How the American Cancer Society maximizes donor dollar impact with Pendo  

Every year, nearly 2 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer. It’s a devastating diagnosis that can leave patients and their loved ones distraught, uncertain about the future, and in need of crucial resources and support.  

The American Cancer Society (ACS) exists to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through advocacy, research, and patient support. Their mission as a non-profit is to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer. 

ACS is always looking for more and better ways to maximize its impact. A pillar of their strategy is to ensure that they spend donor money as efficiently as possible in service of the mission. And to realize that goal, they turned to Pendo.  

Ensuring every donor dollar goes as far as possible 

The American Cancer Society had already seen the value of Pendo on Cancer Survivors Network, a website it manages that connects members at all stages of their cancer journey in an online community. When ACS needed to move users to a new interface, it used Pendo In-app Guides to help them through the transition so that patients would not lose access to the site and the support it provides. 

 In November 2023, ACS decided to put Pendo on Coupa, the platform its employees use for spend management, procurement, and purchase approval. Lindsey Teetor, a supply chain content and training development manager at ACS, explained: “To ensure that we are good stewards of donor contributions, we have a set of policies and procedures that govern how resources are spent to ensure that every dollar is well spent towards the mission and its impact.  While Coupa is a great platform, there are many different forms to fill out and complete, and multiple different ways for requesters to navigate through the buying process.”  

Before ACS started using Pendo, Teetor said, employees found the system confusing. Infrequent users often didn’t know what to do and became frustrated when having to place an order. This led to users navigating through purchase workflows without completing necessary steps, which impacted compliance and productivity. “People wanted to do the right thing, but they were getting lost.” 

On top of the confusing workflows, Coupa releases quarterly interface and feature updates that often leave employees uncertain about where and how to complete these new processes. “With these challenges, we knew we needed to do better to improve efficiency, compliance and user experience.  After researching the market we recognized the value of a digital adoption platform (DAP) and selected Pendo as the product of choice for ACS,” Teetor said. 

Creating support that meets employees where they are 

Historically, ACS provided manual documentation about purchase and procurement best practices in the form of PDFs, Word docs, and PowerPoints. The problem was that these documents weren’t ready at hand or easy to find when and where employees needed them. Confusion about where to find guidance as employees navigated Coupa was leading to compliance issues and inconsistent processes. But Pendo’s in-app guidance capabilities changed all that.  

Now, the ACS team is leveraging Pendo to drive better compliance, so that employees aren’t just getting to the end of processes, but completing them in the right ways to ensure donor money is well spent. “We’ve put up some pop-up guides that block you from moving forward if you haven’t completed the steps correctly, which has been very helpful,” Teetor said.  

ACS is also getting out in front of Coupa platform updates and releases so that employees know where to go, what’s changed, and how it affects them. “We paired a new set of guides with one of those Coupa releases, which changed the design of the front page. By using Pendo we were able to draw attention to new features and explain what they were,” Teetor said. “We wanted to avoid employee confusion and provide a little bit more direction and structure to the page.” The result has been more satisfied employees completing work more efficiently, compliantly, and accurately. 

Improving process efficiency and compliance from the outset 

With the results they’ve seen from their initial use of Pendo guides, ACS plans to make Pendo the principal engine for its Coupa onboarding motions. It’s not only the ability to deliver training in the app, but to customize it for different segments of users that drove the decision. “Some people will log into this platform once a year, others ten times a month, others every day. So, there’s a variety of user knowledge and needs that we want to address. So when it comes to assigning trainings, Pendo’s segmentation tools are really going to come into play.”

 The American Cancer Society’s mission is a vital one, Pendo is proud to help the organization ensure that every dollar donated is one spent effectively, efficiently, and compliantly. “It’s a big responsibility to buy on behalf of the company,” Teetor said. “By putting these trainings and guidance in the platform where employees are actually doing the work, it has already begun to  increase speed and efficiency in spend management and procurement.”