Top Five Salesforce Best Practices for the Nonprofit Sector

#FocusOnBestPractices

Why Salesforce?

In this era of rapid technological change, business leaders need to be aware of the latest software offerings to take advantage of important new functionality. A key platform for business users is the immensely popular Salesforce. Like any other enterprise software, however, Salesforce needs to be configured, customized, and administered properly for optimal function and maximum return on investment. In addition, there are best practices that are unique to each market sector.

In a series of blog posts, we’ll be taking a look at important best practices for some of the markets that Korcomptenz specializes in. This post focuses on the nonprofit sector.

Salesforce in the Nonprofit Industry

Nonprofit organizations typically have different goals compared to other markets. The greater good of the communities they serve, whether working in healthcare, scientific research, education, or wellness, takes precedence over maximizing profits.

At the same, nonprofit organizations need to attract donors, manage relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders, and ensure operational efficiency to support their good work in the community.

Fortunately, Salesforce can help across all those needs. Here are five best practices for nonprofit organizations.

  • Focus on Staff Training – While nonprofits don’t usually have large training budgets compared to the private sector, it’s important that your staff is kept up-to-date on Salesforce capabilities and unique implementation for your organization. Salesforce works best when it’s properly utilized and administered, and training can help make sure that your data is up-to-date, your workflows are being used, and your reporting is accurate.
  • Use Workflows and Notifications Your Processes – One of the most common issues for nonprofits is that there is a lot of process overlap, and these processes can be challenging to translate into Salesforce as items cross multiple teams and gaps are revealed. Fully mapping your processes will help ensure that all your data flows properly through Salesforce. For instance, the information related to the member life cycle can be streamlined by making use of Salesforce dashboards. This could also help you in tracking key metrics and keeping the database updated. Once you have everything mapped, you can use Salesforce’s powerful workflow and notification tools to digitize these processes improving performance, increasing accuracy, and making it easier to onboard new team members.
  • Engage with Salesforce Communities-Salesforce and the larger Salesforce community offer a lot of no-cost or low-cost resources that can support a wide variety of needs from training to features and functionality. There are also specialized online communities that help nonprofits with free of cost help and support. Non-profits can leverage these communities in order to get new ideas and tips. You could also seek help from the Salesforce support team. Leveraging these services can help augment your offerings without breaking your budget.
  • Automate Donation Processing- Donation and fundraising are a key component of any nonprofit’s operations. Salesforce and their Visualforce programming language give you the ability to automate key aspects of this process by taking donations online, and integrating them with your overall donor list. This allows you to easily categorize and access donors and potential donors. Key information such as names, addresses, and contact details could be retrieved and analyzed easily to better plan and predict future fundraising efforts.
  • Segment and Automate Donor Outreach and Fundraising Drives- After you’ve automated your donations, the next step is to segment your database by potential value, and then automate outreach accordingly. For lower value donors—individuals that have given once, or only give in small amounts—you can communicate and drive donations primarily via email while using higher touch options for larger donors. This ensures that you will consistently message across your entire donor base, driving donations from all segments at all times.

Contact Us and Keep Reading to Learn More

We hope the Salesforce best practices in this blog have been helpful to you. Please visit Korcomptenz to learn more about our Salesforce solutions for the nonprofit sector or to schedule a complimentary consultation. Also, be sure to check back in the future for best practices for other industries.

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