores provide jobs for people who have been through Salvation Army programming, and income supports the nonprofit’s charitable efforts.

“The Salvation Army Switzerland needed a clear understanding of their business and customer,” says Andrin Soppelsa, a project manager at iSolutions who helped build the Brocki Card solution. “So we provided the interface to transform their vision into insights.”

Insights into donors

“We live by donations we get day by day. But before we started the BrockiCard program one year ago, we didn’t know our buyers or the people who bring donations to our shops,” Stern explains.

Nonprofit leadership wanted the insight into customers that a CRM solution would bring, and they needed a way to collect that information that was easy to use for both customers and employees. The Salvation Army Switzerland shop employees are often in reintegration programs and don’t have much digital training or retail background, so they needed a solution that was simple to adopt.

The nonprofit already used Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so continuing with a Microsoft platform felt like a straightforward choice, explains Mathias Haller, CIO and head of IT at the Salvation Army Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary. He continues, “Being on the Dynamics platform is a huge benefit. When we have new needs, we won’t have to invest again in another platform. And we’ll benefit from new functions in the future as we grow.”

Finally, the Salvation Army Switzerland wanted to focus on its mission, not trying to develop the technological expertise to build its own solution, so they went hunting for a partner to develop a customer loyalty program.

The nonprofit chose to work with iSolutions, a Microsoft partner, which recommended using Power Platform’s Power Apps to build an easy-to-use app. The app would connect to Dynamics to store customer information, Power BI to generate reports, and Azure to run the interfaces in the cloud.

“Start small and start fast:” Solutions that are easy to build and use

To better meet customer and donor needs, the Salvation Army Switzerland needed to understand them. So it set out to build a loyalty program that collected information at the point of sale and donation.

iSolutions opted to build a loyalty app within Power Apps, the Microsoft platform that enables users without developer expertise to build custom apps. The BrockiCard app integrates seamlessly with Dynamics, so the data transfers automatically to the nonprofit’s CRM system. “We didn’t have to worry about integration,” Soppelsa says. “We could just focus on development.”

In addition, iSolutions opted to use low-code, drag-and-drop design Power Apps so the team wouldn’t have to hire a developer—a move that would have drastically increased the project budget. “I’m not a full stack developer, and I still built the BrockiCard app,” Soppelsa says. “It got a high impact with not much investment, which was one core reason we chose to work with Power Apps.”

The approach also paid off in speed. The app was tested in stores just six months after kicking off the project development, and it went live in all stores just three months after that.

Building an app integrated with their CRM platform tools allowed the Salvation Army Switzerland to begin understanding, and communicating with, supporters quickly, Haller says. “The BrockiCard program is easy to use. It didn’t cost a fortune. It met our desire to start small and start fast.”

Creating ongoing relationships with customers and donors

The Salvation Army Switzerland wanted to create incentives for customers and donors to repeat their support of thrift stores. After all, the shops provide jobs for people with barriers to employment, and revenue funnels to community services and projects the nonprofit runs. They met this need with the Brocki Card, which transforms one-off interactions into an ongoing relationship.

When someone signs up, they share details including their postal code, family size, and email address. They then scan their card whenever they donate or buy something at any of the Salvation Army Switzerland’s 20 stores. They earn points based on the value of the purchase or donation, which they can redeem for discounts or store credit. The app also tracks the type of donation or sale (clothing or books, for example), the value of the goods, and the store location.

“This information [stored in Dynamics 365] will provide new insight on our customer base and make sure we can reach them,” Haller says.

The eager adoption of the loyalty program surpassed nonprofit expectations. After just one year, more than 65,000 people have signed up, far exceeding the goal of 40,000 in four years.

The Salvation Army Switzerland uses the collected information to fine-tune its marketing outreach, ensuring communications are more relevant to supporters’ interests. For example, a Salvation Army Switzerland store in Zurich is located in an area undergoing heavy construction. The nonprofit’s marketing team could email an update explaining the store was still open, plus   suggesting nearby stores as alternatives, to all BrockiCard holders who had shopped there.

“We want to give only relevant information,” Stern says. “This helps us grow relationships with buyers and donors. Most people want to be up to date with us, to know more about what our shops are doing.”

The personalized approach helps the Salvation Army Switzerland to reach one of its main goals with the Brocki Card program: to get more repeat customers and donors.

Running stores more efficiently

Before creating a CRM-based loyalty program, the Salvation Army Switzerland had hunches of the volume and type of goods donated and sold at each location, but no hard data. Now, though, the nonprofit tracks what goes in and out of every store.

This data is fed into Power BI, which visualizes the information in easy-to-read reports based on real-time information. The insights allow nonprofit staff to make decisions based on realities on the ground. For example, if a store has a surplus of household items, the marketing team can send a promotional email to customers who live in the surrounding neighborhoods with a coupon for home goods.

In addition, collected data helps store managers customize each branch depending on customer preferences. One branch, Stern explains, sold much more clothing than average. Managers tweaked the layout of the store, and now it has more than 80 racks for clothing. Fine-tuning stores based on real-time data helps customers get what they want and boosts store revenue, 10 percent of which goes directly to supporting the nonprofit’s charitable work.

Leadership can also turn to Power BI reports to make decisions on store staffing. If a particular store faces a trend of increasing donations, managers can hire additional staff for the drop-off site.

Expanding to meet customer demand

“Without data, we would be blind when making decisions on where to open new stores,” Haller says. Now that the nonprofit has a wealth of information on customer buying history, donation trends, and supporter postal codes, it can make informed choices of where, when, and how to expand. He continues, “To figure out where to open a new store, we need valid data on where our customers are, where they are from, and what they’re interested in, because not all stores sell the same products.”

If, for example, a high concentration of buyers lives in a certain postal code, leadership could look to that neighborhood for a new store. And if those customers consistently buy more clothing than anything else, the nonprofit could design that store with a larger-than-typical retail area for apparel.

Evidence-based decisions on scaling thrift stores reduces the risk in opening new shops, since data points to opportunities to meet demand. That, ultimately, allows the nonprofit to do more of its work serving refugees, training people with barriers to employment, and providing essential care to those experiencing homelessness.

“Secondhand shops are traditional; they’ve existed for many years,” Haller says. “We’re keeping that traditional experience and combining it with something unique: a modern loyalty program.”