Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM platforms. But there are still many organizations who aren’t yet using Salesforce, or are debating on if it’s a worthwhile investment. If that’s you, keep reading to learn how Salesforce is beneficial for nonprofits.
Table of Contents
- What is Salesforce?
- 5 Top Uses for Salesforce NPSP
- 4 Great Features of Salesforce for Nonprofits
- Getting Started with Salesforce for Nonprofits
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is one of the world’s leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. They can help your marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, and IT teams work together from anywhere in the world. The aim of the Salesforce platform is to help keep your customers happy everywhere.
40,000 of Salesforce’s 1.5 million customers are nonprofits. Most of these customers use the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). NPSP is the foundation of Salesforce for nonprofits. With NPSP, nonprofits can easily manage their donors, volunteers, and grantees (all their supporters and their information) in one place.
5 Top Uses for Salesforce NPSP
Fundraising
With Salesforce, you can have one single platform to manage all of your fundraising. This helps you easily capture all of your supporter information in one place, in order to build a strong relationship with a donor. You will have data and insights on fundraising that helps you make reliable decisions.
Salesforce and NPSP enable you to streamline how you identify, cultivate, solicit, and steward major donors. These are just a few of the ways Salesforce can help with fundraising, and it pays off! Salesforce for nonprofits has reported a 130% increase in total online giving.
Marketing and Engagement
Salesforce helps you connect with more people across more channels to power more impact. You’ll be able to easily measure the impact of different communication efforts, empowering you to know your community better and engage them with what they want. This will ultimately lead to a better likelihood of accomplishing your mission, and also save you some time in the process!
Program Management
With Salesforce you can have a unified view of relationships and programs. This way, you can deliver better services to those who participate by understanding the unique needs of the program. You will also be able to create better experiences for your volunteers, and easily show the impact of your program to the world.
Grantmaking
Writing grants is essential for nonprofits looking to fund their mission. But it can be very complicated. Luckily, Salesforce makes it easier. With NPSP, you can manage the full grantmaking lifecycle in one place, know your stakeholders, and easily see the outcomes of your grant and share them. No more struggling to wrangle data across five different departments for your impact report!
Nonprofit Operations
Salesforce will be useful for everyone in your nonprofit, including the IT and Operations teams. With NPSP, you can unify all of your nonprofit data, automate data across apps, and safeguard and monitor your data.
4 Great Features of Salesforce for Nonprofits
1. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is an all-in-one CRM platform for nonprofits. It facilitates fundraising, program management, grant management, marketing, and of course, donor management. You get to measure, track, and update data across all aspects of nonprofit operations and management. The Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud enables your nonprofit to drive growth and success through data.
Nonprofits can create accounts for donors, businesses, grantees, volunteers, and other organizations on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. Then add contact information, including addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. You can also add social media information and track online donor responses. All this data can be accessed by your team from anywhere. You’ll have a visual report of donation history, relevant notes, and other documents.
Donor records can be converted to different languages, time zones, or currencies depending on the user that views the item. Nonprofits can also create relationships between records, allowing them to understand better how donors were introduced to their organization.
2. Elevate for fundraising
Elevate provides a modern giving experience that increases conversion with personalized Giving Pages that can be extended to donor experiences for self-service. You can use Salesforce’s mobile-friendly donation form to accept one-time and monthly donations. You can also manage all your payment data on Salesforce NPSP dashboards. In addition, nonprofits can manage recurring donations and donors in one place. You can also customize receipts and automate them for your donors.
3. Event management
Salesforce Event Management gets nonprofits started on the right foot by viewing where donors are located on a map. Organizations can then choose their event location based on that information. Nonprofits can choose event management apps on the Salesforce app store to get started. They offer nonprofit discounts and allow them to manage data from anywhere and view real-time updates as guests check in.
Nonprofits can include mobile registration and passbook tickets. These apps enable volunteers and staff to search donor data quickly, collaborate on team documents, update donor records, and view and edit event schedules.
Guests can have online access to build and manage their evening agendas. Attendees can also share event pictures on social media and respond to surveys sent by your organization.
4. Reports
As a nonprofit leader, you often have to provide reports to answer questions from board members, volunteer groups, and major donors. Salesforce’s dashboards provide these details in a visual display that includes ticket sales, total event revenues, attendance, donors, donations, and survey responses.
Getting Started with Salesforce for Nonprofits
By now, you’re probably convinced that Salesforce could benefit your organization. But how do you get started? Are you worried about the learning curve or the time it will take to implement and manage your CRM?
You don’t have to be. At Soapbox Engage, we offer Salesforce Consulting Services. We can get your organization set up and running inside Salesforce. Our job is to customize your Salesforce CRM and online engagement tools for your unique needs to maximize your impact. If you want to get the most out of Salesforce and NPSP, entrusting a team of Salesforce experts and MVPs with your Salesforce instance is the way to go. With flexible packages designed to meet your needs and budget, we will have you slashing overhead and growing your org in no time!
Learn more about our implementation services and our support services for Salesforce.
Eager to get started? If you have questions or are interested in setting up a demo, contact us.
And there you have it! Now you have the information and should be ready to get started on your Salesforce journey.
If you’re still not sure about Salesforce, check out these resources:
- Powerful Salesforce Training for Nonprofits: Hiring a consultant will provide the most ease to your journey. But if you’d rather take a self-service approach to learning Salesforce, check out this blog post that features some great training.
- 6 Salesforce Apps Nonprofits Will Love: There are a lot of great Salesforce Apps out there. Here is a list of our top picks for nonprofits.
- Salesforce Event Registration Apps: 10 Key Considerations: Is event registration and management one of the more frustrating aspects of your work? Check out this post for details on how the Salesforce Event Registration App can make your event registration easier and less stressful.
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