We explore how the benefits of using Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack for managing donations can boost relationships with your donors in our blog.
Nonprofit organizations are the heartbeat of our communities. They assist individuals and families in need, and many organizations rely on donations and grants. One common challenge fundraisers face is nurturing the relationship with a donor and tracking their donations and employer matches or pledges. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) can help alleviate some of the challenges these organizations face. NPSP is an add-on to Salesforce and a managed package comprising objects, reports, and tools you can add to your Salesforce instance.
Nurturing a relationship with a donor is a crucial step that sometimes gets overlooked while completing manual processes. NPSP helps to keep the donor information in one central location. You can set up a reminder to contact a donor at a specific time.
Prior to a call or meeting, a user can review the donor’s household and contact record. This allows you to prepare to answer your donor’s questions, keeping them informed and connected.
You can also use automation to send out messages to individuals at regular intervals, which is another way donors can feel more in the loop regarding their involvement with your organization. A user can use Levels to group contacts based on volunteer hours or the donation amount and tailor communications based on this data.
Salesforce and the NPSP have many tools available to track and maintain relationships. It also provides staff with the data needed to make informed decisions and keep communication lines open with their donors and volunteers.
In this blog post, we will explore the benefits nonprofit organizations can expect from using Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack to manage donations.
Single Source of Truth
People often have to enter and update data in multiple spreadsheets across the organization. The updating of spreadsheets can be cumbersome and time-consuming. When you or your organization need to make decisions or quickly answer questions, it can be difficult to complete the task. With the help of NPSP, say goodbye to the need for multiple spreadsheets.
You can now have a single source of truth for your donor and volunteer data. No more searching through folders and spreadsheets for information. Users can view household information, donation or pledge data, giving history, and an endless amount of other information with the click of the mouse.
Tracking Donations with NPSP
Tracking donations has become easier for organizations using NPSP. You can use the opportunity object to track donations and revenue. The managed package comes standard with six opportunity record types which include:
- Donation: A gift to a nonprofit organization consisting of goods or money.
- Grant: Funds received that are non-repayable.
- Major Gift: A major gift is a large sum of money a nonprofit receives. What constitutes a large sum of money will vary from organization to organization.
- In-kind Gift: Rather than a cash donation, this donation is either a good or service. Some examples include food, clothing, and computers.
- Matching Donation: A company donates based on an employee’s donation to a nonprofit organization.
- Membership: When an individual or household donates to join a group or organization.
You can create new record types if your organization wants to track additional information. Your organization can edit page layouts, add fields and make customizations as needed. Each record type can have a different path as well, and NPSP can handle simple or complex scenarios.
Salesforce Path provides a quick visual for the user to identify the current stage of the opportunity. You can also add instructions to the Guidance for Success textbox to guide the user through each stage. The Guidance for Success textbox can include tips, links to Chatter groups or files, best practices and policy reminders.
Recurring Donations
NSPS has made it easier to track and manage recurring donations. The package currently supports two kinds of recurring donations: open-ended and fixed-length. Open-ended donations have no set end date. For example, a donor gives $50 each month with no end date. The NPSP user will create an opportunity every month until the donation closes.
The other type of recurring donation is fixed length. Donors give these donations at intervals for a decided period. For example, Company A would like to donate $1,000 over four months. After the four months are paid, the recurring donation will end. You can edit recurring donations if needed. The donor can either lower or raise their amount. If the donor has an unexpected life event, you can pause or close the recurring donation.
These records will contain information on past donations and activities like emails and notes. You can add notes to the record after interaction with the donor. This will allow other users within the organization to stay up to date with the latest information.
Reporting and Dashboards in NPSP
Getting an overview of your fundraising efforts using standard reports has never been easier. The NPSP comes with over 70 reports and dashboards to choose from that can report on donations related to specific campaigns and household fundraising information. The important thing for the organization to remember is the data must be accurate. If the data has errors, these prebuilt reports and dashboards may not accurately provide the information needed.
Once you have cleaned the data, you can compare and filter it based on the parameters you and your organization decide. Users are not limited to these out-of-the-box reports and dashboards. You can create custom reports and dashboards. These reports will help to compare donations year after year, view goals and make important strategic decisions within the organization.
Conclusion
The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a powerful solution that provides organizations with the tools necessary to improve donation management. It doesn’t matter if you have a new or Salesforce Organization. The NPSP provides a complete view of donors, supports streamlining donation management, enables donor engagement at scale and supports nonprofit growth. NPSP empowers nonprofits to unlock the full potential of their donations.
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