7 Salesforce Products to Transform How Nonprofits Do Business
If you were to ask what our favorite Salesforce “product” is, it would be hard to answer. The range of products available for nonprofits is extensive and each has their own “wow” factor. However, most of our nonprofit clients have no idea what Salesforce.org is capable of providing to further streamline their technology stack and fully integrate various departmental needs.
So, in this post, we’ll break out some of the various tools available for nonprofit organizations and demystify some of the terminology. Let’s start at the beginning. Salesforce.org is a cloud-based, customer relationship management tool specifically for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Sometimes, industry people will refer to it as “SFDO,” differentiating it from the Salesforce.com (for profit version) or “SFDC” product.
The Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud is a collection of products packaged together to meet the wide variety of industry needs. The first app most clients are familiar with is the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) that is built much like the Sales app for profit clients use. The largest difference is the industry-specific language and data architecture customized for fundraising and constituent management. This is where clients track individual contacts, households, organizations, donations, fundraising campaigns, inbound grant management and task management. There’s also a free Volunteer app that many clients use alongside the NPSP.
Some additional products that may be new to nonprofit professionals include:
Grant Management - This is primarily for outbound grant management (think of Community Foundations, Family Foundations, etc.). This allows grantors to track not only outbound grants (including the application and reporting processes), but also build relationships with donors who are funding the grant opportunities.
Marketing Cloud Engagement - A robust, sophisticated marketing tool for nonprofits that want to build personalized email journeys like drip campaigns, if/then scenarios, and so much more.
Case Management - For nonprofits working with individuals in need of case management, this tool allows you to track and customize all necessary plans and goals, documentation, next steps with each client; as well as robust dashboards and reports for KPI tracking. Layer this with the Salesforce Shield tool to ensure HIPAA and security compliance.
Experience Cloud for Nonprofits - This allows nonprofits to engage with their constituents in a secure, online space. Use cases include self-service client, donor and volunteer portals, peer-to-peer engagement, and field staff and volunteer access to program data and service delivery. The possibilities are endless!
Insights Platform - This takes data hygiene to a whole new level. The Insights Platform Data Integrity tool allows you to find and prevent duplicate records, standardize addresses, find change of addresses through NCOA, and ensure global addresses are accurate according to country standards. This is the data clean-up so many nonprofits have been asking for!
Elevate - A fundraising solution that’s directly integrated into the Nonprofit Success Pack! Elevate offers giving pages, allows payments which flow seamlessly into NPSP, has a recurring giving tool, and allows nonprofit fundraisers to personalize the donation experience through offer ladders, pre-filled donation fields, and personalized email templates. Note: this does not have the ability to support event fundraising.
Accounting Subledger - I often get asked about reconciliation between fundraising and accounting departments. The Accounting Subledger tool translates your fundraising data into formats used by accounting software to streamline the reconciliation process.
It would be impossible to fully share the breadth of opportunities these seven tools can offer to any organization. But to learn more about these tools and view online demos, I recommend visiting the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Products page, as well as the pricing page.
Additionally, not specific to nonprofits, but incredibly useful are two more notable products:
Slack - Integrate your Slack conversations with Salesforce to help staff and partners stay up-to-date with constituent activities, plans and communications.
Tableau - Taking data analytics to a whole new level, Tableau offers a much deeper dive and greater capabilities into dashboards. This is a must-see demo to fully appreciate all of the bells and whistles available in viewing and processing your Salesforce information.
Whether you’re looking to transition to Salesforce or are already using the platform and wanting to expand its capabilities and efficiencies, our team is excited to talk through any of the products above and provide demos.