How To Support Your DEI Fundraising Efforts in Salesforce

With the increased awareness of social justice issues impacting our communities, many nonprofits are looking for ways to combat systemic racism. Some organizations may be adding this focus to their mission. Others are looking for ways to cultivate people of color to their board or as donors. And others are looking for ways to fund the organizations who are starting this work or who have been doing this work for decades. With this awareness has come a flood of thought leadership around diversity, equity and inclusion in philanthropy, including ways you can use technology to enable change.

Recently, my colleague, Alissa Silverman, hosted a panel with philanthropy leaders with unique expertise in addressing DEI in Fundraising. They discussed the recently released Everyday Donors of Color report from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Alissa shares a summary of their discussion on the Salesforce.org blog DEI Strategies to Diversify Your Fundraising Approach. What I love about it is the practical guidance each leaders shares and of course, the role technology can play to accelerate your mission.

As a supplement to this thinking, I’ll restate each of the how-to sections covered in the blog and include step-by-step instructions to achieve the suggestions given in the discussion.

Systems: Your operations will need to be more agile and more connected. Without technology, this would require a lot of manual work and time. Let’s say you want to take Kailee’s suggestion and target donors to make a first time gift of $25 with the goal of converting them to monthly donors. Nonprofit Cloud is designed to automate many of the steps required, allowing you to add this strategy to your current fundraising program without overtaxing your team. A digital platform like Salesforce allows you to segment donors into a dedicated campaign, build a unique donor journey via email and social, send targeted messages built on program activities or impact, and then follow donors with special giving pages, recurring donation management, and reporting.

Step 1: Create a campaign to target prospects for a recurring gift like the one pictured below.

Step 2: Add contacts to the campaign. Identify the contacts who may be appropriate by creating a list view. In this case, we have filtered prospects who have an email address and who have given less than $25 this year. Select the Add to Campaign button and add them to the New Donor Recurring Gifts Campaign you just created.

Step 3: Set up an automated email campaign. Using an email marketing automation tool like Pardot, you can create a campaign that cultivates the prospects by sharing information about your organization’s work and making the ask at the appropriate time. Decision points along the way allow you to notify staff, send a different email or adjust the prospect’s engagement score to ensure the next appropriate step is taken depending on their behavior.

Step 4: Create a Giving Page. With simple donation forms using an online giving platform like Elevate, reflect the theme of your campaign and make it easy for prospects to make a first or recurring gift to your organization. With Elevate, you can include the donor’s contact information in a personalized URL to make giving even easier. You can also customize your ask strings so new donors feel comfortable making their first gift or recurring donation.

Data: Many organizations do not know the identity of most of their donors, and some try to close this gap with donor surveys to gather the information. Yolanda F. Johnson shared the best practice of taking five minutes after every donor meeting to update the donor record, including anything you learn about their background and identity. With Nonprofit Success Pack, both of these collection methods are easy, but more importantly, you can put this important data to use to determine benchmarks, track progress, and segment donors to create special engagements using Pardot.

Did you know Salesforce has a survey tool? Yes! It’s called Salesforce Feedback Management. You can easily build a survey and send it out once a year to confirm your donor and volunteer’s contact details and preferences. This also gives you a chance to collect additional information that may be helpful to your organization. A survey can be added as a call to action in a prospect journey or other campaign as well. There also several survey tools available on the Salesforce Appexchange that may meet your organization’s needs.

Let’s take a look at a couple of ways to update donor data after a meeting as Yolanda suggests as a best practice.

Step 1: First, make sure every one of your fundraisers has access to the Salesforce mobile app. You can download the Salesforce app from your phone’s app store and use your Salesforce credentials to log in.

Step 2: Show your team how they can see everything they need in the mobile app and encourage them to use it! Your team can access contact and gift records and update notes from meetings immediately afterward so they capture any important details about next steps or about the donor themselves before they forgot to log them. Using the built-in dictation function in their mobile phones, users can dictate their notes directly into Salesforce to save even more time.

Relationships: More than ever, we are having to build relationships using technology. But as important as the relationships fundraisers build with their donors are, the relationships organizations can help donors build with each other is even more important. Giving circles are a great example of donor communities. With Experience Cloud for Nonprofits organizations can build donor communities and then encourage them to donate and share opportunities with their communities with an Elevate giving page.

Step 1: Build a simple Experience Cloud site where donors can interact with your organization and even make donations. You can expose certain Salesforce objects like Donations so when your constituents log in, they can see their past giving history and download receipts.

Step 2: Encourage donor or affinity groups to engage with each other on your Experience Cloud site. Group members log into the site and can interact with each other on the group page. Here we have a Latinas’ giving circle reviewing a proposal to enable them to make an informed giving decision as a group.

Take action: One of the most important takeaways was to just get started! Drop a comment below about what activities you’re planning to engage donors of color!