Top 5 Nonprofit CRM Features Your Organization Can Benefit From

As a nonprofit organization with a noble cause, you may have had a great start with traditional tools like Excel as your donor management tool. But technology is evolving. You may now need to invest in a holistic platform that takes care of your donor profiles and makes sense of your data from various sources. A CRM solution like Salesforce is light years ahead of Excel in helping your non-profit flourish and establish meaningful connections with your donors. This blog discusses 5 CRM  features that nonprofit organizations should know about: 

Donor Profile Management

For years, the ideal way to know more about donors has been through face-to-face meetings and networking. With a CRM like Salesforce, it is now easier to stay connected with your donors and stay ahead with their information. The Nonprofit Success Pack provides various facilities for constituent management. You don’t need to rely on your IT experts to add custom objects. You can do it yourself within Salesforce. With a Salesforce CRM, you can:

• Track basic information of donors and make quick updates whenever required.
• Monitor the entire history of your donors like the type of donations made in the past, events participated, areas of interest etc.

Event Management

Fundraising campaigns are important for many nonprofit organizations to jumpstart their fundraising efforts. Whether it’s a small scale or a large scale one, you will need a tool to manage the logistics, donors, guest lists and marketing efforts. There are several solutions available in the market to manage such events, but lookout for a platform that gives a holistic view of your event details and streamlines it. For example, there are several built-in features in Salesforce like contact profiles, custom fields etc that enhance your event experience. When combined with a native Salesforce app, you can extend your Salesforce CRM functionality to address several challenges associated with fundraising events.  Let’s look at a few ways a CRM can help with event management activities. You can

• Enable donor registration online through a custom microsite
• Create unique event tickets
• Take care of the end-to-end logistics of the event such as sponsors, venue, speakers, etc

Campaign Management

Successful campaigns help in bringing more donors and active participants interested in contributing to your initiatives. You may have to email event invitations or fundraising sessions or enable volunteer engagement. You will require various fundraising strategies and creative methods to pull in people to your cause. With a CRM like Salesforce, you can accomplish these tasks without ever leaving the platform. It has built-in statistics that give you an understanding of how your campaign is moving forward and how well it has performed. 

Marketing and Communications

Simply getting the word out about your fundraising event is not enough. To make a huge impact you need to come up with innovative marketing and communication strategies. There are so many channels for you to communicate with your target audience, which can be overwhelming at times. A CRM like Salesforce helps you boil down the exact channels  needed to reach people. A few examples would be: 

• Segment your donors based on their common attributes and create custom emails before sending them.
• Use the CRM to store and track social media interactions of the target audience and curate posts accordingly.

Reports and Dashboards

Having a CRM not only helps you in tracking your donor details, it also organizes them for your email campaigns, donation landing pages and all sources where you expect visibility from your donors. Salesforce CRM has built in reporting capabilities which can be used to get an understanding of how to use your data. You can create custom reports and dynamically view them on the dashboards. You can even configure the layouts based on which metrics you consider the most important. 

With Salesforce reports and dashboards, you can analyze the following aspects:

• All transactions related to donations and funds
• Number of donors who engage with you during campaigns 
• Progress of your fundraising campaigns and how well you have performed
• Event details such as number of attendees and the money spent and raised

Now that you have familiarized yourself with CRM features that a nonprofit organization can benefit from, the next step is to have hands-on experience with the tools to reap maximum benefits. This is where we step into the picture. Our Salesforce consultants at Dazeworks will help you figure out your CRM needs and speed up the entire process. 

What other CRM features are you interested in? Let us know in the comments. 

References:

https://bugendaitech.com/top-5-salesforce-features-for-non-profits/
https://doublethedonation.com/tips/salesforce-for-nonprofits/
https://www.selecthub.com/customer-relationship-management/top-nonprofit-crm-software-features/