How Children with Cancer UK is getting a fundraising boost with Salesforce

Children with Cancer UK was set up by parents who lost two children to cancer.

At the age of just 14, Paul O’Gorman was diagnosed with leukaemia, and died two months later in early 1987. His sister, Jean O’Gorman, was diagnosed with breast cancer in Spring 1987, and passed away in the November. Their parents, Marion and Eddie O’Gorman, set up Children with Cancer UK in the wake of losing their two children, as a way of helping other young people and their families affected by the disease.

The charity’s motto is ‘Until every child survives’, and so far its efforts have facilitated a big shift towards that goal. Since it started operations in 1988, Children with Cancer UK has raised more than £300 million, funded over 300 research projects, while childhood cancer survival rates have improved from 67% in 1990 to 85% in 2018.

To try and shift that number further upwards, the charity is aiming to significantly increase its fundraising impact this coming year, so it can continue to fund more critical research, and support more children and families affected by cancer. Technology plays a critical role in enabling this fundraising effort, and the charity has been modernizing its core systems to create more resilient, secure, data-driven processes and decision-making processes.

Clear roadmap

When it started the digital transformation journey, Children with Cancer UK’s systems were outdated, fragmented and lacking integration. The charity invested significant time in the initial planning process, including defining a clear roadmap that covered core systems, data foundation, and supported journey transformation. Fadil Dugolli, Head of Information Technology at Children with Cancer UK, notes:

A key early focus was to ensure that our data was clean, accurate, and fit for purpose, so that the transformation would deliver long-term value rather than short-term fixes.

The charity opted for a range of Salesforce products, implementing Salesforce CRM - version one and version two. Dugolli explains:

Version one was translating those business processes that we used to run in the old systems, digitalizing them into Salesforce so users and teams can actually understand what they were doing, which then has created a single reliable source of truth for our supporter data.

Across 2025, the organization reviewed and enhanced the platform based on user feedback, and improved usability and adoption across the team. Dugolli says:

We probably can say that we now run in version two, based on those improvements we've been able to make.

According to Dugolli, Children with Cancer UK is one of the small number of charities that have implemented Salesforce Data Cloud. This now underpins its data segmentation and powers its personalized, data-driven supported journeys in Marketing Cloud.

The charity’s investment in Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud automation is enabling it to better understand its supporters, personalize communications and optimize fundraising journeys. This is leading to better engagement with donors, improved retention, and ultimately more income generated to support the charity’s mission. 

The migration to cloud-based services has transformed the way the charity works, notes Dugolli:

If you go back five years ago when I joined the charity, we had about 32 virtual servers, very little on cloud-based solutions. There was no data integration, there was no automation. There was a lack of a clear vision where technology was going and how you could help the charity to move forward.

Marketing Cloud has led to significant progress in transforming the supporter journey. For example, London Marathon journeys are now fully built and automated end to end, which means the charity can deliver timely, personalized communication at scale.

Seamless payments

The system has led to a reduction in manual administration around registration fees and payments, which are handled seamlessly through FinDock and Marketing Cloud. This has freed up teams to focus on building meaningful relationships with runners and supporters, rather than chasing payments or managing manual processes, resulting in a direct financial benefit. Although Children with Cancer UK had fewer runners in the London Marathon in 2025, it managed to fundraise five percent more money compared to the previous year. Dugolli adds:

We are now continuing this momentum by developing additional supporter journeys for different audiences across the organization, from community fundraising to sports departments to individual giving, which is the department that looks after single donations and direct debits. So we are scaling up this to cover all our fundraising efforts.

Before the charity switched to Salesforce, it was using Dotdigital as its third-party mailer, and some emails still go out from this system as the organization hasn’t been able to migrate absolutely everything yet. A disadvantage of this is the lack of a link between Dotdigital and the CRM system. Dugolli says:

Any campaign that you send today, eventually the data, the open rate, etc, you can't report directly. You have got to take the data, manipulate, import it, put it in some sort of a report database for you to be able to report it.

The charity was using Power BI for this task, but it was a manual script and manual process, which often would take weeks to carry out. When Children with Cancer UK does its direct mail, typically it pulls data from around 70 different segments; it then has to do calculated insights and an A/B split test. Dugolli adds:

The time it used to take the fundraising team and the data team to produce the final list, it would've been typically around four weeks to even a month's time. We've managed to build all of that on Data Cloud, and those are locked as a template. Users can use those templates to readjust the different segments, and different exclusion and inclusion for various sectors, and rerun those data segmentation lists that we pre-built and they can adjust the fundraising strategy quite instantly rather than having to wait for a different department to produce a different set of data.

If Dugolli could offer a piece of advice to other organizations undertaking a similar digital transformation project, it would be build your foundation properly and make sure your data is absolutely spot on. He adds:

Do your due diligence in terms of making sure that data you import into the system is absolutely clean and fit for purpose. In our case, we've done that, we've taken our time, we've planned properly, and our CRM today really reflects our business processes. We have clean data and trusted data, and future-proof platforms. Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud work quite well because of the data, the way that we structure our data, the trust we have in our data.

AI next

Now that Children with Cancer UK has built those foundations and is confident in its core infrastructure, the charity is shifting focus to try and unlock the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and become a more data-led and agentic organization. The organization is looking at using Agentforce on Marketing Cloud Next to build small campaigns and small journeys, and work at a much faster pace. Dugolli adds:

At the same time, with Tableau Next, if the fundraisers want to know the average gift for the past five years, they should be able to lift that information directly from the system rather than having to wait for the data team to produce that sort of report.

There are also plans to build a knowledge base for the supporter care team, and a potential phone queuing system, which would let the telemarketing team reach donors directly. While Dugolli has many examples in his mind of where AI could benefit the charity, he points out:

I just have to take one step at a time.