Salesforce Integrations: 5 Useful Tools for Nonprofits

By Adam Weinger

Adam Weinger is the President of Double the Donation, the leading provider of tools to nonprofits to help them raise more money from corporate matching gift and volunteer grant programs. Connect with Adam via email or on LinkedIn.

The reason Salesforce is a leading CRM platform is because it’s highly customizable, can be accessed remotely, and offers innumerable features to boost supporter engagement.

As a nonprofit professional, you know that this cloud-based platform allows you to increase productivity and build long-lasting relationships with your supporters, but how can you truly maximize your software’s potential? The answer is simple: connect extra apps and plugins with it!

Salesforce is known for its abundant integration opportunities. It’s just a matter of narrowing down which ones your nonprofit needs the most. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the most useful Salesforce integration types for nonprofits:

1. Matching Gifts
2. Fundraising and Marketing
3. Prospect Research
4. Donation Forms
5. Event Management
6. Relationship Management

Not convinced your organization needs any additional Salesforce tools? Take a look at this article to learn why a Salesforce touch-up might be necessary!

If you’re ready to boost productivity and strive toward your mission by making the most of your Salesforce system, read on!

1. Matching Gifts

Corporate giving programs, specifically matching gifts, are a powerful revenue source that’s often overlooked by nonprofits. Matching gifts are a form of corporate philanthropy in which companies match their employees’ donations to eligible organizations. They are extremely valuable to nonprofits. 

An integrative tool like 360MatchPro by Double the Donation can help you take advantage of matching gift opportunities that you may be overlooking, so you can potentially double (maybe even triple!) your donations. 360MatchPro integrates with Salesforce to fully automate the process. Once you integrate the tool with Salesforce, here’s what it can do:

• Automatically identify potential matching gift opportunities by scanning donors’ email domains, donation forms, confirmation screens, and other sources.
• Contact match-eligible supporters until they finish the matching gift process. This is done via email from an email domain branded to your organization to ensure trustworthiness. You can customize the content, timing, and groups of recipients for these automated emails.
• Create automated plans for fulfilling your matching gift potential. 360MatchPro creates plans for reaching out to your most sizeable opportunities.

Understanding the importance of matching gifts is only part of maximizing your corporate giving funds. You’ll need to remind donors of their eligibility, provide them with the necessary tools, and consistently follow up with them to ensure they complete the process. Integrating a matching gift tool with your Salesforce software simplifies this process!

For nonprofits who need more tips about giving, here's a post about how nonprofit can take advantage of corporate giving opportunities.

2. Fundraising and Marketing

Without the proper financial support, your nonprofit wouldn’t be able to continue working toward its mission. You rely on effective marketing to get the word out about fundraisers and other important opportunities your supporters need to know about, so when integrating tools with Salesforce, why not choose an app that conducts marketing and fundraising all in one?

Salsa Engage is a plugin for Salesforce that offers a number of tools that can help you reach your marketing, advocacy, and fundraising potential, such as:

• Marketing automation. You can customize templates to guide supporters toward completing important actions like making a donation, or you can trigger emails and social media posts to release at the same time as your nonprofit’s important activities like fundraisers.
• Donation forms. Customize your donation form by incorporating your organization’s colors, logos, and fonts. When supporters give through this donation form, their information, such as their name and contact information, will be streamlined to your CRM to either create a new donor profile or update an existing one.
• Peer-to-peer fundraising pages. Conducting a peer-to-peer fundraiser can rake in a lot of additional revenue but can also take a lot of extra effort to coordinate. Salsa Engage makes this process easier by creating customizable fundraising pages for your volunteer fundraisers to use.
• Event registration pages. These customizable pages create a seamless process for registration, specifically for selling tickets, collecting payment information, and sending confirmation emails. The information that’s collected is then added to your Salesforce supporter profiles.

Profitable fundraisers and effective marketing can be difficult to pull off without a little extra help, especially as your nonprofit continues to grow. Don’t attempt to do it alone. Integrate a fundraising tool and a marketing tool, or choose an all-in-one tool that integrates with your Salesforce software.

3. Prospect Research 

To tailor your outreach to your supporters, you’ll need to take the time to get to know them. This means understanding their interests, their preferences, and why they support your cause. This process, called prospect development, is simplified and enhanced by DonorSearch. 

DonorSearch allows you to develop long term relationships with your supporters by getting to know them personally. Through its Salesforce app, 360io, you can:

• Conduct automatic donor screening. As donors are entered into your CRM, you’ll instantly gain insight into their giving histories.
• Generate profiles. By clicking the DonorSearch button on the Salesforce platform, you can access detailed supporter profiles and manually research each donor.
• Customize workflows. Workflows tailored to your team ensure that you review every donor as they enter your CRM.
• Create tasks to continue research. If further action is needed or more research needs to be conducted, make sure it gets done by creating tasks.

For nonprofits, prospect research is vital to building positive, lasting relationships and it can give you powerful wealth insights. Grow your list of supporters by making everyone feel valued and important to your cause. When integrated with Salesforce, a comprehensive prospect research app allows you to do this with ease.

4. Donation Forms 

As you already know, nonprofits couldn’t work toward their mission without monetary support, and providing your donors with multiple ways to give is the only way to create an effective financial strategy. When you expand your marketing efforts to the online community (and you should expand to the online community), the first step you should take is to create a well-designed, engaging donation form.

Established nonprofits typically know the difference between a good donation form and a bad one. Creating and maintaining these forms can quickly become a hassle. That’s where a Salesforce plugin like Donorbox comes in handy! Donorbox allows you to:

• Create fast and easy donation forms. Fully customize your donation form with your organization’s colors and logo and set up payment processing within just a few minutes!
• Implement your donation form in multiple ways. Make your donation form appear in a pop-up, directly on your website, or on its own campaign page!
• Have customizable options. You can allow donors to set up recurring donations and share it via social media, and your team can track donation form engagement!

The information you collect will be replicated in your Salesforce CRM, but donation form tools like Donorbox check existing contact emails to avoid duplication. Integrating a donation form plugin allows you to expand your revenue potential, with less effort on your part. 

5. Event Management 

Nonprofit fundraisers are oftentimes coordinated with a specific event. By integrating a comprehensive event management tool like Fonteva with your Salesforce software, you’ll take your event fundraisers to the next level!

Organizations typically rely on multiple platforms to manage their events, like platforms for registration, venue management, and so forth. With Fonteva, this is condensed into one comprehensive Salesforce app. It comes with a number of useful tools, such as:

• Venue, vendor, speaker, and exhibitor management.
• Attendee schedule management and agenda builder.
• Custom ticketing pricing (and 100+ payment processor options).
• Advance registration options.

Instead of maneuvering multiple apps for ticketing, registration, venue management, and so on, go with an option that allows you to access everything you need all in one place! With an event management app that directly integrates with Salesforce, you can access real-time event data without ever leaving your CRM. 

If your organization has decided it’s time to step up your game in any of these major areas, go ahead and implement some or all of these tools. You’ll grow your supporter relationships and expand your revenue potential!

Don’t let your organization miss out on any major opportunities, whether it’s relationship growth, fundraising, or marketing. Pick the best tools for your nonprofit now!

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