Salesforce offers nonprofits two powerful solutions to manage donors, measure fundraising performance, and track donor communications. Read this guide to learn how can you best use Salesforce for your nonprofit and how Donorbox can help!
Salesforce has been around for years, but many nonprofits don’t know how to take full advantage of everything this powerful CRM has to offer – or don’t want to invest the funds required to use it.
This article will break down precisely what Salesforce is, how Salesforce NPSP (Nonprofit Success Pack) and Nonprofit Cloud work, what features both options include, and how you can use Salesforce to raise more funds for your organization.
Salesforce is one of the world’s leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This platform can help your marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, and IT teams work in tandem from anywhere in the world.
Easily create dashboards and reports to monitor every aspect of your fundraising and relationship-building. Plus, track your program engagement and effectiveness to ensure you’re working toward your mission.
Ultimately, Salesforce streamlines your workflow and helps you build stronger, lasting relationships with your supporters.
Both of Salesforce’s solutions for nonprofits provide flexible and powerful tools to help nonprofits manage their donors, volunteers, ticket buyers, and grantees all in one place.
Nonprofit Success Pack includes features that help customize Salesforce specifically for nonprofit use. Since it is a customizable and flexible solution, it sometimes requires more technical know-how than other solutions. It was the first nonprofit-focused solution Salesforce offered and thousands of organizations use it. While it has great features for nonprofits, some functionality is limited when compared to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
As Salesforce’s newest standalone, cloud-based solution for nonprofits, Nonprofit Cloud provides comprehensive fundraising, marketing, and program operation functionality. Plus, track and forecast your outcomes with greater ease and more accessibility for your entire team. Because Nonprofit Cloud is a complete solution, organizations can spend less time setting the tool up and more time enjoying the benefits.
Nonprofit Success Pack is a free and open-source application on Salesforce AppExchange.
Nonprofit Cloud costs $60/month per user for Enterprise and $100/month per user for Unlimited. Nonprofits can receive 10 free licenses through Salesforce’s Power of Us Program.
Learn more about pricing here.
The Salesforce donor database is entirely customizable, so nonprofits can easily add custom fields, objects, relationships, and other elements to the Salesforce CRM platform. Web-to-lead automatically converts new donations into new donor profiles.
You’ll never need to worry about the time-consuming process of updating your donor database with online donations. The Salesforce donor database can also seamlessly integrate with online fundraising platforms like Donorbox. You can easily customize your field mappings and push the essential donor and campaign data to Salesforce automatically.
Salesforce for Nonprofits comes with 70+ industry reports and dashboards for nonprofits. It also provides an organized system that anyone can understand. Nonprofits can share these reports with and personalize dashboards for staff, volunteers, and the board.
Instead of sharing the same information with all team members, nonprofits can customize their dashboards and keep everyone working on their projects. Organizations can also schedule automatic email responses when an individual or team needs to be updated.
Salesforce for Nonprofits has a program management module that helps track programs and services. Nonprofits can also segment participants into different groups based on available filters like season, class, funders, etc. If nonprofits have any recurring services, they can easily set them up on the tool and track them efficiently.
Your supporters’ data can be segmented and used for creating customized content on the Salesforce marketing cloud. You can then use the pre-built email templates to send this content as personalized emails to your supporters.
Salesforce’s 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.
As you continue planning your event, last year’s event information will help you along the way. You can collect details on which activities encouraged more participation and which ticket type sold best. You can use this information to make necessary changes, raise more funds, and strengthen donor relationships.
Salesforce Elevate is an integrated fundraising solution for U.S. nonprofit organizations. 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 dashboards. In addition, nonprofits can manage recurring donations and donors in one place. You can also customize receipts and automate them for your donors.
Salesforce for Nonprofits includes several features to help nonprofits market events and fundraising campaigns efficiently.
Email campaigns are still one of the best-used marketing techniques for nonprofits. Organizations can get pre-built email templates and customize them further to include the nonprofit’s logo and mission statement. Staff, board members, and volunteers can use these templates to ensure your organization’s branding remains the same. Nonprofits can then send personalized emails based on updated and segmented donor information and track the click-through and open rates for each campaign.
Social media is another popular marketing option for nonprofits. Organizations can use Salesforce to store donor social media information and track any online interactions.
Nonprofits can also use Salesforce to organize and track responses from direct mail campaigns.
Nonprofits must create 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.
Here are a few ways nonprofits can use dashboards to keep everyone updated:
Accounting Subledger makes work easy for both your fundraising and accounting teams. You can sync your fundraising data with an accounting system to save significant time and money you spend otherwise. This feature comes with out-of-the-box templates used on popular accounting systems like Blackbaud Financial Edge, Quickbooks, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Workday, and more. The user interface is simple and intuitive to help your teams track gifts, pledges, and revenue information in the easiest way possible.
AppExchange is the Salesforce app store. For nonprofits, however, Salesforce has listed a separate list of apps to benefit from. These apps are categorized into sections like consulting, fundraising, management apps, popular, and sponsored. Many of these apps are free and can help boost your nonprofit fundraising, management, and growth.
Donorbox has helped over 80,000 organizations raise more than $2 billion with comprehensive and easy-to-use fundraising tools. Multi-step donation forms optimized for mobile use, powerful event ticketing, in-person giving with the Donorbox Live™ Kiosk app, and more can help you power up your mission.
What’s even more powerful? Combining Donorbox with Salesforce! Donorbox’s integration with Salesforce helps you connect your Nonprofit Success Pack or Nonprofit Cloud account with your Donorbox account, allowing all donor and donation data to flow seamlessly into your CRM.
Learn more about this integration, including how to set it up, in this blog.
Launch Donorbox + Salesforce Today
Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack and Nonprofit Cloud have more than enough features to gauge your fundraising performance, perform donor management, simplify communications, and manage operations for your nonprofit.
On top of that, Donorbox’s partnership with Salesforce provides nonprofits a unique opportunity to try out this service while also ensuring steady income streams and the best donation experience for themselves and their supporters.
Check out Donorbox’s other simple-to-use and efficient features and sign up today!
To give your fundraising and nonprofit management a boost with tips and resources from Donorbox, visit our Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter for a curated delivery of blog content to your inbox every month!
If you have all the documentation and details ready with you to apply for the Power of Us program, you should hear back from the respective team of Salesforce in about two to three weeks. After that, it shouldn’t take a long time for you to get started.
You can sign up for a free trial of Nonprofit Success Pack or Nonprofit Cloud and start setting up your account right away!
First, sign up for a free trial of Nonprofit Success Pack or Nonprofit Cloud. If you are a nonprofit organization, you should then apply for the Power of Us program to receive 10 free users.
Nonprofits can use the Salesforce CRM system to collect and store donor information and put it to work for events, fundraising campaigns, donor communications, financial and accounting systems, and more. It helps nonprofits build better and stronger relationships with supporters, keep track of programming, and forecast fundraising needs.
Salesforce provides training with many of its packages. If your package does not include training, free courses are available on Udemy and Trailhead.
Nonprofit Cloud is a low-code solution. Because NPSP is so customizable, it requires more technical know-how, including some coding.
Kristine Ensor is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience working with local and international nonprofits. As a nonprofit professional she has specialized in fundraising, marketing, event planning, volunteer management, and board development.
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Kristine Ensor