How Salesforce NPSP Can Help You Optimize Your Donor Engagement Plan?

While Salesforce CRM is best known in the commercial world as a customer relationship management system, NGOs are using it to manage constituent relationships and achieve comparable outcomes. A cloud-based CRM can be an important aspect of the nonprofit technology stack for storing and managing large volumes of data as well as tracking specific activities and behaviors at the personal level. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) provides NGOs with a robust, scalable, and adaptable fundraising platform right out of the box.  

Luckily, Salesforce CRM’s success has led to it being extensively acknowledged by other product providers, and it now has the capacity to integrate with many, if not all, of the industry’s major technologies. Simply by adopting Salesforce, a nonprofit’s fundraising efforts are enhanced by the 360-degree perspective it provides to its constituents and supporters. Regardless of their size or reasons, nonprofits, associations, and foundations benefit from the Salesforce CRM platform’s tremendous capabilities. 

Additionally, non-profits can further optimize the Nonprofit Success Pack by leveraging existing optional functionality and adding their own customizations. 

What is a Donor Engagement Plan?  

Engagement Plans for donors include tasks for engaging with constituents.  A strategy that helps you track engagement efforts for Major Gifts is the most popular example of an Engagement Plan. This means you can now incorporate how you qualify, engage, and ask a potential donor into your Salesforce workflow. Consider Engagement Plans to be a roadmap that assigns responsibilities to your team based on where they are on the map. 

 Major contributors, meaning those who give extraordinarily significant sums of money to your organization, usually demand a higher level of participation than regular donors. An Engagement Plan with a significant donor, for example, would entail calling the donor to schedule a lunch, then having the lunch with the donor, then sending the donor a follow-up email, and so on. Each of these actions would be assigned to a task on the Engagement Plan and due on a specific date. 

Late last year, Salesforce announced the inclusion of a slew of new features to go along with the renaming of their Non-profit Starter Pack to the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). Levels and engagement plans were two of the most popular elements. 

The Nonprofit Success Pack now includes Engagement Plans, which adds basic motion management to the platform. By nurturing prospects into making larger contributions, moves management aims to “change (their) attitudes so they want to give.” 

What are the benefits of having an engagement plan? 

• They deliver a consistent stewardship experience that strengthens a donor’s bond with your organization. 
• They make certain that contributors are not forgotten or ignored. 
• Plans give your team a year-by-year stewardship plan and cadence to follow. 

While it is critical that NGOs personalize cultivation methods to their unique and exceptional contributors, creating, executing, and tracking individualized plans can be difficult at times. This approach becomes more difficult as your portfolio grows larger. 

What is Salesforce NPSP ?

Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) is a free and open-source solution that non-profit organizations can use via Salesforce AppExchange. It’s an integrated platform that combines Salesforce clouds like Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, as well as the Lightning Platform and Communities, to help companies manage all of their essential interactions and boost their bottom line.  It is designed with a number of out-of-the-box and comprehensive capabilities to assist non-profit organizations in managing their customers’ data using the CRM paradigm, as well as driving fundraising and programming, by providing a single source of truth. 

To make the non-profit’s business process easier, the non-profit success pack includes fundraising and easy-to-use constituent and donor management software. It provides a powerful, comprehensive, and complex platform for managing programs, donating, managing volunteers, and running fundraising campaigns. 

Non-profits can use Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud for impact management, grant management, marketing automation, and community portals. Personalized trip management, gift management, reporting and analysis, income management, donor interaction, programme delivery, volunteer management, fundraising, and more are among the features available. 

Salesforce Non-Profit Cloud allows non-profits to use Salesforce products such as DocuSign, FormAssembly, and others to perform tasks such as digital signatures, web form creation, project management, and more.  

What Are The Benefits of Salesforce NPSP? 

Salesforce NPSP is an open and flexible platform that allows users to manage donations, campaigns, volunteers, programmes, grants, and more – all in one place for a complete picture of their organization. 

The following are some of the primary advantages of integrating your Salesforce CRM software with this NPSP system:  

• It is entirely free for up to ten users for organizations. 
• It can be tailored and customized to meet unique requirements. 
• The NPSP makes it simple to complete the more involved configuration process. 
• Organize your contacts and homes, as well as your gift payments, organization accounts and affiliations, and grant lifecycles. 
• Keep track of connections, donations, and recurring donations. 

 The NPSP has developed a better approach to keeping track of everything in one spot. Because it’s built on the Salesforce platform, all of the data models are compatible.  

How Nonprofits are Boosting Donor Relationships with Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack ?  

The advantage of Salesforce is that it can be customized to meet your present operations. Engagement Plans can help you document what’s working for your business and automate your tried-and-true donor engagement strategy. 

