Soapbox Engage Blog

Having the right tools can make all the difference in both the end results of fundraising campaigns as well as the morale of the fundraiser. And the importance of morale shouldn't be underestimated. As we noted in a recent blog post, the average tenure for a fundraiser is just 16 months. Burnout plays a big part in that stat.

The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack offers a powerful platform for fundraising out-of-the-box along with an immense ability to further customize that platform to meet your own needs. Over the last several months, we've highlighted a number of ways to do so. As summer nears a close and we look toward the end-of-year giving season, we offer this list of 10 how-to recipes to make your job as a fundraiser easier and your work more effective. Each range in the time required to implement. Some require as few as 15 minutes. Some a little over an hour. Feel free to tackle one or two in your own Salesforce instance to prepare your nonprofit for the end-of-year fundraising sprint.

And, to prepare yourself for that fundraising sprint, watch our free webinar, How to Raise More Money Without Burning Out, with special guest presenter Beth Kanter. We discuss signs of burnout and strategies for self-care and organizational culture that promotes it - along with some other Salesforce-specific suggestions for staying fresh as a fundraiser.

As part of our focus this month on avoiding fundraiser burnout and succeeding long-term, we had the pleasure of chatting with Beth Zimmerman, Founder and Executive Director of Pets for Patriots, on what keeps her fresh and focused on the success of her organization's mission.

For more on 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.

It's only fitting that while I write this week's PUB Crawl the day before the NPSP Community Sprint here in Chicago, the higher education community just celebrated their inaugural HEDA Sprint. It goes to show you that the open source spark of energy knows no boundaries!

As we gear up for two days of bountiful community contributions, I took a chance to tune out for a bit and watch the clouds pass by as I flew this morning. I thought about our community's history.

It's amazing to think that the NPSP community, which started out of the pot with open source roots, a guy wearing rainbow colored pants, engineers wearing sweatshirts with bicycles on them and flip flops, and contributors essentially blindly walking into Salesforce walls, became the non-profit solution for one of the world's largest tech companies. It speaks volumes to what dedicated individuals, and a supportive community, can achieve when we say, "there's a need, and there's a passion, so let's build it."

If you're in Chicago this week for the sprint, I'm honored to have a chance to work alongside y'all this week. And if you're working hard for the greater good this week in the office, I tip my hat to you. Here's one more glassful of knowledge before we dive in to a busy week. Let's do this, community!

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

Nonprofit fundraisers are magical creatures. Through a mixture of science and art, they conjure connections between individuals’ better desires and nonprofit missions to spark change in the world. Magical, I tell ya.

Fundraisers are also a passionate, determined breed. Studies show that fundraisers work an average of five to twelve hours of overtime each week. Again. And again. And again. Those hours get longer as the days get shorter when the holidays approach. And, year after year, the job gets yet more challenging as program beneficiaries’ needs grow and nonprofit budgets increase.

Magical, passionate and determined, though they may be, nonprofit fundraisers are often bright stars that burnout fast. The average tenure for a fundraiser is just 16 months. This fact is not only deeply felt by the individual fundraisers but by the nonprofit sector as a whole. High turnover rates combine with struggles in finding qualified candidates to result in long-term vacancies in development positions. Those empty development desks present serious challenges to nonprofits and their missions.

It's incredible to think that last week, a group of people met together in DC and did something extremely productive. I joined a group of non-profit executives and Salesforce.org employees for Expedition Impact, a fantastic new style of event for Salesforce that was less about Salesforce products and more about providing a forum for non-profit best practices.

I think in that photo above, one of the new NPSP product managers, Shelly Erceg, is saying, "Ryan, I really like where you mind is for the mapping of all taquerias near our community members, but I think it might be slightly out of scope...maybe it's a perfect community software contribution instead?" I feigned happiness, but inside, was devastated.

