In the previous installment of this blog series we introduced constituent relationship management and its importance to the success of your nonprofit endeavors. This current offering introduces a data model that enshrines perhaps the most vital of nonprofit activities, the cultivation and continued engagement of donors and sponsors to support your social goals through the effective execution of your services. The model described below roughly applies to most constituent relationship management systems but is perhaps best expressed on the Salesforce platform ( we are somewhat biased – we use it extensively ). We will almost exclusively use Salesforce terminology heretofore – but the concepts and entities are universal and should be instantly recognizable.
Account – Donor or client households, companies, foundation funders, or other organizations with whom your organization has a relationship. There are two main types of accounts you can create in Salesforce NPSP: Households and organizations. Household accounts are used to track donor or member households. Organization accounts are used for any other accounts such as funders, corporate donors, vendors, government institutions, or other business entities. You may see the term Company used interchangeably in other CRM systems.
Contact – Individual stakeholders in your organization. All contacts must be connected to an account. The contacts object can be used to track donors, members, volunteers, clients, and staff—basically any individual that interacts with your organization.
Opportunity – Potential revenue-generating activities like donations, grants, or membership fees tracked over time, from pledged—or earlier—to received. These could include: financial contributions from a person or a company, grants from a funder, contracts from a government institution, or sales of merchandise related to your organization. You may seem them variously called Deals in other CRM systems such as HubSpot.
Campaign – Any outreach you’d like to plan, manage, and track. Opportunities can be credited to a campaign (or multiple campaigns) to determine your return on investment.
In addition and closely related to contacts, you may want to consider enshrining Leads in your CRM. Leads are typically used to qualify interest before creating a contact. It’s simply a way to record that someone may be interested in working with or donating to your organization, or they want to purchase something that your organization is selling. Leads are more temporary than contacts. A lead is really only around until you figure out if someone’s interest is genuine, and if it is, you would convert that lead to a contact (or account). It’s also a safe way to capture interest from your website and make sure you’re not getting duplicate or spam records. You want to reserve your contact records for people that you know are interested in being involved with your company (because they have signed up to volunteer or sent in a donation). You can make use of these points of interest by recording name, company, or email address and tracking that data in the long term.
Right, now what ?
Perhaps best to illustrate with a timely and resonant example.
You’re a leader of a nonprofit organization combating the opioid epidemic. You have a number of programs that provide access to treatment centers, motivational interventions, mental health facilities as well as counselling and rehabilitation. You are recognizing an escalation in the opioid epidemic because of the COVID-19 crisis. Shelter-in-place orders have pushed individuals battling sobriety into isolation and have decreased access to your services and increased opportunity for distraction from addictions. Your partners and clients are raising alarms that the coronavirus pandemic is “a national relapse trigger”. Thus, social distancing is potentially concealing a surge of opioid abuse, with resulting morbidity and mortality, larger than any you have seen before.
You swiftly realize that a shift to virtual services is critical to staving off a deluge in addiction cases and relapses. You create a hotline and put together a team of dedicated counsellors available 24 / 7 to respond to client queries and requests for services over a number of social and digital channels. You scale up that program with virtual assistants – AI powered processes that help triage, route and escalate calls and interactions with your clients. All of this requires funds that you just don’t have in your current budget ( Corona was a pleasant adult beverage this time last year ). You plan an outreach program or a “campaign” to garner financial support for this new program from your community of existing sponsors and extend it to new ones – individuals or families that have directly or indirectly been impacted by this pandemic and have a vested interest in putting a stop to it. You collect campaign details in your Salesforce instance including the type of campaign ( email, direct mail, social media or in-person event ), start and end dates, budget and so on. Your campaign involves reaching out to specific individuals who can be either current sponsors ( contacts ) or new potential donors ( leads ). You have extensive information about current sponsors. For instance you know that they are households ( The Simpsons ) or organizations ( The Gates Foundation ) and your strategy for engaging with Homer and Marge is wildly different from that with Bill and Melinda’s representatives. You can therefore have different account types with each being handled by different individuals in your organization.
The appeal on your website has attracted a number of concerned individuals who wish to contribute to the cause either monetarily or with their time and skills. Your staff will engage with these leads, gathering further information to qualify them as genuinely interested and following preconfigured automation, convert them into donor contacts, automatically creating the right type of account and optionally a donation opportunity in the form of a pledge. More engagement follows, with staff enthusing your new donors about the timeliness and potential impact of the program as well as updating them with already accrued benefits ( with hard data from your program office surfaced in Salesforce ). You continue to build a durable relationship with your donors and secure long lasting commitment to this and future programs. You even secure from some the much sought after recurring donation, supporting programs that most align with their unique perspective. You conduct almost all of your engagement activities within Salesforce including planning and executing follow up tasks in a donor centric manner – on a channel and frequency of their preference. Remember, your Salesforce instance has a 360 view of your donor including their relationships with other donors and affiliations to organizations that might have relevance to your cause. The perspective provided by these relationships are incredibly important to understanding the dynamics of your donor community and oftentimes offer up the path to a hugely successful engagement strategy.
Qualifying nonprofits get a Salesforce instance and the NonProfit Success Pack for free (yes, really – do reach out to us if you need assistance). You get much of the above out of box with NPSP. But you can do significantly more. To really leverage the platform and catapult your nonprofit forward you need expertise that we would be very happy to provide. All proceeds go toward funding our platform for change ( which incidentally we would love to collaborate with your nonprofit on ). Please also take a moment to sign up for our newsletter.
Keep those comments coming and until next time …..