Engagement Plans and Levels are two new NPSP technologies from Salesforce that, when used together, may simplify the engagement planning process and eliminate the hassle of managing shifting parts. Please note that NPSP 3.81 or a later version is required for access.  

When a donor makes a substantial gift and you want to follow up, Engagement Plans are frequently used. When a contributor of a specific level donates again or renews their yearly gift, you could start an Engagement Plan. 

Salesforce Engagement Plan 

This tool enables portfolio managers to specify all of the tasks (emails, phone calls, events) they should send to donors and at what intervals they should occur. There is no need for Excel anymore – NPSP Plans for Engagement is here to stay. Within an Engagement Plan, these items are defined as tasks. As previously stated, the greatest strategies take a longer-term approach to a donor relationship, and Salesforce allows you to customize donors’ experiences with your organization over a set period of time. 

A donor or group of donors can be assigned Engagement Plans once they have been created. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to supervision. Therefore, Salesforce allows you to create a variety of Engagement Plans. You may, for example, give a comprehensive set of tasks to Major Gift donors and a simplified version of that plan to your Young Professional Committee. The responsibilities might be differentiated according to the type of donor you need to manage. 

Fundraisers benefit from engagement strategies because they allow them to be more flexible. The task due dates can be triggered either after the Engagement Plan begins or after the parent task is completed. This type of task is called a dependent task because it requires the success of preceding tasks. 

Additionally, you can establish rules that reschedule a task for the following day if it happens during the weekend. You can duplicate and update an existing Engagement Plan and all of its associated tasks to make the process of creating them easier. 

Donors can effortlessly transition from one engagement plan to the next. For instance, if a contributor unexpectedly increases to a higher amount for leadership contribution you may switch them to the Major Gifts engagement plan. This process can be automated using the levels technology by salesforce. 

 Levels are a new NPSP element that works in conjunction with Engagement Plans. 

You can easily identify a donor’s level of commitment and engagement to your organization by using levels. You can create tiers depending on your own criteria, such as lifelong donating or the size of the most recent gift. Levels can be created and designated in accordance with your organization’s existing structure, and they can be manually or automatically allocated to entries. 

This procedure is easy to manage. Tasks will appear on the home page of the staff member to whom they are allocated once Engagement Plans have been prepared and implemented. Dashboards can assist in keeping track of forthcoming chores and ensuring that no actions go unnoticed. On donor records, completed and uncompleted tasks will display in the “Open Activities” and “Activity History” linked lists. 

These new NPSP capabilities assist fundraisers in developing effective donor development programs while avoiding burnout. And, because all of this data is stored in Salesforce, you can maintain key institutional knowledge while also strategically deepening your relationships with your contributors.   

When to adopt an engagement plan? 

 Starting with your major donors, most developers and even Salesforce recommend adopting Engagement Plans. Other donor levels should be considered as your company becomes more efficient.  

Salesforce’s value lies in its ability to adapt to your existing procedures. Engagement Plans can help you codify what works for your company and integrate automation into your tried-and-true donor engagement strategy. 

When a donor makes a substantial gift and you want to follow up with them, Engagement Plans are frequently used. When a contributor at a certain level provides or renews their yearly gift, you could start an Engagement Plan. And as soon as the contribution is received online, your system sends an automated acknowledgment email. Your Salesforce account creates a sequence of actions, such as: 

1. Development Director to contact donor in 7 days
2. A handwritten acknowledgment in 10 days is required by the Executive Director.
3. Personal invitations must be sent to donors 60 days later.
4. Last but not least, a 300-day renewal appeal.

Plans for engagement can go beyond the standard follow-up plan. Nonprofits can better identify their supporters by classifying them into Levels based on criteria like total gifts or service hours. Nonprofits can use Engagement Plans to build a collection of tasks with activities appropriate for each level that is applied and recorded consistently. Also using a move movements management strategy, you may establish a more nurturing method to turn one-time donations into regular advocates.  

Final Thoughts  

Non-profits are aware that retaining donors necessitates a strategy, as gifts do not tend to renew spontaneously. Using Engagement Plans, you can quickly and easily sequence various activities associated with a process.  

It’s critical to maintain a donor’s relationship with your organization after they’ve made their first gift. This is where Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) tools and engagement planning come into play. 

Engagement Plans are useful for any process that requires interacting with constituents, such as volunteer onboarding or large donor outreach. You can check for periods of increased engagement as well as moments of drop-off that can be remedied by tracking how often your constituents demonstrate their support. Using this data to examine the donor journey in further detail will help improve your organization’s interactions with its audiences and further encourage continued participation.  

Ready to upgrade to Salesforce NPSP to optimize your donor engagement? Schedule a time to talk with one of our specialists at Webuters to learn more about the new features that will help you engage your donors for their continued support .