The upside, of course, is the chance to see my dream come to reality at the upcoming NPSP Community Sprint in Chicago next week! I'll be reporting live-ish from the venue, so follow me on Twitter to keep up-to-date on everything #NPSPsprint related. Including the burrito locator app. Meanwhile, enjoy your weekly pour of Salesforce knowledge!

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

When summer hits DC, it's pretty obvious. Just walking down the street in the middle of the day is a task that makes you feel you just stepped out of a steam room. So smart locals with visiting guests do their memorials tour late at night, when the temperature moves from "ridiculously hot and humid" to "still hot and humid". And that's just what I did late last night. Walking through the Martin Luther King Jr memorial, I came across the following engraving.

Reading this, I couldn't help but think about our community. So many here have focused their careers on serving the public to help move the needle of social justice. Today, we have a great opportunities to contribute to our non-profit Salesforce community, be it attending an NPSP Day or training others in your organization to leverage technology to increase impact.

When you run into a Salesforce wall, or come across a challenge that seems a bit insurmountable with Lightning (just saying!), remember that we're all in this together, and we're all doing our part to contribute to a better society. Keep on keeping on!

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

Since our last gathering, I've become wiser (aged), learned new grilling techniques (stop peeking and leave the lid closed), and saw a video that pretty much made my Salesforce week (Lightning is getting another makeover...see below). So, I'm calling that a pretty productive week.

For my readers in the US who were on vacation, welcome back to a full work week. Let's get you back into the swing of things with a review of everything you missed while you were out. For all the rest of you, shhh, don't tell those vacationers about the fun Slip 'N Slide and BBQ party we all had in the PUB.

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

#GivingTuesday takes place on November 28th this year and wise nonprofits are already planning strategies to leverage this massive day of giving. For 2017, six key factors are conspiring to make this the perfect year for peer-to-peer fundraising - the act of your supporters asking their own community for donations on your behalf - to be a powerful addition for your nonprofit’s strategy.

Here’s why:

2016 was a high watermark for donations to nonprofits with a massive flood of dollars given in the final weeks of the year. This torrent of generosity was attributed to a number of expected factors: an economy continuing its recovery, the natural spike in donations at the end of the year, and a strong #GivingTuesday response. What was not widely expected was the outcome of the presidential election and the many in the body politic who chose to reach for their wallets to voice their protest of the incoming administration of President Donald Trump.

Any fundraising professional is familiar with the dramatic scale of #GivingTuesday. $177,000,000 raised online from 1,640,000 individual gifts in 2016 alone. All on one day. 24 mere hours. And that one day, branded just five short years ago, is now the de facto start of the end-of-year giving season.

As hard as it is to believe, #GivingTuesday is fewer than five months away. Smart nonprofits are already planning how they'll leverage this massive day of giving. A critical piece of that strategy is segmenting their donor lists so they can craft appropriate individualized appeals to donors and would-be fundraising ambassadors. One element of that segmentation is determining who gave to your organization during last year's end-of-year giving season. In this step-by-step recipe, we'll share one way to do this using User Defined Rollups in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.

For more on extending the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack for Giving Tuesday appeals along with savvy fundraising strategy, watch our free webinar, Seize #GivingTuesday Success with Fundraising Wisdom and Salesforce .

I'm always excited to see the amount of knowledge that can be delivered when you gather 60 strangers in a room, hand them stickies, markers, coffee...and maybe a bit of cruise captaining. With little more clue than "there will be lunch and coffee" on the official agenda, a new group of open source community contributors joined the worldwide NPSP Day movement in New York on Friday, marking the 12th convening in 12 months. We pretty much rocked the Big Apple with Salesforce non-profit knowledge.

Watching technology consumers turn into empowered contributors makes for a great highlight reel at the end of a week. So as look at our photos from NPSP Day, and get settled in San Francisco for the TrailheadX conference this week, let's get caught up on the latest and greatest happenings in the Power of Us Hub, shall we?

