Three Fundraising Processes You Should Track in Salesforce

Fundraising is a difficult task, but when it comes to nonprofits, it’s an essential part of being successful. Every day, development teams work to keep track of everything on their plate, all while trying to focus on getting money for their organizations. Salesforce can help your organization with fundraising, freeing your talent to focus on other areas of their jobs.

Given the vast resources, Salesforce can change the fundraising landscape at your nonprofit organization. Salesforce is a leading constituent relationship manager (CRM) and many nonprofit professionals don't realize what it can do for their organizations.

When you combine Salesforce with the nonprofit starter pack, you manage fundraising obstacles that seem like a nightmare at best or a Greek tragedy at worst.

The Salesforce potential

Too many nonprofits that already have Salesforce implemented aren’t taking full advantage of what Salesforce can offer. Users get started, open up the interface and stare blankly, not sure what to do next. If you're not familiar with a CRM or SFDC it can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, nonprofits miss out on valuable tools that can help them work smarter, not harder.

Feeling lost and unsure of how to use your Salesforce instance to its full potential is normal, but It doesn’t have to be that way. While there are a ton of different ways that Salesforce will benefit nonprofit, there are three big ways you should be using Salesforce to improve your nonprofit and take it to the next level.

Donor Touchpoints

Staying in touch with donors and engaging them between financial asks is crucial to nonprofits. Using a constituent relationship manager like Salesforce can help you cultivate your donors, so they are more than financial backers; they are full-fledged supporters. Full-fledged supporters are more likely to recruit their friends, family, and colleagues to become donors, and in turn those people will become supporters too!

For more significant donors, donor touch points will keep you on the radar, reminding them that your nonprofit is there and could use their donations. These donor touch points don’t have to be a lot of work, because with Salesforce you can automate your outreach, sending contact emails on schedule while you take care of other tasks. Donor touch points will help create, and send correspondence, as well as make event planning and outreach even easier.

You will be asking yourself why you weren’t using these features sooner.

Grant Processing

Grants are essential for the survival of many nonprofits. You can create a grant tracking system using an opportunity field in Salesforce. You can use this to keep tabs on grant research, track which grants you are more likely to be awarded, letters of intent, open grant proposals, and grants already won.

For even more efficiency you can use automation to assist with your grant processes by creating reports that can tell you which grants you’ve applied for, which grants have been awarded, how many grants you may be awarded, and tracking the impact grants are having on your nonprofit.

Gift processing

Salesforce can also help your nonprofit standardize gift processing by giving you the ability to manage donations from pledge to actual payment. You can create triggers and flows, clean data, integrate data from other sources like financial institutions, and event management apps.

With the ability to track donations with a complete 360-degree view, you’re able to create better campaigns that will take less time and yield more significant rewards.

Salesforce is one of the best CRM platforms for nonprofit companies and foundations. If you want to know how Salesforce can help your nonprofit, contact us and we would be happy to help you with your Salesforce journey.