Nonprofits hold great value for small regions and communities as well as the country as a whole. They support the local government bodies in addressing different local issues. At times, they are among the first to come to the rescue in emergencies.

As a nonprofit organization grows in size, challenges may start to surface. One of the significant challenges that can plague a large-sized nonprofit organization is donor management.

Nevertheless, there is a way to tackle this challenge - donor management software. To help nonprofits manage donors efficiently, Salesforce provides its own Salesforce Donor Management software.

Before moving ahead, it’s essential to understand the concept of donor management in detail. If you also run a nonprofit organization with many donors, this post is for you.

In this post, you’ll learn about donor management and its importance. You’ll also learn what all Salesforce Donor Management comprises and how a donor management software helps a nonprofit organization manage donors better.

What is Donor Management?

Donor Management, as the name indicates, is the process of managing your nonprofit’s donors. It is essentially a process of tracking your donors’ details, interactions with them, and utilizing the information suitably.

The better you utilize your donors’ information, the higher are the chances of good relations with them. In the long run, proper donor management not only helps retain donors but also adds more.

To manage donors better, you’ll need to gather some raw data, including:

• Donors’ contact details
• Gifts and contributions
• Interactions with your donors
• Donors’ preferences
• Events donors attended
• Your notes about individual donors, etc.

How Salesforce Donor Management Works

Salesforce Donor Management basically comprises managing your donors and establishing strong relations with them.

There are various processes involved in Salesforce donor management that together ensure a streamlined donor management as below.

Online Fundraising

Online fundraising is a crucial part of Salesforce donor management and requires a robust digital fundraising platform for nonprofits. It is because an online platform makes it easy for donors to donate on the go. You can include donation pages and payment services to make your donor management easy and seamless.

Centralized Donation Management

It includes connecting multiple donation channels on a single fundraising platform in Salesforce Donor Management. The centralized management eliminates the need to track income and donations from different channels individually. You can easily capture your income, allocate it to your programs, and track them through your accounting systems.

Moreover, it enables you to connect with more donors, boost repeat donations, and manage large volume gift entries. That too at a very nominal price and in less time!

Combination of Direct Mail with Digital

Salesforce donor management also includes making your direct mail fundraising strategy stronger. You should integrate deduplication of records, address standardization, and auto-updates of addresses.

You should also enhance donor acquisition and conversion with personalized communications with effective Salesforce donor management.

Acceleration of Big Donations

Salesforce Donor Management also involves crafting a cohesive and robust gift strategy. For that, you should enable your team to tackle the potential donors at every stage, from cultivating them to enduring stewardship. Provide the support for integration to tools like calendar, email, and mobile apps. All these integrations help the team attract more donations in less time.

Boost in Data Transparency

Sometimes, there may be a mismatch in the data of your finance team and fundraising team. This is because both the teams track and report gifts and pledges in somewhat different ways. Thus, there are chances that there are issues in the reconciliation of data at times.

With a robust Salesforce Donor Management strategy and software, you should prepare donation data for your finance team and help reconcile revenue. Meet all the financial reporting requirements and enable a transparent collaboration between your fundraising and finance teams.

Enhanced Visibility and Agility

Use insightful reports, centralized dashboards, analytics, and AI to analyze revenue productively. Finding out the opportunities and areas of improvement is also a part of Salesforce Donor Management.

Direct your fundraising teams to plan an action after gathering all valuable insights and analyzing them. They can share stories with compelling data to prove that your cause is worthy of the investment.

Benefits of Salesforce Donor Management Software

Before enumerating the benefits of this software, consider a hypothetical scenario first.

You are a nonprofit organization’s executive director. The organization is making good progress. And three new employees joined your organization last month. Certainly, it is exciting for you to see the team growing.

While everything is seemingly good on the outside, things are getting hectic inside. With more employees joining, new projects starting, and donations pouring in incessantly, tracking everything is getting harder. The level beyond which you can’t manage your nonprofit’s operations manually has already been reached. In the end, you find yourself sitting in a corner at your desk - helpless, frustrated, and clueless.

Maybe, it’s that point in time when you integrated a digital fundraising solution. This is where a donor management system comes to your rescue. Be it names, emails, tasks, deadlines, gifts, or anything else, such software, tracks it all.

Before you pick a donor management software, ensure that it has the following components.

• It should be able to track detailed contact info and interactions with your team members.
• It should enable monitoring of individual campaign metrics. You should be able to track donor-specific info like donation sources, gift sizes, donation amounts, etc.
• It should let you segment information and align it with your organization’s overall strategy and individual campaign strategies.

We can discuss your perfect donor management software!

Now, let’s walk you through a few use cases to explain how Salesforce Donor Management software can help your nonprofit organization:

1. Helps Manage Potential Donors

Event management is a very important aspect for nonprofit professionals. Let’s say you host a large event with a huge number of attendees. Seeing such a large gathering excites you and makes you hopeful. You take down their names and contact numbers to follow-up on them for donation requests. Everything ends well, and you return to the office the next day only to find out your hopes are shattered. The sheet of names and contacts is lost! Won’t it be painful?

Now, reconsider the same scenario in a slightly different manner.

You host an event, take down the attendees’ names and contact info. This time, you don’t rely on only a single sheet of paper. Rather, you upload that attendance sheet to your donor management software. Once you upload it there, you can sit back relaxed because you won’t lose it now. The next day you come to the office, you can start leveraging the attendees’ info and raise Salesforce nonprofit donations

Noticed the difference? With Salesforce Donor Management software, you can stay assured that you will not lose or misplace anything anytime.

2. Enables Fundraising Intelligence

Fundraising Intelligence means the processes and systems that provide nonprofits with insights into current donors. Fundraising Intelligence helps know more about the affinity, capacity, interest level of current and prospective donors. You can store it into a prospect’s or donor’s score.

Salesforce Donor Management software empowers you to:

• Prioritize prospects based on ratings and scores for affinity, capacity, and interest to donate.
• Cross-reference a contact with their worth and past philanthropic records.
• Segment thousands of records in one go based on scores with the feature of batch scoring.
• Streamline your communication with prospects and donors with a complete understanding of their profiles.

See, you are already there. You can now see how Salesforce Donor Management software makes fundraising smarter.

3. Helps Prepare a Better Fundraising Strategy

With all your past, current, and prospective donors’ data in one location, you can get an easy and comprehensive view. The centralized collection of data helps you segment both your potential and current donors to leverage them strategically.

For example, a donor Emily attended your small fundraising music concert last night. She also bought three tickets for her friends. Suppose each ticket costs $100. This means that she spent $400 for just one show. It indicates that she is financially strong and capable. And generous, of course. The next time you organize a music concert like this, Emily should be among the few who you invite first!

Want a donor portal to match up to Salesforce Donor Management software for your nonprofit?

Build a Next-Gen Donor Management Portal with CRMJetty

Salesforce Donor Management software is a paid component of Salesforce NonProfit Success Pack (NSPS). If you go to the pricing page of Salesforce NSPS, you can see the pricings. Even if you go for the Salesforce Cloud Enterprise Edition + NSPS, it will cost you $36 per user per month. This means you’ll need to pay $4320 per year if you want 10 users to access your portal. That’s a pretty hefty amount.

Our Salesforce portal costs you only $3999 every year. This payment will give you the ability to give CRM access to unlimited users. Our portal also supports the configuration of any number of standard and custom objects in your store backend. Thus, you can save more and grow fast.

If you have a legacy portal and want customizations, our developer team can do that for you. We can also help you build a portal from scratch if your requirements are unique.

So, let’s join hands to make the best donor management software for your nonprofit!