The Salesforce playbook for nonprofits.
Nonprofits are asked to run development, program delivery, grant compliance and finance with a fraction of the operating budget a commercial business would spend on any one of them. That constraint is the whole design problem. Technology has to reduce administrative load rather than add a system for somebody to maintain, and every hour it gives back is an hour returned to the mission.
- 13 chapters
- 5 Salesforce products in depth
- 14-point readiness checklist
- 9,827 words
What's inside.
Written by our Salesforce consultants for nonprofits. Read it start to finish or go straight to the chapter you need.
Salesforce in nonprofits: where it pays off
6 patterns that work, and the stack we typically deploy.
The challenges Salesforce has to solve
The 6 problems a design has to solve, plus 4 methods we use on them.
Which Salesforce products fit, and how
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud, Salesforce Data 360 (Data Cloud), Tableau, Salesforce Service Cloud: use cases, data model and buyer questions for each.
How to implement it
Who needs to be in the room, what the first release includes, and the questions to settle before kickoff.
Moving from your current system
What moves from your current system, how to plan it, and the decisions to make early.
The systems to connect
10 systems to connect and what flows between them.
Regulation and compliance
6 rules and obligations the design has to account for.
Readiness checklist
14 decisions to make before you sign a statement of work.
What to measure
6 metrics to baseline before the build, with a worksheet.
After go-live: support and health checks
What ongoing support covers and when to run a health check.
If a project has stalled
How stalled projects get back on track, and how to get more from the org you have.
Where the industry is concentrated, and local guides
local guides for 3 metros.
Next steps
Free assessments and how to reach a consultant.
From the readiness checklist.
Three of the 14 decisions the playbook asks you to make before you sign a statement of work. The full checklist, with the rest of the playbook, is in the PDF.
Get the full playbook →- Agree gift rules with financeDevelopment and finance often count revenue differently. Settle how pledges, soft credits, matching gifts and restricted funds are recorded before building anything. Documented rules prevent the familiar year-end dispute over whose totals are correct and make audit preparation much less stressful.
- Design for a small admin teamChoose standard features and declarative automation over custom code wherever possible, and document every design decision in plain language. A system that only an outside consultant can maintain becomes fragile and costly, undermining the mission-focused efficiency the organization hoped to gain.
- Protect participant privacyProgram participants may include children, survivors of violence or people receiving health services. Restrict access to their records tightly and keep them out of fundraising views. Some data may fall under HIPAA or other rules depending on the services offered, so confirm obligations with counsel before migrating it.
The Salesforce products it covers.
Each product chapter covers use cases, how the data is modeled and the questions buyers ask. Shorter versions are on our site.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud for NonprofitsMarketing Cloud helps nonprofits treat supporters as individuals with different motivations.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud for NonprofitsExperience Cloud lets nonprofits and grantmaking foundations open parts of their Salesforce org to the people they work with outside the staff.
- Salesforce Data 360 for NonprofitsData 360 (formerly Data Cloud) gives a nonprofit one resolved view of each supporter when their activity is scattered across an online giving platform, event and peer-to-peer tools, an advocacy system, volunteer software and the Salesforce CRM itself.
- Tableau for Nonprofit OrganizationsTableau helps nonprofits turn data scattered across donor systems, program databases, spreadsheets and finance tools into dashboards that explain what the organization accomplishes and how it is funded.
- Salesforce Service Cloud for NonprofitsService Cloud helps nonprofits that handle a steady flow of inbound requests: donors asking about receipts or recurring gifts, members with benefit questions, people calling a helpline, and community members asking how to access a program.
Who wrote it.
Abstrakt Solutions is a Salesforce Select partner based in St. Louis, with 108 Salesforce certifications, 7 Salesforce accreditations and a 4.95 out of 5 rating from 92 reviews on Salesforce AgentExchange (formerly AppExchange).
The playbook draws on the guidance we publish for nonprofits.
