What Can Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Do For Nonprofits?

As a nonprofit, you understand the value of using a good CRM to nurture your contacts and grow your organization. When using a CRM like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, it’s important that it’s set up properly and all your data is uploaded and connected correctly. Maybe you’ve even run into a situation where you’ve wanted to do something in your CRM and you came across some roadblocks. What should you do? Being that we’ve worked with customizable platforms like Salesforce for many years, we’ve helped countless nonprofits answer questions like these. Because Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is a multi-level completely customizable platform the possibilities it provides nonprofits are endless.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud?

If you use Nonprofit Cloud you will not only have access to use the platform but also the Power of Us Program. This program is made up of a community of other nonprofits. This community provides a set of tools that will help you on your way. The Power of Us is also where you can apply to get 10 free licenses a year.

Read on to find out more about how Nonprofit Cloud’s toolbox can help your organization. Below we will outline each tool and what it can do for you.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Program Management?

The first tool is Program Management. It was designed to help your organization streamline your nonprofit’s case management processes. It can do everything from case management tracking and reporting to helping improve client and program management services. Some of the practical applications you’ll be able to do out of the box are being able to track outstanding tasks and client needs, understand the client journey, record all your client notes in an easy to find way, deliver client assessments, analyze insights that matter and more.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack?

In a nutshell, Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack NPSP is an application that can be installed on top of the Salesforce platform to provide specific donor management functionality. With the out of the box platform, you’ll be able to track donors’ donations and certain types of volunteer data. You can use this donor management solution to track your organization’s fundraising leads, to do prospect research, track other aspects of your fundraising campaigns and more. When it comes to reporting, NPSP provides donation data aggregation and roll-up reporting functionality like no other CRM out there. With individual donor profiles and 360-degree campaign views, it’s easier to analyze your successes, fine-tune your strategies, and identify new stewardship opportunities.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Marketing & Engagement?

Salesforce Nonprofit Marketing & Engagement tool is designed to help you connect with your donors, clients, and partners every step of the way. These tools are functions of Marketing Cloud & Social Studio. If you purchase Marketing cloud, there is an abundance of other powerful tools you’ll have access to. Inside the Nonprofit Marketing & Engagement tool, you’ll be able to turn interactions with your organization into data you can use. From creating targeted triggered email campaigns to building tailored journeys to coming up with a plan to get more engagement on social media- this tool can do it all. Not to mention you’ll get access to a marketing analytics suite that can help you turn your efforts into actionable results for your organization.

Is Nonprofit Cloud free?

Salesforce offers grants of up to 10 licenses for qualifying organizations through their Power of Us program. Even though Nonprofit Cloud can be offered free of charge if you qualify, to use the tool to its fullest potential you will need to customize the platform to meet your organization’s needs. Do know that this process could take some upfront time and cost, but it can pay off immensely in the long run if done correctly.  

Nonprofit Cloud Implementation

As you can see Nonprofit Success Cloud at its core has a lot of helpful out of the box features. With all of the capabilities the platform offers from donor management functionality with NPSP to case management with program management to optimize your marketing with the marketing & engagement tool, you might be wondering what more does my organization need? To maximize Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, you’ll need to expand its functionality and tailor its solutions to work for your nonprofit.

What are some of the ways to customize Nonprofit Cloud during the implementation process?

Custom fields & Field Labels: Nonprofit Cloud comes out of box with a wide variety of relevant information for donation and constituent management, however, some of the fields may not directly line up with your institutional language.  Fortunately, it is very easy to hide, change, or add individual fields to suit your needs.  Hiding a field doesn’t necessarily remove it forever, so if it’s something you may not track now but want to in the future, the field can easily be made visible again. Changing a field’s label is also possible, and this type of change does not affect the functions of the platform when doing so.

