Salesforce is a great donor management tool for nonprofits, but it’s even better when you use it in new ways. Here are five ways that I’ve seen nonprofits use Salesforce to engage with donors and keep them coming back.
1. Fundraise Online with Elevate
Salesforce is a great tool for nonprofits because it keeps track of all donations, funds, and campaigns in one system. You can track where donations are allocated, what development effort raised the donation, and much more. However, with a basic implementation of Salesforce, getting all those donations entered into the system can be a very manual process.
Enter Elevate, an integrated fundraising solution for non-profits built right on the Salesforce platform. Bridge the gap between your website and Salesforce by accepting payments online, which automatically post into Salesforce without any manual data entry. Since Elevate is built on the platform, it can also access data within Salesforce, allowing you to customize your donation forms for your donors.
Setting up integrations between websites, payment processors, and Salesforce can be complicated. We recommend leveraging a trusted partner with experience with both Salesforce and web app development.
2. Stay Informed with a 360-Degree View of the Donor Journey
Salesforce is a great tool for nonprofits that want to have a complete view of their donor profiles and interactions. With Salesforce, you can map out the journey your donor takes from their first interaction with your organization to making their first donation and beyond. Here’s how:
- Create a 360-Degree View of Your Donor Journey (The Foundation)
- Stay Informed with a 360-Degree View of the Donor Journey (The Fundraising Funnel)
- Show More Engagement Opportunities (Nurture Campaigns and Community Sites)
Setting up a well-designed Campaign hierarchy and capturing all relevant touchpoints across your donor journey is a critical piece to creating a full 360 view. Your non-profit is unique and has unique data about your donors – your donor management platform should reflect that. By customizing Salesforce for your specific organization, we can enable your organization to track all critical data about your donors, empowering your team to provide personalized outreach and engagement.
3. Visualize Donor Engagement with CRM Analytics
CRM Analytics is a powerful tool for nonprofits. It allows you to visualize donor data in new ways and use it to identify trends and patterns. This will help you better understand who your donors are, how they’re engaging with your organization, and what types of fundraising efforts work best for them.
Using CRM Analytics, you can even show donors how their donations are being used by creating visualizations that show where their money goes and what impact it has on the world around them.
4. Personalize Outreach Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud Engagement for Nonprofits provides engagement tools that are fully integrated with Salesforce and your donor data. For example, you can use Marketing Cloud to send donors who have recently donated an email thanking them for their gift or even automatically send them a link to your website where they can learn more about the cause. Personalize outreach to your donors by using their Salesforce profile to customize messaging and donor journeys.
You can also use Marketing Cloud as a donor management and engagement tool by incorporating it into your onboarding process for new volunteers or board members. This will give them a better understanding of how their involvement helps further the mission of your organization and make sure that everyone gets the most out of their time spent volunteering or serving on the board.
5. Leverage Experience Cloud to Create Donor Communities
Salesforce Experience Cloud provides online experiences for your donors and constituents, all tied to your Salesforce platform and data. Allow donors to log in and self-serve to update their profile and giving. Build a donor community with message boards and forum features, publicizing events and relevant cause-related information. You can even use Experience Cloud site to recruit and manage volunteers.
The possibilities of engagement are practically endless when you can empower your donors and constituents with their own Salesforce data. We’ve helped countless non-profits set up grant-making sites, online case management tools, and communities focused on their cause through Experience Cloud.
Examples of Donor Management with Salesforce
The Philadelphia Bar Foundation serves as a philanthropic hub for engaging organizations that represent and provide access to justice to thousands of underserved community members. The organization had outgrown its legacy constituent management system and knew it could do more if it had the right tools. Our team launched automation and integrated donation tracking, which empowered the Foundation to track online and offline fundraising efforts, attribute donations to specific types of funds, distinguish between donor types, and send automatic and personalized donation acknowledgments. Now, the organization can build data-driven marketing campaigns for specific funds and target specific donor prospects. Learn more.
Our team also empowers nonprofits already on Salesforce who want to do more on the platform. We worked with Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation (ATBMF), an organization that works with college football coaches and teams to organize bone marrow drives at college campuses, to enhance its capabilities within Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. We built functionality to track items donated to the organization for fundraising auctions and automatically email thank you notes to donors based on a complex set of donation criteria like size/type of donation, saving significant man-hours and cost of postage. Learn more.
About Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud leverages a suite of projects to manage and grow fundraising efforts, marketing campaigns, donor engagement, and grant management programs. The platform allows nonprofit employees to see a single source of truth from anywhere at any time. And because it’s built on the foundation of the world’s leading CRM, Nonprofit Cloud empowers organizations to grow faster, with more data and opportunities at their fingertips.
Your Nonprofit’s Next Steps
In the end, it’s up to you how you use these tools. But if you’re looking for a way to get more people involved in your organization and make it more effective, Salesforce Nonprofit can help. Our Salesforce consulting team can help launch a strategic and customized implementation to drive strategic donor management and engagement. Contact us to learn more.
