We recently shared a how-to recipe for creating a Next Ask Amount formula field on the Contact record in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. Next, we tossed in twelve different versions of that formula to give you options. Now we take this same concept and extend the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack by creating a Next Recurring Ask Amount field to convert one-time donors into sustaining supporters.

For a deeper dive into strategy, Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack tactics, and details on operationalizing your personalized ask using Pardot or the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, watch our recorded webinar, Making the Right Fundraising Ask: When, How and How Much.

You did it. You crafted a compelling appeal with a great story that is sure to inspire action from your recipients. But you are no novice. You know that the wrong ask amount can cause even a great appeal to fall flat and donation response rates to plummet. Situations where major donors are asked for a mere $25 are the stuff of nightmares. And asking for too much from a given donor can inspire eye rolls and opt outs faster than you can click a mouse.

In this day and age, you need to personalize even this part of the fundraising process. But how?

Return on Investment, Acquisition Rate, Conversion Rate, oh my! These and so many more fundraising statistics are helpful in their own way, dear nonprofit fundraiser, but so many can tempt one into simple snapshots of the past, leading to short-sightedness in the future. How can one avoid the temptation of the myopic and rejoice in clear-eyed, future-focused fundraising success?

Lifetime Value. (Cue angel choir).

Lifetime Value (LTV) transforms all of the donations you receive and the money spent acquiring them into a single, powerful number. That number can predict the future and, more importantly, grant the foresight to inform strategy so you can change that future, and raise more money at less cost to do more good.

But how does Lifetime Value help inform, and how do you find that powerful number for your own organization?

We have a mantra that guides the development of our online engagement apps when integrating with Salesforce: stay true to the core. We do everything we can to leverage the functionality and data model inherent in Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), only creating something new when necessary. This mantra means that Soapbox's integrations are designed to work with Recurring Donations, Opportunities/Donations, Payments, Campaigns, each NPSP Account model and a host of other elements that comprise Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack. It also means that data winds up where the NPSP expects it to wind up.

There are a lot of reasons why we do this. And, with the release of NPSP Version 3.90, there are 71 more!

An amazing team of nonprofit experts in the Salesforce.org community just dropped 67 new Reports and 4 new Dashboards into the NPSP. They cover a dizzying array of common nonprofit scenarios across an insane number of aspects of the NPSP. And, since Soapbox places data where it's expected, they immediately empower our users to get even more out of Salesforce with their reporting and data analytics might.

Charitable donations are at record highs in the United States these days. The trend started in 2015, strengthened in 2016, and hit fever pitch with the election and inauguration. Sustainability of this historically high giving is in doubt, however, and savvy nonprofits are strategizing how they can both capture the moment and do so in a way that sustains them through uncertain times ahead.

Chief among these strategies should be a laser focus on amping up monthly donations that can keep on keeping on even if times get tough. But how?