Good Return works to eradicate poverty by 2030 with the help of Salesforce

Poverty remains a critical issue in Asia-Pacific with some of the most marginalised people living on less than $3 a day. Providing donations is not enough to effect permanent change: people need access to finance and the financial capability to grow their own income and escape poverty for good. Good Return provides both of these and is using Salesforce to scale its efforts and reach 50,000 people across Asia Pacific over the next four years. The Australian nonprofit is contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal to eradicate poverty by 2030.

“We want to empower people to improve their own lives by building financial capability and enabling access to responsible finance. Salesforce helps us scale our programs to reach more people,” said Shane Nichols, CEO at Good Return. “It also facilitates communication with our supporters so we can demonstrate the impact we’re making and keep them engaged.”

The nonprofit started out as an Australian offshoot of World Education, a global nonprofit helping those who are financially and socially excluded. The two organisations still share similar aims, but in 2009 the Australian entity launched an online microfinance platform and rebranded itself as Good Return. It also embraced its future as a fintech in order to help more people, more efficiently.

One of Good Return’s first priorities was to build a new microlending site, making it easier to connect individuals who want to lend money to poor entrepreneurs seeking credit. These entrepreneurs are often women with limited opportunities to work, and microfinance supports their ambitions to start and run their own businesses.

Built and launched using the Lightning Platform, the new site has made it easier for supporters to fund loans and almost 80% are now choosing to donate or re-invest after loans are paid back. Good Return has also increased funds raised in Australia by 46% in 2018/19.

Good Return’s partners and employees also benefit from a streamlined experience. It takes just three steps to list a new microloan request compared to the seven it took previously. Additionally, staff at Good Return are no longer losing time on workarounds and moving between different systems. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack gives them what they need to manage programs, donations, partners and supporters.

Good Return is now moving more of its data to Salesforce for a single view of supporters, partners and entrepreneurs. And while this will help it to connect more personally with stakeholders, data integrity is a priority and one of the reasons the nonprofit chose to work with Salesforce. The platform helps Good Return safeguard its data while using it in different ways to increase its impact.

The nonprofit is pushing further into digital and testing a new app in Cambodia to help entrepreneurs to track and manage their finances. It plans to roll out localised versions of the app internationally over the next two years. The development of a new portal for supporters is also on the horizon. Powered by Community Cloud, the portal will make it easier for them to manage their own investments and see the impact these are making on people’s lives.

“A lot of the work we’re doing is focused on building trust and transparency between consumers and financial service providers, so that feedback loop between supporters and loan recipients is really important to us and we’re using Salesforce to strengthen that,” said Nichols.

With these projects and more, Good Return anticipates its growth in 2019/20 to match that of the year prior. It is also on target to raise $1 million in microfinance by 2022 and empower more people to escape poverty.