Soapbox Engage Blog

Sometimes, Salesforce and non-profit technology can seem so vast and confusing, the best way to sum up your feelings might look something like this photo from NPSP Day Washington DC.

The good news is that there's a large, open source community ready to share knowledge with you in a variety of ways. I'm gearing up for three NPSP Days in six days, where raw community knowledge comes together in-person. Online, our community has contributors around the world delivering code and documentation to help us all better understand how to use these tools for our organizations' needs.

With Dreamforce only a few weeks away, it's time to gather together and share new ways we can all contribute to our community's success. So if you're going to Dreamforce, hit that reply button and let me know. I've got some fun in store for my PUB Crawl friends at Dreamforce.

Until then, here's your well of knowledge for the week!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

To understand how best to acquire new donors, it is important to determine what methods have been most successful in doing so already. This task is precisely why the Campaigns object exists in Salesforce. With it, you can define an unlimited number of efforts and associate Donation records with those efforts. From direct mailings to peer-to-peer fundraising to email appeals to individual online donation forms to much more, creating Campaigns for each can help you track their results.

This step-by-step recipe is an ode to the power of Campaign, demonstrating how you can create a chart that shows new donor acquisition by Primary Campaign Source so you can understand what's working - and what's not - for your nonprofit.

For other new donor Salesforce recipes along with a discussion of donor acquisition strategies, watch our free webinar, Win New Donors this End-of-Year Fundraising Season.

Effectively comparing new donors acquired to previous supporters for the current year can yield valuable insight into the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts. With this step-by-step recipe, you can create a chart that shows new donor acquisition vs. previous donors cumulative by month for the current year as well as view data comparing donations between those groups.

For other new donor Salesforce recipes along with a discussion of donor acquisition strategies, watch our free webinar, Win New Donors this End-of-Year Fundraising Season.

This weekend, I was looking up from the base of the final climb up Yosemite's Half Dome and thought to myself, "this is probably pretty stupid". I geared up with a pair of gloves, and for 20 minutes, I was forced, by sheer gravity, to stop thinking about Salesforce best practices for handling accrual accounting and focus on not sliding off the granite.

When I reached the top, and finished kissing the ground, I had a chance to soak in the view from the rooftop of the valley. It was amazing, and it didn't require any Internet connection to make it happen (I checked).

We're living in this always-connected, cloud-run world, and sometimes, we miss the beauty around us. So, while you're diving into the knowledge sharing from the community this week, think about taking that small break your mind needs to recharge and refocus. If you're heading to Dreamforce in a few weeks, you'll need all the defragmented brain storage you can get.

Let's dive in, shall we?

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Successful new donor acquisition is one of the most challenging aspects of nonprofit fundraising. Key to success is a solid understanding of your current donor file so you can quantify past performance and set reasonable goals. With the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, you have a firm foundation for that understanding as well as the ability to further customize reporting to give a full picture of your donors. In this step-by-step recipe, we'll create a chart that shows new donor acquisition cumulative by month for the last five years as well as toss in some helpful additional metrics.

For a full rundown of other new donor Salesforce recipes along with a presentation of new donor acquisition strategies, watch our free webinar, Win New Donors this End-of-Year Fundraising Season.

New donor acquisition can feel like a riddle, wrapped in a conundrum, tucked inside a big, fat fundraising target. And, while current donors are difficult to retain, new donors can be exceptionally more difficult to find. Sadly, you can’t simply expect new donors to fall in your lap with their wallets open.

Besides, that would be weird. Also, a tad awkward.

For new donor acquisition, you need a goal and a plan to ensure success.

It’s officially autumn in Washington DC, but the heat certainly makes it feel like the middle of July. That, coupled with the growing lines at my nearby coffee shop for anything pumpkin related, has me thoroughly confused as to the season.

Meanwhile, a group of us braved the heat in DC and enjoyed the second edition of the NPSP Day Washington DC, our first NPSP Day redux. Successful community engagement (and burritos) in the shadow of the US capitol certainly provided a shining moment in DC.