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

DaizyLogik, a great group of folks creating custom solutions that tailor Salesforce for nonprofits, is the latest firm to join the Soapbox Engage Partner Program.

We're just a few days away from the next NPSP Day in New York, and I can't wait to jump right back into the unconference mix here in the US after the NPSP Day tour took a two-stop jaunt overseas.

Community events like these not only increase knowledge, but open our minds to a more creative position. They give us a chance to exit the day-to-day work and focus on exploring new opportunities. As of yet, we haven't had a Play-Doh breakout (soon, maybe?), but just working together as a community to solve common challenges, we've created some pretty innovative ideas.

To make the countdown to Friday a bit easier, I've done my best to collect one of the largest set of Power of Us Hub posts. So, find a cozy spot, sit back, and indulge in this week's content roundup.

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

Nothing can cause more confusion between your finance and fundraising departments than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requirements for donation acknowledgements. Never fear! We're here to shed a light on what often feels like a murky area.

The right thank you is essential to a nonprofit expressing exceptional gratitude and developing long-term relationships with donors. Below is a little inspiration from two organizations that get it right to help your creative juices flow for your next thank you letter or email.

We were all taught to say “thank you” when given a gift. Nonprofits are no different. Expressing timely and proper gratitude to donors when they make a gift to your organization is not only the right thing to do, it’s also key to cultivating sustaining donors and funding your mission.

The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) provides a straightforward way to say thanks with a handy Email Acknowledgement button that triggers an automated email for one or multiple donations at a time. The beauty of the button is its simplicity with its use of a single email template with merge fields of your choice and letterhead you can customize to a degree. Whether that handy button and its simplicity is right for your organization depends on a few factors we’ll discuss below.

The opportunities to contribute to the increasing impact in our Salesforce non-profit world continue to grow. This week, I'm excited to highlight the great work of the NPSP Videography Team. They're a group of volunteers that wanted to see more organizations benefit from the Engagement Plans and Levels functionality in the NPSP, and delivered fantastic videos to make them more useful. All this without formal training in software video training, but a lot of heart and background in video to make an awesome end-product.

So while you're enjoying a tall glass of knowledge from the PUB Crawl this week, consider what unique talents you might have, and how you can bring those talents to our community to help us all continue to move the needle in the right direction.

Now, here's filled-to-the-top glass of Salesforce knowledge!

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

It might be the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere, but you wouldn't think it was vacation time in Salesforce world. As the Salesforce Summer 17 release rolls out this week, admins everywhere are digging into the newest features while wiggling toes into the sand.

Summer here in DC means more softball, humidity, and likely a pretty unforgettable week of politics. So while the world feels like it's gearing up for an endless news cycle, I'm going to pry myself away from the TV and cozy up to 500 pages of release notes. In spite of what we see on the TV these days of a divided world, the Power of Us Hub continues to be a the prime example of how we're better when we collaborate to solve tough challenges.

So turn off your TV news channel of choice, take a deep breath, and let's dive into some community goodness.

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

Repeat donors are essential to successful fundraising efforts. They can also be notoriously difficult to come by, and are becoming more so. Between 2008 and 2015, donor retention across the nonprofit sector declined 8%. Overall, just 45% of donors come back and give again to an organization in the year after a gift. That number becomes even starker when looking at just first time donors who give again only 23% of the time.

What’s more, post-election realities have affected giving in ways that require nonprofits to innovate in their fundraising efforts. Lynne Wester, famed donor relations expert noted in her blog recently:

“With a finite amount of charitable giving and an ever increasing number of nonprofits, the dollars simply cannot stretch equitably to everyone. Meaning that if one nonprofit experiences a windfall, like the ACLU raising $24 million dollars in one weekend, six times its yearly totals, that this money comes from another nonprofit's bottom line.”

To compete, you must set yourself apart in a sea of nonprofits. One powerful way of doing so is by expressing exceptional gratitude.