How and Why to Use Salesforce for Nonprofits?

According to stats Salesforce provides on their website, over 50,000 companies from the total 150,000 using Salesforce are nonprofits. And while we’ve already discussed the reasons why nonprofits need CRM systems in general, we haven’t covered the whys of them adopting Salesforce.

So, here we are with our short but, we hope, quite a comprehensive guide on what, how, and why Salesforce products are a great choice for nonprofit companies.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

If you’ve been reading our blog for some time, you might have seen this product in our list of Salesforce Clouds. So, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is a set of tools and solutions for nonprofit companies to manage their organization and process data faster, easier, and simply better.

Purchasing a Nonprofit Cloud license can cover your basic needs, like keeping track of donors, monitoring your volunteers, managing programs, and fundraising.

Nonprofit Success Pack

Nonprofit Success Pack, or NPSP, is a ready-to-use solution for nonprofit organizations, which is open-source, free of charge, contains different managed packages, and is a part of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Enterprise Edition. It used to be called Nonprofit Starter Pack and is considered to be the best way for nonprofits to start exploring Salesforce.

NPSP can cover most of your nonprofit needs and has a wider range of tools for managing your organization.

Experience Cloud for nonprofits

Experience Cloud is yet another Salesforce product nonprofits can benefit from. It helps companies provide their partners with limited functionality and data access while providing them with the possibility to interact with the system and the company.

So, basically, you can create extra space with certain views and tools for a specific group of people working with you and let them be fully involved in business and connect with you within one single platform.

Nonprofit businesses can use Experience Cloud to make their sponsors see where and how much of their money is gone; let volunteers manage their volunteer projects; help donors keep track of their donations, etc.

How to use Salesforce for nonprofits?

Okay, so there are some Salesforce products nonprofits can use to improve their performance. But what exactly do those products have that betters your nonprofit org? Let us give you a few solutions you get by adopting Salesforce for your nonprofit projects.

Program Management

One of the tools Salesforce offers nonprofits is Program Management Module (PMM). It’s a framework that companies can use to manage their programs and services, monitor how many of them are active, and who is involved in each. PMM goes with a ready-to-use dashboard and reports, which you can comfortably use to keep track of your program statistics and its progress.

You can also adjust your Program Management Module to your company’s needs and add some extra features by installing a few applications from AppExchange. For instance, with the right tool installed, you can add surveys or forms to your program management.

Account Management

With Salesforce, you can create and manage different accounts for organizations you work with (for example, your sponsors or partners), create Affiliation records (extra information about the company, their experience, or employees), and connect them to each other.

Campaign Management

Campaign Management is a wonderful tool for nonprofits to manage and analyze their charity campaigns or events. You can create a record, a list of people you want to invite, send them the invitations right from the CRM system, and even check if they’ve seen the email or if they’ve responded to it. Additionally, you can create Opportunities for every donation you got so that it’s easier to analyze the campaign’s success.

Donation Management

As you already could understand, nonprofits in Salesforce add donations to their system by creating so-called Opportunities. Using them, you can make a record of one-time donations, collection of them, or even recurring ones.

Every donation can be added from a specific organization account. Thus, you’ll have a list of all donations connected to a certain partner’s profile.

Security and Users Setup

Salesforce provides companies with the ability to fully customize the platform view and access to data and tools, including the view and access for both the group of users and every single user. This drastically betters data security and eases the process of team management.

NPSP Reporting and Analytics

With customizable dashboards, nonprofits can have a comprehensive overview of all the processes going on within their organization: the number of events, donations, volunteers, etc. You can run reports for a specific group of objects and specific accounts or users. This will help you to not only see the whole picture, but also to take a closer look at every single part of it.

In addition, Salesforce provides you with mobile access to Reporting and Analytics, which makes it easier and faster to process data and make informed decisions.

Marketing Automation & Engagement

By connecting Marketing Cloud to your Nonprofit Cloud, you can get access to a lot of tools to market your company more effectively. For instance, you can create emails using nonprofit marketing email templates, import your contacts with NPSP Import Wizard tool, and run email campaigns right from the CRM.

Apart from this, you can use Automation rules to send follow-ups or automated replies to specific groups of people, which allows you to drastically scale up your marketing campaigns.

Salesforce AI for nonprofits

Salesforce has an artificial intelligence tool, which they call Einstein, and this one can be really helpful for nonprofits. Using AI in CRMs is always a wonderful idea, and it brings a number of benefits. And here, we’ll single out the main two that Einstein for Nonprofits can provide you with.

Predictive analytics

By analyzing all the data you provide about your donors, like the amount and frequency of their donations, how and how many times they engage with you, and your system, Salesforce Einstein for Nonprofits can predict the chances of the current donor to continue or not continue their partnership with your company by giving them a score. All predictions are easily accessed and visually presented via dashboards or in the reports you run inside your CRM.

Smart suggestions

Einstein AI can advise you on how to better your donors’ scores and better your relationships with them. You can use Einstein suggestions while crafting emails, for example, and deciding on the next step in your communication. They will also be shown next to your donor’s score if it’s low or if there are some specific things to improve in your collaboration.

So, is Salesforce a good choice for nonprofits?

Definitely, yes. It will take your organization to the next level, improve your team collaboration, relationships with donors and volunteers, charity campaigns success, and just make things much easier for you. And that’s what’s important for nonprofit companies because people are mostly limited in the time they can spend on nonprofit projects.

We hope that your adoption of Salesforce will help you achieve your goals and make this world a better place. And if you need a little assistance getting started with this platform – don’t hesitate to contact us and ask for it. Till the next time!