CASE STUDY American Heart Association
American Heart Association connects every dollar to mission impact
Modernizing the foundation behind charitable giving to help generosity go further
3-MINUTE READ
In most organizations, the supply chain moves products. At the American Heart Association, it moves the funding that powers research, health education, CPR training, advocacy, and community programs across the United States and globally.
Each year, the organization manages more than $1.5 billion in revenue, including ~$425 million associated with 2.8 million individual donation transactions.
As the American Heart Association expanded domestically and internationally, its existing financial platform could no longer keep pace with growing business requirements. Information spread across systems, spreadsheets, and manual processes — many of them disconnected or requiring manual integration — limiting visibility and slowing decision-making. Rather than simply replacing technology, leadership chose to redesign financial processes across the organization, moving the Association from a fragmented operating environment to one where funding can be seamlessly tracked, governed, and directed from contribution through mission delivery.
The Association selected Accenture to bring strategy, technology, and change management together in a single program, connecting finance, procurement, grants, projects, reporting and planning.
Connecting a complex funding ecosystem
The American Heart Association's funding moves through donation platforms, payment systems, grants, projects, procurement activities, suppliers, and financial operations before supporting research, education, advocacy, and community programs. What appears to donors as a single contribution is supported by a much larger operational ecosystem behind the scenes.
As that ecosystem evolved to support grants programs, research awards, banking relationships, suppliers, and mission activities, information about those activities often lived across multiple systems and processes.
The Association and Accenture created a connected foundation for finance, procurement, grants, planning, and reporting, linking 23 donation platforms, banks, Workday, ProposalCentral, and other systems through 67 integrations and more than 95 reports.
Teams can now work from integrated financial and operational data drawn from the same enterprise foundation.
Creating trusted information
Connected information is only valuable if people trust it. Before leaders could rely on it to guide decisions, the Association needed confidence that financial information was being defined, categorized, and reported consistently across the organization.
The Association and Accenture standardized how financial activity is categorized, reconciled, and reported across the enterprise. Manual reconciliation processes were replaced with governed certification workflows, while the chart of accounts was streamlined to create a more consistent reporting structure.
The effort reduced active natural accounts by 60% (from 750 to 300) establishing a common financial language across the organization while strengthening oversight of approximately $425 million in donation transactions.
Turning information into action
With 3,500 licensed users across National Center and regional operations, adoption was critical to success.
As adoption grows and post go-live operations stabilize, teams will spend less time consolidating information and reconciling transactions, and more time analyzing performance, supporting decisions, and directing resources where they can create the greatest value.
By creating an integrated platform with greater financial visibility and increased automation, we are improving efficiency and focusing on higher-value activities that advance our mission.
Cyndi Roberts / EVP and CFO, American Heart Association
From giving to impact
Every donation represents a desire to make a difference. By connecting its funding ecosystem and creating a common language for financial activity, the American Heart Association can now make decisions based on integrated information, strengthen compliance and governance, and better align funding with strategic priorities.
For an organization powered by generosity, that shift is about more than efficiency. It means more of the Association's capacity — and more of every dollar entrusted to it — can go toward research, education, and programs that give communities a healthier future.
