Bring The Elephant Home is a Dutch NGO dreaming of a world in which people and elephants can live in harmony, benefiting from each other’s existence. Not only do they dream of it – they make it happen, too. In Asia and Africa, BTEH leads a number of conservation projects, supporting local involvement, a healthy ecology and benefits for both the local communities and the elephants roaming nearby.
Needless to say, such a mission requires considerable fund-raising efforts and this is where Flock. stepped in. We built a sophisticated donations tool, allowing money transfer by Ideal, credit card, SEPA-payment or collection order (“incasso”), using an external payment service provider (Buckaroo).
We equipped our tool with all the necessary analytics in order to help the management make informed decisions regarding future campaigns.
As a next step, we created an interface to connect the sponsors’ database to Mailchimp, bringing BTEH’s campaigns and money-raising truly to a next level. This replaced the organisation’s tiresome and error-prone administration based on spreadsheets, leading to a substantial surge in donations and soon translating into tangible benefits for the elephants and the local communities.
The new interface meant great improvements in communication, too, including targeted follow-ups (for example, information regarding particular elephants in the “Adopt an Elephant” project).
Technology-wise we used Kotlin and React. It was a great opportunity to experiment and gain confidence in those two languages (the project dates back to our company’s early days). But the main reason we were so keen to help Bring the Elephant Home is because at Flock. we understand dreamers very well. Needless to say, our tool is open-source and available to any NGO for free (https://github.com/flock-community/flock-eco-fundraising/tree/master/src/main), so don’t hesitate and contact us if you would like to use it, too.
