SEIF works with impact driven entrepreneurs who with their business models aim to solve some of our most pressing global challenges, alongside having a solid business case.
Since 2011, SEIF offers specialized coaching, training, consulting and impact investment opportunities to support impact entrepreneurs to advance their businesses, enter the market, grow and scale successfully. In 2020, SEIF invest was founded as an addition to SEIF innovation, to take the next steps in the impact investing sector.
SEIF leads the Tech for Impact Awards, a Europe-wide competition for impact tech entrepreneurs. Twice a year they run the Impact Academy for startups who want to grow and get impact investment ready. In 2021, SEIF launched Switzerland’s first Social Impact Accelerator together with SENS.
SEIF continuously refine their existing programs, develop new services and explore new partnership opportunities for corporates and organizations to engage with impact entrepreneurs in a meaningful way.
"Working with the NexellAngels, we went from a patchwork of unconnected systems to a single synchronized solution tailored to suit our unique needs. It has significantly improved our workflow, and we now have a great overview and quick access to insights about our impact startup database."
Challenges
Starting out, several different solutions were used by SEIF to manage contacts, fundraising, mailing tracking and so on, primarily because these solutions were very cost effective. This was alright in the beginning, and a common route for many startups. However, SEIF had grown rapidly to the point where this patchwork was no longer serving their needs; in fact, it was holding them back. The data contained in these solutions was not synchronized and some of it was duplicated. Considerable time was spent by the small SEIF team to manually gather, maintain and compile data.
An essential part of the project was Nexell working with SEIF to help them clearly define their needs and establish what they wanted to achieve with the new solution. The core was established as: wanting a consolidated view of who they were in contact with and who is being supported; to easily see which company is supporting which project; and to be able to easily produce statistics and reports for stakeholders without manual exporting, combining and merging of data.
Solution
SEIF was referred to Nexell by a previous client. The first discussions took place in the autumn of 2019 and the project kickoff was in January 2020. Two months later, the project was live. The NexellAngels enabled Salesforce’s Sales Cloud with a Nonprofit Success Pack.
Data cleaning was important, including removing duplicates and redundancy, and well as deciding what was most up to date and what to keep. SEIF were clearly the people best equipped for this task and managed these actions themselves.
SEIF is aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and also tracks which of the SDGs the startups they are supporting meet. Nexell built a custom function in Salesforce which allows SEIF to see at a glance, using icons, which projects have met which goals: a unique feature which Nexell knew would be useful for SEIF.
Result
The efficiency gains have been significant; tasks which may have previously taken weeks can now be done in a few clicks. The benefit of these gains are amplified when felt by a small team. The SEIF team is extremely lean and these new gains have really improved the team’s efficiency. Naturally, when the team can work better, SEIF can perform its functions better, and ensure that its clients are receiving the very best support and recognition they deserve. Because SEIF is better able to support their clients and beneficiaries, the people who need them are better supported.
Maria Ljung
