Re-platforming Salesforce Marketing Cloud onto a new account and Sales Cloud org — with a governed two-environment architecture and a clean migration of every live supporter journey.
Compassion Australia runs child sponsorship — a deeply personal, long-term relationship with hundreds of thousands of supporters. Those communications run on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, tightly integrated with Sales Cloud. As part of a platform-wide move to a new Salesforce environment, Compassion migrated to new Sales and Marketing Cloud instances — and every live supporter communication had to move with it, without disruption.
Re-platforming meant rebuilding the entire Marketing Cloud environment against a new Sales Cloud org and data model, then migrating every triggered send, journey and automation that keeps supporters informed — welcome and confirmation, arrears recovery, return-to-sender, gift-of-compassion e-cards, new-letter and Christmas servicing notifications, the monthly birthday run and payment reminders.
Marketing Cloud offers no true sandbox, so there was no safe, standard way to test integration changes away from production. The migration also had to protect data integrity and marketing permissions, and leave Compassion's own team with a repeatable way to deploy future change.
Before committing to a build, we ran discovery workshops with Compassion to set the goal together: give their own team the ability to run marketing and fundraising campaigns with as little external help as possible — and shape the new platform around that independence.
We started by surfacing the full picture — a dependency register that traced every live Marketing Cloud process back to the Sales Cloud objects and attributes it relied on, over a thousand dependencies in all. Compassion could then review, process by process, exactly what needed to carry across to the new instance and what could be retired.
With the dependency picture agreed, we designed the architecture Marketing Cloud doesn't give you out of the box: an administrative parent business unit over governed UAT and Production business units. UAT became a genuine sandbox for integration testing against the new Sales Cloud org; Production became the controlled destination for proven change. Two documented workflows govern it — a System Integration Testing (SIT) workflow for anything touching integrations, schema or marketing permissions, and a Campaign workflow for day-to-day content.
On that foundation we connected Marketing Cloud to the new Sales Cloud org (Marketing Cloud Connect, synchronised data extensions and a clean data model) and rebuilt every live process against the new schema. The self-serve experience — the Preference Centre and a Supporter Survey Cloud Page, the survey carrying a custom scoring model — was recreated. And we re-architected abandoned cart: replacing a brittle payment-failure process with Einstein website feature tagging, a website tagging specification deployed through Google Tag Manager, and custom middleware — including a modified Collect library served from a CDN — opening the door to browse, wishlist and content re-targeting.
We ran the build as a managed project — component-level design workshops, a full UAT build and integration test, then a disciplined manual rebuild and QA into a fresh Production business unit with its own naming conventions, credentials and integration user. At go-live we ran an enablement session for Compassion's deployment team so they could own the platform, then provided 30 days of hypercare — daily availability plus proactive monitoring — and a 30-day warranty on delivered work.
Throughout, dependencies were triaged as blocking or partially-blocking — so build could progress on partially-blocked items while end-to-end testing and go-live waited on the upstream Salesforce processes, keeping delivery moving without ever running ahead of its dependencies.
Compassion moved onto its new Salesforce platform with every supporter communication intact — and with a governed environment model it didn't have before: a real sandbox for integration testing, documented SIT and campaign workflows, and the ability to promote change safely. The re-architected tracking and abandoned-cart foundation opened the way to browse, wishlist and content re-targeting.
Most importantly, it delivered on the goal set in discovery: a well-documented platform Compassion's own team can run and extend — built for self-sufficiency rather than dependence on outside help.
It is also the platform the ongoing email and SMS programme runs on. In 2025 that programme was attributed over $2.6 million in digital revenue (Google Analytics 4) — including over $500,000 from service journeys that carry no marketing call to action (new-letter notifications, birthday-gift notifications and welcome journeys) and approximately $958,000 recovered through arrears journeys. These figures count only the first transaction, while many conversions are recurring sponsorships with an average tenure of around seven years.