Everything Bagels and Salesforce

By: Sandra Jensen, Founder, KELL Partners

I love a fresh everything bagel out of the oven. I love the taste. I love the smell. To me they are a slice (semi-intentional pun) of heaven. If you add a big smear of vegetable cream cheese, I may want to lock myself in a dimly lit room to eat it all by myself, because I am sure it will be all over my face and the front of my shirt.

Did you know that the “everything” flavor is a thing now? Move over avocado toast! With just 5 ingredients (poppy seeds, sesame seeds, dried minced onion, coarse salt and garlic), you can “everything” anything from popcorn to hummus to sushi (I swear!).

This got me thinking. What are the 5 ingredients to a successful start on Salesforce? How would I “everything” Salesforce for nonprofits? If I had to pick just 5 ingredients, I would choose:

1) Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)
Developed for nonprofits of all sizes and backgrounds, the Nonprofit Success Pack turns the world’s #1 CRM into the #1 CRM for nonprofits, so organizations can focus on impact. NPSP starts with a industry-standard data architecture and adds pre-built constituent and donor management components. A free, open-source product developed in partnership with the Salesforce.org community with contributed code from KELL and many others, NPSP is built specifically with the needs of nonprofits in mind. Whether your organization is all-volunteer, moderately staffed, or well-established and resourced, the NPSP will help you advance your mission and deliver impact — as it’s doing every day for tens of thousands of nonprofits.

2) Fundraising
With add-on applications like Click & Pledge and Classy, you can integrate branded, secure online donation pages directly into your website. Would you like to also manage events? Whether you’re planning a small volunteer event, a formal gala or a run/walk/ride, these two solutions have everything you need. You can create customized event registration pages, sell registrations and track attendance. Are you looking for a solution for crowdfunding, endurance-events and peer-to-peer campaigns? Classy excels at this. A fully integrated fundraising solution with Salesforce is a key ingredient.

3) Email Automation
Whether you want to set up automated messages based on an individual’s activity (like a welcome series for new donors), personalize your email based on biographic or demographic data, or get a little more creative with drip campaigns and A/B testing, Pardot is a great solution for email automation. Since it is tightly integrated with Salesforce, there’s no need to import/export lists and running reports to show bounces, opt-outs, click-throughs and forwards are available “out of the box”. You can also tie your emails to a Campaign, so you can see the direct impact of your marketing efforts towards your fundraising goals.

4) Document Merge Automation
Say goodbye to the hassle of mail merges. Document merge with powerful automation using DrawLoop allows your nonprofit to efficiently produce merge documents for any purpose that weave your Salesforce data with conditional content and custom templates. With literally a button-click, you can create donor acknowledgement letters, event invitations, donor profile reports, appeal letters, end of year giving receipts and much more as individual documents or in mass. Think about how much time you can save by eliminating this laborious process.

5) KELL360
After helping nearly 1,000 nonprofits implement Salesforce, we have learned a thing or two about best practices. We have also spent a lot of time listening to our clients’ needs and then developing these needs into requirements. From there, we spent hundreds of hours applying these best practices and requests into constructing KELL360 to build out key features, reports, dashboards and automation, accelerating your time to value. KELL360 delivers a complete solution for nonprofits without sacrificing any of the flexibility provided by the Nonprofit Success Pack and is fully supported by our team of nonprofit experts.

With these 5 ingredients, you truly do have everything you need as a nonprofit to be successful with Salesforce. Just like when making the perfect everything bagel, the ingredients matter. By combining these solutions, you really do have the perfect recipe for long-term success.