Nonprofit Direct Marketing in 2021
By: Dustin K. Pitts — Senior Manager, Solution Engineering and Brandon Westmoreland — Senior Solution Engineer, Salesforce.org
Hello everyone! It has been quite some time since I have written my blog series about direct mail. A lot has changed in the past few years! Not only has the industry been hit hard with Covid-19, but technology has shifted all around us. When speaking to a teammate recently the question of “What is currently going on with Salesforce.org and nonprofit direct marketing” came up. I figured I would write a quick blog post to give an update of what we are seeing and what Salesforce.org has built out in the past few years to address the needs of the industry.
I have invited my colleague Brandon Westmoreland to join me in this post to help dive deeper in some of the new tools we have here at Salesforce.org. Join us as we have a quick chat about the state of DM in the industry.
Vendor Partnerships
Dustin: We all know that direct marketing is a complicated undertaking for enterprise nonprofits. In most cases there is no one stop shop for everything. Advanced direct marketing programs often include a CRM vendor, direct marketing strategy vendors, segmentation vendors, statistical modeling vendors, and gift caging shops. Over the past few years we have doubled down on building out an integrated direct marketing ecosystem. I am proud of how far we have come. Brandon can you take us through some of the details?
Brandon: At the beginning of 2017 we saw several large enterprise customers choosing Salesforce and NPSP as their CRM provider of choice. These nonprofits — like the American Cancer Society — all came to us with existing direct marketing vendors. Both Salesforce.org and these partners quickly realized that we are all stronger together. As a result we built out formal partnerships with several of them. Sample partners include Merkle, DMI, RR Donnelly, Omatic and more. These vendors are all now enabled on NPSP and know how to service customers on our platform. Many of these partners have also built pre-existing apps that directly plug into our solutions. This makes life easier for our customers because they can still use the same processes and procedures they are familiar with without expensive custom-built implementations.
Direct Marketing Performance Reporting
Dustin: Prior to the acquisition of Tableau, direct marketing performance reporting was built out in NPSP using our standard reports or via custom reporting in third party tools. We have made vast improvements on this front. Brandon has been working with our products team to develop templates for direct marketing reporting. Brandon, can you tell us some more about this project?
Brandon: Sure! Over the past year I have worked closely with our product development team to build out our Tableau Fundraising starter dashboard. This dashboard gives nonprofits a quick start when integrating Tableau to NPSP. The starter pack includes three unique views: Revenue Overview, Donor Acquisition and Retention Overview and Campaign Performance Overview. Revenue Overview gives nonprofits a gauge on revenue YTD and what channel is bringing in the majority of the donor dollars. Donor Acquisition and Retention shows YOY growth and/or decline within your donor file. Campaign Performance gives insight to campaign KPI’s including overall revenue, average gift, response rates, and YOY performance. All of these starter dashboards can be viewed as well as downloaded for free from the Tableau website.
National Change of Address
Dustin: The last time I wrote about NCOA we were relying on third party solutions to process NCOA updates. That has changed and we now offer this directly to our customers via Insights. Brandon, can you tell us a little more about that tool?
Brandon: Yes, Insights Data Integrity is a simple data quality app built by Salesforce.org for our nonprofit customers. It does three main things: (1) allows admins to schedule recurring address standardization jobs that updates the formatting of existing address records in NPSP, (2) allows admins to schedule recurring NCOA jobs that automatically updates your constituents’ address records if they’ve notified the USPS that they have moved, thus keeping your records accurate and (3) enables nonprofits to find all duplicate records in their orgs and merge them in a way that respects the NPSP data model + all other custom objects. This is a super helpful tool ensuring nonprofits direct mail efforts are reaching their donors and keeping their CRM up to date with the addresses they have on file for their constituents. You can learn more about the product here.
Omni Channel
Dustin: Omni channel is a hot topic for all nonprofits with a direct mail program. While most nonprofits we are working with still separate out their marketing efforts by channel, this is quickly changing. Brandon, you have been helping lots of these customers. Can you tell us about one of the trends you are seeing?
Brandon: This is absolutely a hot topic within the nonprofit industry. We know that donors like having multiple options to give. One thing we are noticing is that QR codes are back in the mix since the pandemic. It seems everywhere we go now we can scan a QR code and it take us to a landing page. For nonprofits they can easily embed a personalized QR code onto the reply device of a direct mail piece. The donor then scans that QR code and it takes them to an Elevate donation page. This Elevate page is coded to track the campaign associated with the mailing for marketing performance tracking. This innovative format gives the donor a new way to respond to direct mail while also beginning a digital transition for future engagements. Once that transaction takes place you can then pull the donor into future email and SMS messages using Pardot or Marketing Cloud.
As you can see, we continue to evolve and grow our solutions around the direct marketing space. I am excited to see all of the new offerings we have for our customers. I am especially excited to see our push to offer multi channel offerings for nonprofits.
We would love to hear from you as you go along your direct marketing journey. We have created a group on the Power of Us Hub that can serve as a place to collaborate. Brandon and myself are members of the group. Let’s continue the conversation there! Until then — happy mailing!
