Fundraising is the lifeblood of your Nonprofit organization. As a Nonprofit CEO, Board Member or Program Manager, fundraising is a major factor when making decisions on how to allocate program resources, improve operational capabilities and expand critical services to the communities and clients you serve.
During my time as a Nonprofit CEO running a business accelerator, as much as 80% of my attention and efforts were focused on fundraising. To be honest, at times it felt like all I could do was to keep the plates spinning long-enough till the next funding round came through. Sound familiar?
In my previous blog Top 5 Salesforce Nonprofit Features, I touched on Fundraising and Donation Management as one of the building blocks for a successful Nonprofit. In this blog, I dive deeper into three types of products and tools Salesforce has built on its Nonprofit Cloud to help you meet and even exceed your fundraising goals. More importantly, with these Salesforce Nonprofit tools, you can achieve a well-rounded portfolio of income streams -from online donations, corporate donations, and grant investment - giving you greater stability and allowing you to accurately forecast budgets and allocate resources.
Nonprofits who use Salesforce for Fundraising reported they on average acquired 39% more donors and retained 31% more.
(Source: 2019 Salesforce.org “Voice of the Customer” Survey, an independent survey of over 1000 customers)
Non-Profit Power of Us Program
I would be derelict as a Salesforce champion if I didn’t mention Salesforce’s Power of Us Program. For qualified 501c3 Nonprofits, The Power of Us Program includes 10 donated subscriptions and deep discounts on additional subscriptions, products and/or services from Salesforce. Please check it out. Your Board will thank you!
Salesforce Tools to Increase Fundraising
Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP)
The Nonprofit Success Pack is a dedicated product suite built specifically for Nonprofit organizations on Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud platform. The Success Pack enables Nonprofit leaders to bring together disparate information and data on donors, clients, finance, marketing material, and fundraising campaigns into a single shared-view CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) platform The NPSP incorporates several tools focused on increasing fundraising through its rich Nonprofit-specific feature set such as:
- Income & Donation Management: Measure any income such as earned income, grants, and memberships, providing a complete view of where your funds are coming from and where to focus fundraising efforts. Set up donation stages and paths that help you understand where revenue is at every stage, with guides to help you establish best practices from cultivation through stewardship.
- Reports & Analytics: NPSP provides Nonprofit leaders with over sixty out-of-the-box reports and dashboards to help you better understand and evaluate fundraising campaign performance. Reports and dashboards drive accountability and collaboration based on data; empowering you to adjust and adapt.
- App Integrations: With Salesforce.org’s Elevate suite of products now integrated into NPSP, Nonprofits can leverage payment processing solutions like Payment Services that allows you to connect to your payment provider to process and manage payments, cancellations, and refunds. Giving Pages is an out-of-the-box donation form that conforms to your branding and configuration requirements and fully integrates with Payment Services, your CRM, and Google Analytics. Giving Pages forms are also search-engine optimized and built for mobile access.
Only 26% of Nonprofits consider their data to be “Good” quality
(Source: 2019 Salesforce Fundraising Productivity & Effectiveness Report)
Data-Driven Fundraising
In today’s digital world Nonprofit need consolidated data to have a full view of each supporter, their passion, and why they give to your cause. Take time to review all your donor contact information, remove old contacts. and update activity history. Consider expanding the type of data you collect about your donors and funders. For example, nonprofits who captured more types of data such as volunteering information, organization affiliations, and program interest, are more likely to exceed their fundraising goals.
Here are the Salesforce tools that will help you collect and maintain high quality data:
- Batch Data Import: C’me on, admit it! You still use or have spreadsheets with tons of data, don’t you? With Batch Data Import, you can quickly and easily import complex data from spreadsheets into your CRM. Salesforce also added new data mapping capabilities so you can process an unlimited number of admin-defined objects, including custom objects, directly related to Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities.
- Salesforce Inbox boosts major gift-officer productivity by leveraging email templates, scheduling meetings, entering gifts, eliminating manual data entry, and even creating contacts from Gmail or Outlook.
Nonprofits who use Salesforce for Fundraising reported they on average increased donor engagement by 54%
(Source: 2020 Salesforce Fundraising Solutions Overview)
Digital Fundraising – Raise more funds online!
Nonprofits are increasing their online fundraising efforts to reach new audiences and convert new donors at less cost and effort. The Nonprofit Cloud has a comprehensive suite of online fundraising tools, connecting you an entire ecosystem of digital fundraising apps: Seamlessly track data on campaigns, donors, single donations, recurring donations, teams, registrations, and tickets from fundraising apps.
- Create responsive online donation forms and track donations to constituent and household records.
- Use modern, integrated peer-2-peer fundraising technologies and associate members to campaigns in CRM.
- Leverage the Salesforce AppExchange to download integrated digital fundraising platforms and ensure all data passes through to the CRM.
Elevate
Online fundraising is where Elevate, which I mentioned earlier, really starts to shine for your Nonprofit. Elevate is the fully integrated fundraising suite providing an online interface to engage donors and alumni while streamlining the critical back-end functions of payments, and accounting.
- Salesforce.org Payment Services - A multi-gateway payment layer that allows you to accept payments from the gateway and processor of your choice integrated to Giving Pages or using an extensible web API.
- Giving Pages - A form for one-time or recurring donations that simplifies the creation of donation forms for your online presence while conforming to your branding and configuration requirements, fully integrated with Payment Services.
- Engagement Hub - A brand-specific hub to drive deeper donor engagement with your supporters providing a new, easy way to promote stories, giving campaigns, and volunteer opportunities.
We’ve only scratched the surface on how Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud can help you improve and increase your fundraising. I encourage you to visit Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud to explore the full line of cloud products and solutions.
Having the right Salesforce partner can help you get started on the right foot or accelerate your internal efforts. If you are still not sure where to start, or which solutions can have the best impact on your organizations, please reach out!
About the Author: Doug Campbell
Doug brings over 20 years of experience to fivestar*, spending 10+ years as a Non-Profit CEO of a business accelerator building relationships and connecting entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations to more than $20M in funding and capital investments. During that time, Doug helped his clients launch more than 30 companies and accumulated over 10,000 hours of consulting experience in Salesforce, manufacturing, software and product development, economic development, universities, non-profit management and fundraising.