To top off the changing of the seasons, the non-profit community just proudly added a new handful of gurus to the Salesforce MVP mix! So, without further ado, let's keep this knowledge sharing flowing. Grab an iced (pumpkin spice?) latte, and enjoy this week’s PUB Crawl.

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Donor retention can be as notoriously challenging as it is vital for nonprofits. The good news, though, is that doesn’t have to be! Here are twelve simple ideas that keep givers giving and vault donor retention:

NPSP Sprint Baltimore 2017

I need to apologize to Kevin Bromer.

Kevin is the Vice President of Product Delivery at Salesforce.org. He's also the father of the Nonprofit Success Pack. We chatted between sessions at the NPSP Community Sprint in Baltimore this March. I was participating in a breakout group led by Megan Himan of BrightStep Partners and Dean Graham of Wombat Works tackling issues around User Defined Rollups in the NPSP when I learned about a limitation. I told Kevin in no uncertain terms that this limitation of User Defined Rollups made them virtually useless.

I was wrong.

After a few weeks on the road, it was great to wrap it all up with a day networking with the NPSP open source community in Boston last Friday. Working under the gazing eyes of President Roosevelt and other gorgeous artwork, Harvard put on a great show!

With another round of empowered community contributors joining the NPSP Day movement, I'm excited to bring the energy back to Washington DC tomorrow for our first repeat city. After all the long-distance travel for me recently, it's fitting that the commute will be just two blocks tomorrow!

If you can't join us in DC tomorrow, let me nourish your brain with a tall glass of Salesforce community knowledge. Order's up!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Donor retention is a supremely vital metric by which fundraisers determine success. Visualizing progress toward an organization's goal throughout the year with the proper context is critical to understanding your own donor retention. In this recipe, we roll up our sleeves to walk you through - step-by-step - the creation of a custom Report in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack that will chart both that progress and that context.

For a full breakdown of other donor retention Salesforce recipes as well as a presentation of proven donor retention fundraising strategy, watch our webinar, Achieve Dynamite Donor Retention with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. A more productive 45 minutes focused on fundraising and the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, you will not find.

After cleaning up all of the confetti post-PUB Crawl 100, I decided I needed to go for a marathon run. That was a ridiculous idea. The photo below is from the run. Really. Maybe just celebrating with a bottle of champagne could have been a better idea.

As I'm trying to act like my new limp is just a cool new stride, it seems that the Salesforce community went into overdrive for this week's content. At the same time, I'm gearing up for NPSP Day Boston this Friday, and NPSP Day Washington DC next week, so I'm going to hobble out of your way and deliver one of the biggest PUB Crawl editions ever.

So, sit back, relax, and check out all the goodness from the community!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Two essential metrics for measuring nonprofit fundraising success are a nonprofit's donor retention rate and donor churn rate. In this step-by-step recipe, we'll share a quick and easy way to calculate these vital statistics in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. In addition, we'll show you how to compare your current rates to your annual goal. What's more, we'll offer a method for dynamically calculating the number of retained donors needed to reach your annual goal, thereby providing a countdown to success for your development team to monitor.

For more on donor retention, watch our free webinar, Achieve Dynamite Donor Retention with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. We'll share key strategies for boosting donor retention as well as additional Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack recipes for informing and motivating success.

With this week’s issue, the PUB Crawl marks 100 straight editions! Whether travel or holiday or rain or sleet or dark of night, for 100 consecutive weeks without fail, the PUB Crawl has delivered its friendly, informative weekly digest of the best of the Power of Us Hub to the inboxes of busy people wanting to stay in the nonprofit Salesforce know.

To honor this century mark, we’ve combed our email archives to deliver the following top 25 posts shared over the course of those 100 weeks. Enjoy the walk down memory lane!

Cue the fireworks, it’s the 100th edition of the PUB Crawl! That's right, for 100 consecutive weeks, Salesforce knowledge has been pouring into the inboxes of nonprofiteers around the globe. Sometimes it arrives as a nightcap read, other times it arrives as you're sipping your first cup of coffee. I'm just keeping you on your toes. Regardless of when it's delivered, the goal is the same: increasing your ability to use Salesforce effectively.

