The Organization

Headquartered in New York, Smile Train is a 501(c)(3) organization that strives to provide free cleft and palate repair surgery to underprivileged children around the globe. Since their inception in 1999, Smile Train has partnered with 1000+ local hospitals in more than 85 countries to train surgeons and doctors in cleft repairs. With over 128,000+ surgeries every year, the organization has proudly transformed the lives of more than one million children worldwide.

Icreon and SmileTrain first started working together on a website redesign project. The existing platform that the SmileTrain team was using packaged CMS & CRM components together, but lacked the flexibility and control to make custom changes for the website. They were looking for a partner who could recommend a more integrated environment for their donor management tools.

The Approach

We started by working through a discovery and design phase to gain a better understanding of what was required from the website redesign, and the ways in which donations can happen. We mapped out donation workflows, dove deep into existing donor management tools, and started to build out the UI & UX components of a new website that fit better to the needs of the organization’s constituents.

The Solution

With emphasis on flexibility and customization, Icreon recommended Drupal for the CMS component and Salesforce for CRM – with plans to integrate the two as a ‘donor management system’. Drupal offers complete customization through modules, and it’s open-source nature provides the flexibility to make UX/UI on donor-facing website. Salesforce is an extremely robust platform, and the non-profit specific product directly aligns to the donor/donation processes.

With the development of the website and the integration of Drupal and Salesforce, what we essentially created was a new donor management ecosystem that enabled SmileTrain to start thinking bigger – including our next engagement, which was the development of a peer-to-peer fundraising platform.