Data Management & Cleansing: Salesforce with NPSP provides a single place to store and manage your organizational data, including donation records, in-kind gifts, grants, constituent records, business and organizational affiliations, case histories, notes, attachments, and custom attributes you might want to store as well.  One of the most important success factors in a new implementation is the quality and cleanliness of the data that you import into Salesforce.  NPSP makes this as simple as possible with a set of import templates that are designed to allow for account, contact, and donation data to be standardized for import. However, the task of consolidating and cleaning data is one of the most important and often most difficult tasks to accomplish. This takes extra care and thought upfront but spending the right time on this ensures a clean and smoothly operating constituent management system.

Integration: One of the most powerful features in Salesforce is its ability to integrate with existing platforms and tools. Salesforce also offers programming interfaces that allow developers to utilize back end information in custom software such as mobile applications or websites. Maybe you have an accounting software you use that you want to tie with your donation reports. You’re able to customize Salesforce to integrate with your existing solutions. Note, if you use Outlook 365 or Gmail you’re also able to integrate with these. This can be a huge time saver when you’re sending tons of emails.

Email templates: If you send out a lot of emails it could help to have templates for all of your needs. Maybe you have a set of emails that you always send out with your campaigns and you don’t have the time to recreate the email design. You can customize your organization’s email templates in the way you want. Salesforce is a powerful marketing and communication tool, which becomes even more powerful with standardized messaging.  A good set of email templates will allow you to send curated emails direct to either individuals (such as with case updates, or donation acknowledgments) or to mass audiences (such as with invites to galas, donation campaign emails, or newsletters).  Email Templates can contain merge fields that populate based on the contact they’re being sent to. This means one template can appear individualized for thousands of people.

Roles & Permissions: Maybe you need to set admins roles and permissions for security purposes. Or you want one team to work in the tool in a specific way and another team to work in it differently? You’re able to configure the platform to work how you need it to.

Custom Reporting: Nonprofit Cloud reports provide helpful surface-level analysis. If you’re looking for a deeper approach you might need to build some custom reports. Not every organization will need to track the same metrics. You can create custom reports that are pre-generated to provide you all you need to track and optimize your NPO’s growth.

Automation: As a nonprofit, you’re sometimes short on time and staff. The power of automation can be like giving you extra time on a platter. For example, if someone gives your organization a gift under $10,000 a trigger can be set up to automatically send them an email. And if someone gives you a gift over $10,000 a task can be automatically generated to alert your team to call them. In addition, automation can help improve efficiencies by generating tasks and reminders for staff based on evaluated criteria or operational triggers so that staff do not have to constantly look for changes that happen in real-time.

Volunteer Management: While not part of the base NPSP package, Volunteer Management is a function that is common to many nonprofit organizations.  Fortunately, Salesforce offers an installable package that adds Volunteer Management features. Here you’re able to track volunteer contacts and other basic volunteer management. If you want to go more in-depth with volunteer management, you’ll want to add the Volunteers for Salesforce app to your platform. With this tool, you’ll be able to customize it to help run your organization’s volunteer program. This allows organizations to set up volunteer campaigns, add roles and volunteer opportunities, and allow for registration of a volunteer to those opportunities.

Applications and Extensions: For more sophisticated functional additions, Salesforce has the AppExchange which is a vast marketplace offering add-on solutions and packages that extend the functionality of Salesforce in numerous ways, including the ability to process donations, interface with third-party tools such as financial systems, electronic document “e-sign” systems, event management, peer to peer fundraising, and many more.

Getting Help with Nonprofit Cloud

In summary, using Nonprofit Cloud can help to maximize your organization’s growth. There are countless options available to you to make the platform work more efficiently for your organization. You may be feeling like this is a lot to wrap your head around but know there are plenty of resources available to you, no matter where you are in the process if you’re in need of some extra help.

When you get started on a project, it’s best to walk through a discovery phase. This will help your organization identify your project’s goals and outline what it will take to get you there. We’ve created a guide that will walk you through what you should be asking in the discovery process to make sure the rest of your project is set up for success. Download the guide below.