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3 Ways to Boost Fundraising Results with Nonprofit Cloud

The 2024 Giving USA report reveals that charitable giving is trending downward, highlighting a decline of 2.1% in 2023. This finding cements the importance of prioritizing strong donor management, thoughtful stewardship efforts, and effective marketing and recruitment strategies. 

In addition to diversifying revenue through activities like corporate partnerships or grant applications, nonprofits must strengthen their fundraising efforts to continue fueling their work despite negative trends. Specialized, comprehensive solutions like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provide the tools you need to motivate donors to take action, even during times of increased inflation and economic uncertainty.

In this guide, we’ll explore tips for using Nonprofit Cloud to drive more revenue for your mission. Let’s begin.

Ensure data is unified and accurate.

Tracking data in your CRM is the best way to manage donor relationships, personalize experiences and communications, and make informed, data-driven decisions. However, storing this information across multiple databases can lead to fragmented or siloed data.

Nonprofit Cloud allows nonprofit organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources on one unified platform. This saves staff time from manually compiling data from multiple sources and improves data accuracy. Specifically, syncing data automatically can reduce duplicate entries, missing information, manual entry errors, and more to ensure insights are accurate and up-to-date.

Fíonta’s guide to Nonprofit Cloud also highlights that this solution is a core product built on the Industry Data model. This means that Nonprofit Cloud can seamlessly integrate with other Salesforce Industry Clouds, pre-built objects, and common components. This expands the solution’s capabilities without adding unnecessary data collection and storage complexity.

Create donor-centered, personalized experiences.

Personalized experiences make donors feel like valued members of your team and show that their support makes a difference. When donors know their donations are needed and directly impact beneficiaries, they’ll be much more likely to continue contributing to your mission.

Your nonprofit can offer tailored experiences through Nonprofit Cloud and other Salesforce technology by:

Building custom donor profiles with scores based on recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) values as well as details about demographic and behavioral data.

Personalizing communications with tailored asks, content recommendations, invitations to events, milestone acknowledgments, etc.

Creating customized, guided experiences using OmniStudio (e.g., guided volunteer onboarding) to build interactions unique to your nonprofit.

Prioritizing user experiences by leveraging other technology like Salesforce Experience Cloud, which can offer self-service community forums, account portals for membership programs, and more.

Adding dynamic content to your website and emails by leveraging Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE) tools. This content changes depending on each supporter’s preferences and past engagement (e.g., highlight blog posts or program updates the donor would be interested in at the top of a landing page).

Additionally, consider user experience (UX) design principles and best practices when optimizing your donation form and website. When navigating your website and making a donation feels easy and intuitive, donors are more likely to complete the process and return in the future.

Use workflow automation.

360MatchPro’s guide to fundraising automation defines the term as what occurs “when software automatically executes tasks once certain criteria are met.” The goal of fundraising automation is for the technology to independently manage rote, repetitive tasks on your organization’s behalf.

When used strategically, fundraising automation can significantly reduce the time staff spend on administrative tasks and enhance communications with donors. Consider setting up automated workflows for:

Donation receipts, reminders, and thank-you emails
Confirmation messages for event registrations, volunteer opportunity signups, etc.
Birthday, donor anniversary, and other milestone acknowledgments
Campaign progress updates and impact reports
Lapsed donor re-engagement campaigns (e.g., campaigns that launch after a year passes between donations)

You can apply fundraising automation to almost any type of campaign, such as text-to-give, peer-to-peer, and crowdfunding campaigns. Examine the nuances of each fundraising method to identify opportunities to save time and resources with automation.

Fundraising is a crucial revenue generator for nonprofit organizations, and it helps build communal support and awareness of worthy causes. Nonprofit Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of tools that empower your nonprofit to optimize fundraising efforts, expand reach, provide tailored experiences, and enhance data analysis to pave the way for future improvements.