So, you’re a fundraising organisation, doing great work and achieving some great results with your proactive team, but you’re spending a lot of time on admin when you could be hitting more goals. Maybe you’re still using spreadsheets to capture all of your data, maybe you have dozens of manual processes that you resent doing, but must be done.
Perhaps you already have Salesforce, after everyone you spoke to told you how great it is and how their organisation has benefited from implementing this amazing platform. But you’re yet to see the same results and are in need of a little support in the right direction.
Let’s explore some of the benefits you should be getting from Salesforce, and if you’re yet to realise the potential, as a registered charity, you can apply for 10 free licenses so you can start the journey right away!
Where to start
The first step is to identify what the platform can offer, and which elements you think could be utilised at a very high level. Every organisation is different and Salesforce can be adapted for your needs. To work out what you need to change, start by assessing your current working efforts to see which areas take up the most time or are just long manual process.
List these items out, and you will have a very loose requirement specifications that can be used to hone into a solution to either reduce the impact, or completely remove these frustrations.
What can Salesforce do for fundraising?
Let’s have a look at all of the awesome functionality you could have for your fundraising organisation if you were to utilise Salesforce and NPSP:
- Constituent management – Easily categorise your contact base and track their engagement.
- Relationship and affiliation management – Quickly identify relationships between contacts, and associate them with one or more organisations.
- Event management – Run your fundraising events via the platform, track attendees, no shows, total donations attributed to the event and more.
- Donation management – Associate donations to individuals or organisations, forecast on pledges made and regular donations.
- Soft Credit automation – Streamline the thanking process for each donation by ensuring the right people are being credited for donations made by others, start identifying those individuals who influence the most donations.
- Engagement plans – Set up a journey for your donors to follow through a specific set of tasks/emails/notifications so that as they donate more and more, their status increases – a very easy way to identify and nurture Major Donors.
- Reporting and analytics – Every piece of data that you populate, each field, each record is all reportable. You will now be able to easily generate and run your own reports to show you exactly how your organisation is doing. Generate dashboards for your management team to identify the best events to run, the best places to fundraise. If you track it, you can report on it.
- Chatter – Think Facebook and Twitter combined and embedded into your platform. Start ‘mentioning’ work colleagues on specific records, mentions that will automatically generate pop ups. No more sending emails via your inbox chasing for things or asking for assistance, each record within the platform allows you to collaborate with your entire organisation. What’s even better, anyone else in your organisation will be able to see what’s being discussed which further enhances their knowledge of what’s happening around them.
With this vast array of functionality at your fingertips, and fully out of the box (you don’t need to customise anything if you don’t want to!) you are one huge step closer to streamlining your fundraising processes and making everyone that little bit happier!
What is NPSP?
The NPSP is a collection of nonprofit specific tweaks and modifications to the overarching Salesforce platform. Designed wholly with NFP’s in mind it delivers lots of rich functionality such as fundraising, operations, programs and much more.
In the interests of keeping this as succinct as possible, lets focus solely on the fundraising side for now:
Constituent Management:
Salesforce and NPSP combine to provide a very comprehensive, powerful Constituent Relationship Management platform (CRM). At a glance you can see the engagement levels of your constituents, past and present and easily identify those individuals who are always getting involved.
Salesforce allows for a ‘360 degree view’ of your constituents, this allows you to see not only pertinent information about each individual, but also all of the related records such as donations, event attendance, the history of communication held with them, their relationships with others and other organisations. It really does reflect a surround view of each person and that information can be invaluable to a fundraising organisation.
Relationship and Affiliation Management:
As always, the individuals you’re dealing with on a daily basis are humans, and humans have a tendency to move around quite a bit. With Salesforce you’re able to track your constituents through multiple work placements and relationships. This provides you with a much greater knowledge of who they are and therefore how to approach them and continue the journey with them in mind.
Salesforce and NPSP make this as easy as 3 clicks. You can generate a relationship between two individuals and a reciprocal relationship can also be created. You can easily affiliate an individual to one or more organisations, whilst also tracking things such as job title, when the affiliation started, when it ended, is it current, previous or upcoming?
Event Management:
Utilising the standard campaign object will allow you to create one off campaigns/events or a nested hierarchy of campaigns. You will be able to track individuals you have invited through a member journey and have automatic notifications sent to each individual based on their current status and number of days before or after the event date.
Donation Management:
Once again NPSP comes to your rescue with the capability of tracking donations against individuals, organisations and or campaigns/events. It is very easy to start tracking your donations and pledges within the Salesforce platform. You can also set up automatic management of Soft Credits to other individuals who may have contributed to the donation.
So, you’ve got Salesforce and NPSP, what now?
Well, let’s look at some more freebies that you can use to further enhance your experience and return on that zero fee investment:
Trailhead – Salesforce university, which is completely free of charge. You can follow training courses in their entirety or focus on specific modules. All the while gaining experience and ranks and eventually having the satisfaction of becoming a Trailhead Ranger!
Power of us hub – By signing up to Salesforce as a nonprofit organisation, you’ll be granted access to the ‘Power of Us Hub’, a community of like minded clients of the platform. This is an absolutely amazing tool at your disposal, somewhere you can discuss ideas, learn from peers and understand what other organisations are doing both on and off the Salesforce platform. Be prepared to add a lot of functionality to your wish list!
Appexchange – Salesforce has its own app store, with free applications and paid for apps. Each one is built on the platform and will work seamlessly with your new shiny Salesforce platform. Want to spread out a bit further and find that perfect HR system, or want to look for a more specific event management solution, maybe you’re after a mass mailing tool? The Appexchange has thousands of applications that you can easily install and start using in seconds.
Did we mention that you can get this amazing set of features completely free of charge (for up to 10 people), forever?
Sounds like a pretty great deal to us, now imagine what you can do with the platform if you engaged with a consultancy who have been recognised for the work they do with nonprofit organisations like yourself, supporting you every step of the way! Take a look at how some of our customers such as Cardiff City FC Community Foundation are already reaping the benefits of this amazing platform with our help.