My simple reason for starting the PUB Crawl was to ensure we heard directly from those on the frontline delivering knowledge. I wanted to create a reliable aggregator of insight where I could highlight and celebrate incredible individuals and their contributions to the community.

As we cross this milestone together, I hope you enjoy this week's content and wish for it to inspire you to share your gift of knowledge with others. At Dreamforce, a few of us in the ecosystem will be sharing an initiative that will continue to drive innovation and knowledge sharing within our community through a new distributed model of collaboration. I can't wait to see what we can all build together as a grassroots community in service to each other.

In the meantime, a sincere "gracias" to all of you who have been subscribers of the PUB Crawl, be it since yesterday or 2015. I'll keep rolling the PUB Crawl off the assembly line every Monday so long as you keep creating fantastic content in the Hub. Deal?

Alright, grab a beverage of your choosing and enjoy this week's edition of the PUB Crawl!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

The cues are all around you. Kids are back in school. The Labor Day holiday is here. And the calendar begins its string of months ending in “...ber” as if to subliminally prepare your skin for the shock of seasonal cold ahead.

All of these cues signal that you’re in the backstretch of the fundraising year when the marathon pace picks up and you gather yourself for the final push. You can vaguely see the finish line ahead, Father Time and Baby New Year holding each side of the tape. And the strides in between here and there are the remaining opportunities you have to convince those who donated last year to donate this year.

Excellent donor retention is an essential element of successful fundraising. But how do you keep donors donating?

It's hard to believe that I've been writing these emails for 99 weeks in a row. It's even more incredible to think many of you have been reading these since the beginning. I can only imagine it's because of the incredibly witty and thought provoking photos I use to open the PUB Crawl. Or their silliness. I bet it's the latter.

I mean, take this photo for instance. It encapsulates some of the best of the NPSP community for me in one image. That's Tim Lockie directing me forward via caterpillar at NPSP Day Bozeman, of course. It's a key value of mine in action: taking the work we do for those we serve seriously (leading the community at an NPSP Day), while doing our best not to take ourselves too seriously (everything else about this photo except Tim's slick style, which is awesomely serious).

So, before we bid adieu to summer here on the northern side of the globe, sit back with an iced drink of your choosing (yes, it's too early for pumpkin flavored anything, friends) and think about what keeps you energized and engaged in this community while enjoying this week’s glass of knowledge. Cheers!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

This week's PUB Crawl is slightly delayed due to expected worldwide Internet outage I assumed would happen when the eclipse passed through the US. Thankfully, people around the North America were able to gleefully post kinda dusk looking skies on social media while tending to sore eyes.

Oh, and a group of awesome NPSP community members rocked out in Montana (see below).

This past week of knowledge from the Power of Us Hub might be a little lightweight, but that's probably because folks are gearing up for NPSP Day events across two continents in the next few weeks. So, let's dive in!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

With our continued focus this month on avoiding fundraiser burnout, we were thrilled to chat with Ashima Saigal, Founder of Soapbox Engage Partner Database Sherpa, on how mindfulness and meditation inform her Salesforce work with nonprofits and what insight they can offer fundraisers.

For more on self-care and ensuring long-term success as a fundraiser, watch our free webinar, How to Raise More Money Without Burning Out, with special guest presenter Beth Kanter.

Last week was a blur of activity in our Salesforce non-profit community, with Chicago playing host to the NPSP Community Sprint, Midwest Dreamin', and WITness Success. I even witnessed one of the greatest NPSP Weather Reports ever (and you can see my other NPSP Sprint photos, too)! It's clear that there's strength in the Salesforce community's leadership!

From the success of NPSP Community Sprint, I'm in Bozeman, Montana today, gearing up for the inaugural NPSP Day Bozeman. With the recent string of Amsterdam, London, and New York, the local Bozeman community has put itself on equal footing, with the exception of its stunning mountain views!

So, put on your hiking shoes, grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and join me for the PUB Crawl from big sky country!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!