As their reliance on social media for promotional campaigns and donor engagement steadily increases with each passing year, more and more philanthropic organizations are turning to the Salesforce platform to bolster their nonprofit fundraising. Custom Salesforce development helps charities take advantage of the latest marketing trends by providing tools to help track information and communicate more efficiently with charity members, coordinating organizations, and prospective donors. The ability to simplify traditionally manual processes through Salesforce applications and other custom solutions allows nonprofits to focus more on their core missions and less on tedious, time-consuming administrative tasks.
How Salesforce improves the efficiency of your nonprofit fundraising
Nonprofits who regularly engage in fundraising activities, like running marathons and hosting gala dinners, find the Salesforce platform especially beneficial. Salesforce provides tools to track donor information, record financial transactions, and automate workflows—all of which are integral to the success of any charity event. The platform’s ability to manage databases and create custom processes for marketing campaigns helps streamline records management and encourages better record-keeping overall.
Custom Salesforce solutions also allow organizations to simplify donor records further by integrating data from third-party sources, like legacy software platforms or nonprofit portals—effectively providing users access to more comprehensive information at their fingertips. These capabilities streamline workflows and provide staff members with the data they need to be more effective advocates for prospective donors and existing supporters. Here are seven easy ways that Salesforce development will optimize online fundraising for any nonprofit.
1. When asking for an email address, offer something of value in exchange.
It’s essential to make sure you are offering donors something of value when they are providing their contact information for your donation portal. Give them something that they will find appealing—whether it is an eBook, a toolkit, or even some kind of coupon. By providing valuable content in exchange for the email address, you create an incentive, which ensures that the person receiving the content will be more likely to donate by better understanding your mission.
2. Use Salesforce appointment scheduling to manage meetings with donors for nonprofit fundraising.
At a certain point, your organization will need to hold meetings with donors to garner support for specific projects or initiatives. Salesforce appointment scheduling is the perfect solution because it streamlines the entire process from start to finish. You can use Salesforce to collaborate with staff members who are involved in any aspect of project management, such as:
Maintenance
We discussed in our blog post, “5 things to Consider When Developing a Mobile App” how important it is to consistently update your Mobile App. Once your app is developed, you’re going to need to perform regular upkeep to make sure your app is keeping up with new trends in mobile apps and therefore an enhanced user experience. Just like your business, your mobile app should always be evolving and growing. Discuss a maintenance plan with the development team. Be sure to incorporate this into your agreement before choosing a development team to work with. Maintenance and upkeep are almost as important as the initial build of your mobile app.
- Arranging meeting times and locations that work best for everyone involved.
- Establishing specific objectives for discussion in the upcoming meeting.
- Assigning future tasks to specific members or staffers once the meeting is over.
- Documenting what transpired during each meeting.
3. Use Salesforce management software capabilities in tandem with a CRM tool.
When managing a large donor community, many organizations improve overall efficiency by integrating CRM with certain Salesforce management tools used for nonprofit fundraising. In doing so, this enhanced functionality – which often includes Salesforce automation capabilities – ensures a seamless and consistent collection of information. Your staffers essentially only need to enter the data once instead of multiple times in numerous databases. Meanwhile, CRM software allows you to create forms from predefined templates, so staff members don’t need to waste valuable time creating custom questionnaires and surveys from scratch.
4. Use Salesforce automation workflows to track donor engagement levels on social media.
Social media is a great way to share information, but it’s also a great way to gauge which types of posts resonate most with your audience. With Salesforce marketing cloud features, nonprofits can easily track new “likes” and “shares” of social media posts made by the organization on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms. The organization then adjusts its social media marketing campaigns, accordingly, based on which types of posts receive the most positive feedback from their followers.
5. Use Salesforce data analytics to create personalized donor profiles – and use these profiles for social selling.
The Salesforce platform allows for the creation of unique and customized donor profiles, which are especially useful for large organizations that have many donors or prospective donors on their marketing lists. Salesforce generates a complete profile from all the information you have on file for each member of your donor community, including contact details, donation history, favorite charity events, and more. By using this data, you then target your nonprofit fundraising efforts more effectively by creating custom lists for email blasts or newsletters based on specific criteria, such as:
- Industry
- Location
- Income levels
- Favorite charity events
- Age, occupation, or other socioeconomic factors
You can then use these customized lists to implement specific social selling tactics, like contests or giveaways, that are more likely to attract that special kind of donor. The more personalized you can make your donor interactions, the more money you will raise.
6. Use Salesforce development solutions to build a brand-specific website for your organization.
With custom Salesforce development solutions in play, nonprofits make it easier for their staff members to build and maintain a branded website. It’s also easier to integrate the site with their CRM data on new donors, donation history, and contact information. Successful organizations then use this information, which often includes login credentials from any fundraising portal account, to tailor their marketing message further, based on each member’s profile. These state-of-the-art capabilities are invaluable when establishing authority within your industry while also boosting credibility among potential supporters or clients.
7. Salesforce builds donor-facing portals with personalized fundraising requests.
Whether it’s an annual pledge drive, a matching campaign, or a crowdfunding effort, your organization will need to communicate directly with your major donors about specific fundraising efforts that are either underway or in the works. By using Salesforce as a central platform for this type of communication, your organization will ensure the consistent collection and tracking of data across all channels – including email marketing campaigns – so that you always have a complete record of everything happening on your end.
Salesforce development: Even nonprofit fundraising can be highly competitive
Even in the world of philanthropic enterprises, the competition for those donation dollars can be brutal. To be successful in charitable fundraising, you still need to think, act, and execute like a business professional.
Salesforce provides a wealth of features and functionalities to improve the efficiency of your fundraising operations. By using the tips outlined above, you’ll save time and resources while simultaneously increasing in-house productivity. And before you know it, your newly implemented Salesforce nonprofit fundraising efforts will result in lots more donations coming your way in 2022 and beyond!
